Peter Mandelson - The Third Man - Life at the Heart of New Labour

The growing bond between Tony, Gordon and me was not only about politics. On policy, we also found much common ground. The specifics of the new Labour platform we envisaged would not take shape until much later. But we knew absolutely what had to go: the statist, unilateralist and class-defined prospectus that had lost us three straight elections and was surely going to lose us a fourth.

Two late-night entries in my diary, six months apart in 1988, chart the depth of my frustration and my growing certainty about what needed to be done. The first followed the NEC’s approval of the initial policy review reports. It reflected my relief at the vote, and my admiration for Neil’s role in arguing for and mobilising the support needed to secure it. But I worried about what hadn’t been accomplished, the risks we had failed to take, and where we might go from here. ‘The problem is that for all Neil’s courage and strength of leadership, he is let down by his lack of self-confidence and his seeming lack of interest in the detail of policy,’ I wrote. ‘It shows not so much in what he says and does, but in what he fails to articulate and to achieve.’ There was an ‘awful’ implication in this. I had begun to suspect that the country might never view Neil as prime ministerial material. He would end up being both ‘the hero and the fall-guy of history. The likelihood at the moment is that he will be the leader who restored and rebuilt the Labour Party but who could not clinch victory.’

The second snapshot is from a few days after my trip to Tony’s constituency in Sedgefield. ‘Increasingly,’ I wrote, ‘my role is revolving around the strong future leaders – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair – and the political nourishment and companionship I get from this group. They have such political gifts, and they know that on the present course we shall remain out of office for a generation. I have now become determined to be part of that successor generation. All my political ambition has returned with the challenge that they hold out.’

While I had not yet shared this with Neil, or even Charles Clarke, I knew something else as well. If I wanted to be part of creating a truly revived Labour Party, I could not do it from where I was – as a headquarters man, whatever the range of my influence. Like Gordon and Tony, I needed to be on the front line. I needed to resume a course I had abandoned, in disgust at the shambolic extremism of London Labour politics. I would seek election as a Labour Member of Parliament.

My search for a seat in the Commons need not have ended my role in organising Neil Kinnock’s last realistic chance to become Prime Minister. But it did. By the time of the next election, my relations with Neil would be much more distant, while with Charles Clarke they were badly strained. With Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, however, they were not only closer: the three of us had become a political partnership, convinced that the party had to transform itself if it was to have any hope of returning to government. We were also fairly sure that neither Neil nor his likely successor, John Smith, could deliver that change.

I first broached the subject of looking for a parliamentary seat with Patricia Hewitt at the start of 1989. She smiled, an increasingly rare occurrence. Far from trying to argue me into staying the course with Team Kinnock, she had given up trying to convince herself. Working in the leader’s office, she was even more frustrated than I was about the prospects for the policy changes needed for renewal. With criticism of his leadership rising, Neil was in brooding, bunker mode. A change had come over Charles as well. His ebullient, can-do confidence was less in evidence, as was the banter with which he had always entertained, and sustained, the Kinnock operation – ‘Why, it’s Jolly Pierre!’ he would invariably greet me in my first years at Walworth Road. While I had undoubtedly become a bit less jolly myself, Charles’s morale had clearly suffered from the strain of projecting and promoting, protecting and preserving, Neil’s leadership against critics within Labour, and the media without.

Neil mistrusted, feared, and often despised the press, and would be upset by every unfriendly headline. He was using Patricia less and less, but blamed her when things went wrong – with sometimes distressing results that Charles did little or nothing to alleviate. She had begun helping Clive Hollick, a business supporter of Labour who headed the Mills & Allen billboard giant, in his efforts to equip the party for government over the longer term. Mrs Thatcher had entered Downing Street in 1979 with the core of a programme and a political identity – built, with Keith Joseph, largely on the work of a US-style think tank called the Centre for Policy Studies. There was no left-of-centre equivalent. With Clive’s backing, that was remedied, with the establishment of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Shortly after we spoke, Patricia left to become Deputy Director of the IPPR.

I mentioned my plans to Charles a few days later. He asked me to take Patricia’s place as Neil’s press secretary, an offer he repeated several times in the weeks ahead. No doubt naïvely, I did believe I might succeed in using day-to-day contact with Neil to engage him more deeply in the plans we needed to put in place to win the next election. But I had a caveat. I told Charles that if I made the move, I would want to keep open the option of going for a seat in the Commons. He insisted that that wouldn’t work, and he was right. Patricia’s place eventually went to Julie Hall – a bright, charming ITN reporter who became a close friend, and later the wife, of my most gifted protégé at Walworth Road, Colin Byrne.

I turned my attention to securing real change through the policy review, which was due to be published in the spring. At the end of January, I accompanied Gerald Kaufman on a trip to Moscow for the overseas equivalent of the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. It was an intricately choreographed event, designed to pave the way for us to abandon one of our most entrenched, and electorally perverse, policies: unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gerald and I took with us the trade union leader Ron Todd, a long-time supporter of unilateralism whose presence would be important in making the shift credible.

As we had anticipated, Gerald was told in his meetings with Soviet officials that even the Kremlin saw Labour’s unilateral disarmament policy as an unhelpful distraction. They were also dismissive of the idea of bilateral arms talks, the halfway house favoured by some on the left. The Soviets wanted Britain involved in a multilateral disarmament process, alongside their talks with the Americans, a position they helpfully made clear to the travelling British press. Gerald held a press briefing in front of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square at which he took the first step towards abandoning unilateralism, by steering the reporters away from expecting separate arms talks between Moscow and a future Labour government. Gerald then left, for personal rather than political reasons: one of his more endearing quirks as Shadow Foreign Secretary was his ambition to sample the finest local ice cream on all his travels. For reasons that were never entirely clear, he had decided that Moscow’s best was to be found in the GUM department store, across Red Square. I followed up his remarks with further, off-the-record briefing that delivered the message more directly. Unilateralism, I said, was dead. When we finally released the policy review in May, it was. Labour would remain committed to disarmament, but ‘in concert with action taken by the superpowers’.

The policy review was called ‘Meet the Challenge, Make the Change’. With the exception of Gerald’s bold move on defence, it might more accurately have been entitled ‘Skirt the Challenge, Hint at Change’. There were a few significant changes, notably a retreat from the Bennite dream of reversing all Mrs Thatcher’s privatisations. But on finance, John Smith’s domain, we did not manage to jettison our high-tax, high-spending reputation. The booklet was glossy enough, the presentation sufficiently polished, to make some impact: for the first time since the run-up to the 1987 election, one of our internal polls even showed us leading the Tories. It also provided a platform for organising our campaign for the June European elections.