Peter Mandelson

Peter Benjamin Mandelson (born 21 October 1953) is the present Commissioner of the European Union for Trade. Before taking this post, he was a British Labour politician, and served as Member of Parliament for Hartlepool for twelve years. He is widely regarded as one of the main architects of the modern Labour Party and its rebranding as "'new Labour". He was twice sacked as a cabinet minister in Tony Blair's government. Before Labour came to power, he was author (with Roger Liddle) of 'The Blair Revolution' (1996); more recently he contributed to the book The City in Europe and the World (2005).

Early life

Mandelson was born in London in 1953, where his father was the advertising manager at the Jewish Chronicle. On his mother's side, he is the grandson of Herbert Morrison, the London County Council leader, and Labour cabinet minister.

He was educated at the County Grammar School at Hendon, (now Hendon School). In his youth, he briefly rebelled against his family's Labour tradition and in 1971 left the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) to join the Young Communist League, then the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This move was partly a result of disagreements with the Trotskyist Militant Tendency that had just won a majority in the LPYS nationally. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine's College, Oxford (1973-1976) and, after returning to the Labour party, became director of the British Youth Council in the late 1970s. He was elected to Lambeth Borough Council in September 1979, but retired in 1982, disillusioned with the state of Labour politics.

He worked as a television producer with London Weekend Television on Weekend World, forming a durable friendship with John Birt, then LWT's Director of Programmes, before his appointment as the Labour Party's Director of Communications in 1985. In this role he was one of the first people in Britain to whom the term "spin doctor" was applied; during this period he acquired the nickname "The Prince of Darkness" (originally coined in the satirical magazine Private Eye). In 1986 he ran the campaign at the Fulham by-election that saw Labour defeat the SDP. He managed Labour's widely admired but electorally unsuccessful 1987 general election campaign. During this campaign, the News of the World published a story about his private life based on the revelations of a former lover.

He left the job in 1990, when he was selected as Labour candidate for the safe seat of Hartlepool. He was elected to the House of Commons at the 1992 general election. Although many commentators regarded the industrial northern town of Hartlepool as an unlikely place for the metropolitan and high-living Mandelson to represent, he came to enjoy his time there and built up a rapport with the town.

A popular urban legend in the Labour Party says that Mandelson, visiting a fish and chip shop in his new constituency, saw the mushy peas and asked the proprietor about the "avocado dip". However, the story has been traced to a question asked by an American trainee at the Knowsley North by-election of 1986, and Neil Kinnock has admitted to being one of the people who applied it to Mandelson as a joke. A related story, reflecting his unpopularity in the party, is that he once asked Gordon Brown for 10p to phone a friend. Brown told him: "Have 20p, then you can phone them both."^*

Work with Tony Blair

Disappointingly for Mandelson, he had little influence over John Smith during his leadership of the Labour Party, although he made several notable speeches in which his strong support for the European Union was outlined. He was close to two Shadow Cabinet members, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who were both regarded as potential leaders. After Smith's sudden death in 1994, Mandelson decided to back Blair for the leadership and played a leading but secret role in the leadership campaign. This created lasting antagonism between Mandelson and Brown, who felt he had been betrayed.

Mandelson became a close ally and trusted adviser to Blair. Blair and Mandelson are known to be close friends. Indeed, it has been rumoured that Mandelson even wears a vial of Blair's urine around his neck. His role in organising the many changes in the Labour Party of the time caused him to be disliked by many of his Labour colleagues as well as by political rivals. He was a natural choice to be Labour's election campaign director for the 1997 general election, which Labour won by a landslide. After the election, Blair appointed him as a Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet Office, where his job was to co-ordinate within government. A few months later, he also acquired responsibility for the Millennium Dome, after Blair decided to go ahead with the project despite the opposition of most of the Cabinet (including the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport who had been running it).

Cabinet post

In 1998 Mandelson joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. In his brief tenure of the post he gained the respect of the trade unions for consulting with them. During his few months in the job, he was the centre of a great deal of media attention when Matthew Parris (openly gay former MP and then Parliamentary sketchwriter of The Times) mentioned during a live interview on Newsnight, in the wake of the resignation of Ron Davies, that "Peter Mandelson is certainly gay". Mandelson's homosexuality had been well-known but not widely publicised except on the front pages of the Sunday People, and Mandelson had not wanted it discussed. After Parris's remarks, the press felt free to discuss his personal life (in particular his relationship with the Brazilian Reinaldo Avila da Silva) to a much greater extent.

