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

But he had started so well in Downing Street that he had felt the run would never end. ‘I thought, because of my first few months, I was being seen as above politics,’ he said. ‘You inhaled your own propaganda,’ I replied. The image his media team had created around him at the start was bound to unravel. ‘All that stuff about single-handedly turning back the biblical plagues, the floods, the cattle disease and the terror bombers. Your people went around saying how strong you were, what a great, statesmanlike Prime Minister. They took their eye off what was happening in the real world.’ I felt almost cruel saying it.

Gordon was quiet for a few moments, and so was I. Finally, I said, with what I am sure he sensed was a genuine desire to help: ‘If you could start all over again, you would do things differently. You need a different way of working, a different rhythm, a different approach.’ I was not absolutely sure what that approach would be, but I was sure that the problem was not simply a matter of Gordon lacking the communications skills for modern politics, although that was what he always came back to. ‘I’m good at what politics used to be, about policies,’ he said. ‘But now people want celebrity, and theatre.’

‘Only up to a point,’ I replied. ‘Actually, it’s a lot simpler than that: they just want someone to make their lives better, someone they can believe, and believe in. If you can do that, they can dispense with celebrity.’

Gordon nodded. Then, after another period of silence, he turned to me quietly with the same four words with which he had begun. ‘Can you help me?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘We can try and work it out together.’ At that moment, I could feel my old sense of commitment to him welling up inside me. Suddenly it was nice to feel wanted, needed again.

The question was how to help. I think I had forgotten, over the years of estrangement, how extraordinarily complex a man Gordon was. He had huge strengths, and sometimes debilitating weaknesses. That was simply to say that, like the rest of us, he was human. With Gordon, however, the balance on both sides of the ledger had never quite been captured in the public image which ossified around him. Some bits of the caricature were accurate. Yes, he was bright. He was intensely, obsessively, political. He was fiercely ambitious – for himself, certainly, as his single-minded pursuit of Tony’s job had made clear, but also for the people of Britain. Yet all that was only part of the picture. At the height of the Brown–Blair civil war, I used to laugh at the media’s contrast between Blair as the headline-driven tactician and Brown as the ‘big-picture’ man, the strategist who looked beyond day-to-day trivialities and spin and focused on the issues that counted. As those who knew Gordon best and had worked with him closest could attest – and I had done both for as long as anyone in active politics – the truth was much more nuanced than that. Gordon did see the big picture, but he tended to create tactical opportunities, rather than a strategy to advance it. Tony, by contrast would conceive his strategy at the outset, and then paint a big picture in order to carry people with him.

It is true that Tony cared about the media. Both of us came to realise, the longer he was in power, that we had probably cared too much about what the daily papers and the TV news bulletins were saying. But even – indeed, particularly – in times of crisis, he never lost sight of the issues that mattered. He kept in mind the longer-term goal. Gordon, from the time I first started working with him in the 1980s, was transfixed by the media. He was also transfixed by the Tories. Tony, of course, also took on the Conservatives. The difference was that Gordon wanted to pulverise them, whereas Tony was more often content to outmanoeuvre them. Gordon’s life revolved too keenly around looking for opportunities to grab a front-page headline or top billing on the evening news with some carefully calibrated announcement or initiative. In some ways, he was a more innate politician than Tony. But he was also a more old-style politician. He had grown up in machine politics, in Scottish Labour. For him, politics was always a battle. He plotted a probing advance here, a flanking operation there. It was all planned to weaken rivals or enemies – sometimes in his own ranks, but ultimately the enemy that mattered most to him, and still did, was the Tories.

Yet it was Gordon the person, not Gordon the politician, who would matter most if he, our party and the government were to be pulled out of their tailspin. Despite my closeness to Tony, I had been much closer, much earlier, to Gordon when the three of us began the reforming crusade that would lead to New Labour. Gordon was the older of the two. He had deeper roots in Labour. He was the more driven political operator, the more obviously ambitious. He was the natural leader. That was one reason why Tony’s later ascendancy so hurt him, and so damaged the relationship between all three of us. On a human level, however, Gordon was buttoned up, less sure of himself – not of his political views, but of how he should handle himself in public. Tony was never clubbable in party-political terms. But he had a natural ease about him, a charm, an enjoyment of human contact. Gordon did not possess this easy manner.

I think Gordon’s uneasiness and vulnerability was part of what was now drawing me back to his side, part of what made me genuinely want to keep my word to him and to do what I could to help. It was not out of pity, though it did pain me to see him so bruised. Nor was it merely out of loyalty to New Labour, or my conviction that if Gordon and the government crashed to defeat it would be bad for Britain, although I felt both of these things. It was a sense of fellow-feeling. I had taken my share of knocks along the way as well.

Unlike Gordon, and much more like Tony, I was comfortable in social situations. I enjoyed other people’s company. I was at ease with most of them. Most of the time I was at ease with myself. I had interests and a life outside politics, especially now that I was in Brussels. But I too had had my periods of private doubt and private pain. I had endured, and only very slowly recovered from, the humiliation of being forced to leave the cabinet table not just once, but twice. The second exile had been particularly hard, because I had felt let down by colleagues, by Tony in particular. There had been other tough times as well. Over the years, I had become more thick-skinned. But what I had been through gave me an insight into Gordon’s crisis. He had reached out for help. The truth was that I had no idea whether that was something I, or anyone, could deliver.

When we met again in Downing Street the next day, I tried to get him to focus on the one area where the country clearly needed new policy certainty, and new leadership, and where he was well-placed to deliver. ‘It’s the world economy, stupid,’ I said, borrowing the Clinton campaign quip. ‘Your message has to be that we are steering through the worst and equipping people to benefit from the upturn, to make sure they, and the country as a whole, are not the losers.’

Almost as if a switch had been tripped, Gordon’s mood brightened. He spoke non-stop for five minutes, reeling off the challenges posed by the economic crisis, and the range of programmes – job creation, infrastructure, energy, education, science – needed to make Britain stronger when we got to the other side. He spoke of a redefined, less dominant role for government, providing a safety net for those in need, but above all encouraging aspiration and providing the skills and the conditions for all who worked hard to succeed. An empowering government. This was the Gordon I remembered from the 1980s, full of ideas, full of passion. It was also, I couldn’t help noting, remarkably similar to Tony’s policy agenda, which because of his deep frustration at his wait to take over, Gordon had done much to undermine, and had spent his early months in Number 10 distancing himself from.