My ten-point guide to being just like me and Peter Mandelson
STATUS ANXIETY
Icannot help feeling a certain affinity with Peter Mandelson. Like me, he has been given a number of high-profile jobs, only to lose them in slightly dubious circumstances. Yet somehow he always manages to bounce back. He is the political equivalent of a Weeble: no matter how near he comes to toppling over, he ends up righting himself. This has led me to formulate the Mandelson/ Young Guide to Failing Upwards: 1. Cultivate a reputation for being clever. No matter how often you screw up, if people believe you possess some special talent, they will always consider employing you. In Mandelson’s case, the fact that he is widely thought to possess an almost supernatural ability to win general elections has been key to his political resurrection.
2. Be as obnoxious as possible. This will enable you to blame your career setbacks on the fact that you are an unpolished, plainspeaking man, rather than wholly incompetence. (Mandelson: ‘I can play hardball. People like to discredit me because they fear me.’) 3. Try to be charming occasionally. Given your reputation for rudeness, people will be completely bowled over if you take the trouble to charm them — much more so than if they are chatted up by someone who is routinely charming like Nicholas Coleridge. It will make them feel special, as if they have some unique quality that has enabled them to tame the beast. (See Gill Hornby’s piece in Tuesday’s Telegraph in which she described Mandelson as ‘a complete poppet’.) 4. Do not worry if people try to paint you as a lying, scheming, Machiavellian opportunist. This can work to your advantage. As Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover, it is better to have some people inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in. 5. Cultivate a persecution complex. That way, you can treat each setback as just one more challenge to be overcome — I’ll show those bastards! -— rather than a reason to give up. As Churchill said, success consists of going from one failure to the next with no lack of enthusiasm. (Churchill, incidentally, is the patron saint of the Failing Upwards Movement: he failed on the beaches, he failed on the landing grounds, he failed in the fields and on the streets, he failed in the hills — but he never surrendered.) 6. Do not fear unpopularity. The advantage of being widely disliked is that the few friends you have will be fiercely protective of you. They will take pride in defending you against the mob; it makes them feel noble and morally courageous. Paradoxically, one of the by-products of being almost universally loathed is that you attract a very loyal group of friends. 7. Do not bear grudges. If you are going to burn a lot of bridges in your career, it is important to master the art of rebuilding them. The key to this is to start each relationship afresh, even if the person in question has repeatedly stabbed you in the back. (Mandelson on Brown: ‘Of course we’ve had our ups and downs, but we have also known each other for over 20 years and originally we worked very well together.’) 8. Only deal with the people at the top. If you are unpopular, you are far more likely to win over the Alpha dogs than the lapdogs immediately beneath them. Being friends with an ‘untouchable’ like you enables them to advertise just how secure they are in their social status.
9. It is better to be hated than mildly disliked. If you merely irritate people, they are unlikely to change their mind about you — but if they loathe you with a passion, it is easier to bring them round. One minute they detest you, the next they want to be your best friend. This is a quirk of the human psyche. As the saying goes, there is a thin line between love and hate.
10. Above all, do not be a quitter. Everything you need to know about how to fail upwards is contained in the following anonymous quotation that used to hang above the desk of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s: ‘Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Press on!’ Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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