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- The Observer,
- Sunday May 25, 2003
He has told one friend - yes, Mr Mandelson still has some people he can call friends - that he is 'kicking himself' for making the incendiary remarks about the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor which brought so much opprobrium crashing down on his head.
Labour MPs from all factions and none have fallen over each other to savage the former Cabinet Minister as shrill and divisive. Mr Blair's spokesmen have brutally dismissed Mr Mandelson as 'a backbencher - no more, no less', as if the Prime Minister would struggle to put a face to the MP for Hartlepool. While Downing Street describes him as out of the loop, the Treasury puts him down as simply loopy.
The associates of the Chancellor have fanned out to denounce Mr Mandelson as a meddler and a splitter. 'At least we now know where the poison is coming from,' whispers a 'Treasury source'. This prompts me to wonder whether the Chancellor is quite so fuming as his acolytes like to imply. I have a hunch that Mr Brown might even see advantages in Mr Mandelson's very public intervention in the tense wrestling between the Prime Minister and Chancellor over the euro.
How convenient it is for Mr Brown to be able to portray the divisions between himself and Mr Blair as nothing more than poisonous potions concocted by a marginalised and mischievous Mr Mandelson. That he had played into the hands of the Chancellor would be a good reason for Mr Mandelson to kick himself.
The fury inside Number 10 is less synthetic. The Prime Minister swerved around questions about his old chum in the Commons, but he allowed his spokesmen to be withering in their put-downs. It wasn't only that Mr Mandelson had put the divisions between Numbers 10 and 11 up in neon lights just when they were striving to maintain the pretence that you can't get a cigarette paper between Prime Minister and Chancellor.
It wasn't only because he suggested that Mr Blair had been overpowered by Mr Brown. He had also tossed his hand grenade into the argument precisely at the moment when the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are at one of the most delicate stages of their private wrangling.
'Tony is livid,' one of the Prime Minister's closest aides told me the day after Mr Mandelson let it all it hang out at a lunch with female journalists. On the Richter Scale of lividness, how livid would that be? 'A definite 10. Totally livid, absolutely livid, never more livid, staring out of the window and into outer space livid.'
What was the high crime committed by Peter Mandelson that provoked so much lividness in the Prime Minister and prompted so much venom from everyone else? You may find my explanation rather shocking. Those readers whose nerves are in a frail condition may need to brace yourselves - a shot of strong drink might even be advisable - to get you through the next sentence of this column.
Peter Mandelson spoke the truth. It was a truth that it suits neither the Prime Minister nor the Chancellor to acknowledge, certainly not in public. That is why the other two sides of New Labour's founding triangle are so furious with him.
He caused so much anger because he was broadly right. He said that Gordon Brown is an 'obsessed' man, 'a politician right down to his fingertips, 24 hours a day, seven days a week'. That is indisputably true. That it is equally true of Mr Mandelson himself does not make it any less true of Mr Brown. After all, it takes one to know one. The obsessiveness with which the Chancellor approaches politics, his juggernaut willpower allied with his attention to detail, is what makes him such a formidable character.
Mr Mandelson also suggested that the Prime Minister is less 'political' than the Chancellor. I take him to mean by this that the Chancellor is the more cunning and accomplished political strategist of the pair. Again, Mr Mandelson touches upon a truth about their relationship. One of Mr Brown's huge strengths is his capacity to think five moves ahead - often, five years ahead.
Tony Blair is a brilliant politician in many ways. In several vital respects, he is a more gifted one than Mr Brown. But one of the Prime Minister's frailties is a weakness for not thinking through how he is going to translate his blue-sky visions into reality. The Chancellor has ruthlessly exploited that vulnerability.
Mr Brown has a neck-lock on Mr Blair's ambition to take Britain into the euro. He put that stranglehold on the Prime Minister in the autumn of 1997 and has squeezed it tighter ever since. This was the other unpalatable truth spoken by Mr Mandelson when he said that the Prime Minister had been 'outmanoeuvred' by the Chancellor. By persuading Mr Blair that the euro decision should be dependent on economic tests set and marked by himself, the Chancellor made a prisoner of the Prime Minister. Too late did Mr Blair finally appreciate that he had allowed himself to be locked in chains and handed the key to his rival.
Depressingly for the Prime Minister, he has unwittingly helped Mr Brown to entrench his veto on the euro. It was the Prime Minister - or so, at any rate, we are constantly and gleefully told by allies of the Chancellor - who decided that the five tests had to be passed 'clearly and unambiguously'.
It was the Prime Minister who declared, without first warning Mr Brown that he was going to do so, that the euro assessment would happen two years after the 2001 election. At the time when the Prime Minister sprang this on him from the dispatch box, Mr Brown was incandescent that he had been bounced.
As things have unfolded, Mr Blair's deadline has backfired on him. When the dust of a war that split Europe has yet to settle, when the leading euro-zone economies are struggling, and when the European Convention is providing a cause for the right-wing press to whip up phobia, June 2003 has turned out to be just about the worst time he could have chosen to extract a positive verdict on the euro.
The Prime Minister is now trying to wriggle free of the manacles in which the Chancellor has got him. That is why he has suddenly found a purpose for seeking the opinions of the rest of the Cabinet, in the hope that they will help him to make his escape. The Chancellor, as he made clear in speeches and interviews last week stressing the primacy of his original tests and adding further hurdles on top, is determined to keep the power of decision in his iron grasp.
It is a matter of opinion whether Peter Mandelson was also correct to say that if Britain does not enter the single currency soon, then the country will pay an 'incalculable' penalty in investment, jobs and influence. What is a fact is that Tony Blair agrees with him.
The Prime Minister equally believes, as the Chancellor really does not, that Britain would have 'much greater influence if we demonstrate our intention to go into the single currency', which is why Mr Blair prefers to keep the euro option alive for this parliament while Mr Brown wants it closed down.
Peter Mandelson's great offence was to say something discomfortingly accurate about the Prime Minister. Tony Blair hates to be told that he has been weak, especially when he is being told it by someone who knows him so well, especially in relation to Gordon Brown, and most especially because the Prime Minister can't deny it to himself.
That is why he was so livid with his old friend. No one thanks you for telling the truth when it hurts so much.
