10 MARCH 2001, Page 7

JUST SAY SORRY

Aready you can hear the muttering and, who knows, by the beginning of next week the muttering may become a roar. Apologise! Grovel! Be a man, Blair, and say sorry to Peter Mandelson. If the auguries are correct, the Hammond report is about to exonerate the former Northern Ireland Secretary in terms that ought to be exquisitely embarrassing to the Prime Minister. 'I have no reason to doubt Mr Mandelson's honesty throughout this period,' Sir Anthony 'Wally Hammond will say. It is a sensational verdict. For some people, the persecution of Mandy has been as infamous as the Dreyfus affair, and now is the moment of humiliation for the government — as shattering as the news, in 1898, that Major Hubert Joseph Henry, chief of military intelligence, had forged the papers for the original Dreyfus trial.

In a few short days Peter Mande!son will be making his figurative return from Devil's Island. And the Mandelsonards will be wholly forgiven if they give way to incontinent glee. They may not be numerous, the partisans of Peter Mande!son, but they are entitled to be furious at the way their man has been treated. If they do choose to mount a picket outside the houses of those ministers and officials who did him down, The Spectator will be with them in spirit. A good place to start might be the house of Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, who emerges from the affair not only as a represser of civil liberties, but also as a sneak and a plotter. Seeing Mandy on the news saying something he believed to be at variance with Home Office records, he telephoned not Mandy but the Prime Minister, like some tell-tale tit from an Enid Blyton story. He then told reporters that Mandy had to resign because he had 'told an untruth'.

Well, Jack, what are you going to say now that Wally has found that Mandy's behaviour was perhaps muddled but essentially honest throughout? We want an apology, the crowd will bawl, like carollers after mince pies, and we won't go until we've got one. And then the small mob of Mandelsonards should move on through the Westminster village, picking up supporters as they go: here a few holidaying peasants from the Kintbury estate of millionaire author and friend of Mandy Robert Harris, there a few shirt-makers from the boutiques of Notting Hill, plus the odd rightwing leader-writer.

They might go by Clare Short's house, and demand that she apologise for saying that Mandy 'had problems with the truth'; but there is no question that the rally — which could perhaps be held in place of the Countryside March, as an expression of general revulsion at Blairism — should climax at Downing Street. Tony Blair should come out, in person, and Alastair Campbell should be chivvied out from under his big flat rock; and they should both take the microphone, and they should apologise for their own behaviour and the behaviour of the government as a whole. Why? Because there has been something queasy-making in the way senior figures began to blacken Mandy's name only hours after he had resigned from the government, and while an inquiry was theoretically under way. It was cowardly of Blair to ditch him, without fully establishing the facts; and Blair only did so because he knew that Mandy — having already blotted his copybook in the Britannia mortgage affair — was entirely at his mercy. As he looked at the waxen, worried face of his old friend, the Prime Minister calculated, rightly, that a thousand swords would not fly from their scabbards in his defence. Blair knew instinctively that he could not lose by seeming whiter than white, and sacking a man already associated with sleaze; and that was the action of a bully as well as a coward, But the main reason why Blair and Campbell should cringe, bow and fawn is that the Mandelson affair has illuminated the principles on which they have been governing the country for the past four years. When Peter Mandelson came into that kangaroo court on that Wednesday morning, he ought to have been acquitted, as Hammond has now determined. There was no reason to believe that he had behaved corruptly in expediting the Hinduja passport, and in any event that decision was not his but the Home Office's. He seemed to be at variance with the Home Office minister, Mike O'Brien, about whether or not there had been a conversation between them; but that, as Hammond has found, is still a matter of some ambiguity.

His only real and unforgivable offence was to cause a short-term presentational problem. Alastair Campbell had to give the Lobby its briefing, and Blair faced Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons. There seemed no chance that the affair would die in a day or so; it was easier to chop Mandy than to give him the benefit of the doubt, and see what was at the bottom of it all. So chop him they did. All that mattered to Blair and Campbell was the appearance of things, not the reality — a deficiency which some would say has marred their entire period in office. So let them apologise to Mandy, and we will take it as an act of contrition towards us all, for spin, lies, humbug, Potemkin spending, not to mention Budget double-counting.