Mandelson's reputation may have been harmed rather than helped by the initial decision by its political adviser, Anne Sloman, to ban any mention of his private life on the BBC. It was suggested that the Director General of the BBC at the time, John Birt had had a direct hand in the ban. The popular BBC TV show Have I Got News For You refused to comply and discussed this matter in the public domain almost openly, for example Ian Hislop describing him as a "Home.....owner", which was picked up by Paul Merton, who replied, "What's wrong with gay people owning homes?"; and joking that they were forbidden to mention Mandelson's name or wear a pink shirt for the rest of the series.

First resignation

In December 1998 it was revealed that Mandelson had bought a home in Notting Hill in 1996 with the assistance of an interest-free loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire Labour MP who was also in the Government but was subject to an inquiry into his business dealings by Mandelson's department. Given Mandelson's closeness to Tony Blair, this gave the appearance of buying favours. Although Mandelson had deliberately not taken part in any decisions relating to Robinson, he knew he should have declared the loan as an interest, and he was sacked on 23 December 1998. Mandelson had also not declared the loan to his mortgage company, an offence under UK law, although they decided not to take any action.

Mandelson was out of government for only ten months. In October 1999 he was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, replacing the popular Mo Mowlam after the peace process had stalled when some of the parties refused to continue to negotiate with her. In his very first speech in the post he made a gaffe by referring to himself as the "Secretary of State for Ireland." ^* Afterwards, he oversaw the creation of the devolved legislative assembly and power-sharing executive, and reform of the police service.

Second resignation

In January 2001, it was claimed that Mandelson had phoned Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the "Faith Zone" in the Millennium Dome. At the time, Hinduja and his brothers were under investigation by the Indian government for alleged involvement in the Bofors scandal. On 24 January 2001, Mandelson was sacked from the Government for a second time, insisting he had done nothing wrong. An independent enquiry by Sir Anthony Hammond came to the conclusion that neither Mandelson nor anyone else had acted improperly. The front page headline in one of the newspapers at the time read 'Passport to Oblivion'.

But the headline writers were somewhat premature. Mandelson was challenged by Arthur Scargill of the Socialist Labour Party and by another Left-winger at the 2001 general election, but was re-elected with a large majority. This prompted him to make an exuberant acceptance speech, which was televised live, in which he declared that "I am a fighter, not a quitter!" and referred to his "inner steel". Mandelson was much criticised for this speech which was widely regarded as inappropriate.

After the general election, Mandelson was chairman of the Policy Network and the UK-Japan Group, and was president of Hartlepool United FC.

European Commission

Despite his exoneration by the Hammond Inquiry, Mandelson's reappointment to the Cabinet seemed politically difficult. He indicated his interest in becoming the United Kingdom's European Commissioner when the new Commission was established in 2004 (both of Britain's incumbents, Neil Kinnock and Chris Patten, were standing down). Appointment as a Commissioner would have required his resignation from Parliament and therefore a by-election in his constituency. While some were concerned that the seat would be difficult for the government to retain, Mandelson convinced his colleagues that Labour would perform well.

His appointment was announced in the summer and Mandelson resigned his seat through appointment as Steward of the Manor of Northstead on 8 September 2004. His predictions about the state of play in the Hartlepool by-election proved accurate as Labour kept the seat with a majority of more than 2,000.

On 22 November, 2004, Mandelson became Britain's European Commissioner for Trade. In April 2005, The Times revealed that Mandelson had spent New Year's Eve 2004 on the yacht of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, which is at the centre of a major EU investigation, although it did not allege impropriety.

Mandelson played an important role in negotiating an end to the dispute between the European Union and the People's Republic of China over textile imports in the summer of 2005, although it should be noted the solution, which involved tariffs and imports quotas, failed within its first two months (where textile retailers, knowing import limits were about to be introduced, had placed such large orders with Chinese producers that the entire annual import quota was exhausted in the first month of its operation and large volumes of orders were being held, indefinitely, in customs) and had to be re-renegotiated.

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