TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT
Peter Mandelson is honoured to have the ear of his party's leader, says Alfred Sherman. That's why he had better watch his back
THE Conservatives are in trouble for demonising Tony Blair in their advertise- ments. But Socialists are busy satanising Peter Mandelson, Mr Blair's preferred adviser. It is less risky for them to carry out their dispute through a proxy — tar- geting Mr Mandelson's creative applica- tion of spin-doctoring techniques adapted from the Saatchi brothers — than to attack the leader whose work Mr Mandel- son is carrying out.
Mr Mandelson has been in politics long enough to learn the difference between opponents and enemies (the former face you across the parliamentary floor, the lat- ter sit behind you). But attacks of the kind he is currently enduring from Roy Hatter- sley, among others, should remind him that people closest to you ideologically are not only in the best position to stab you in the back, but are more inclined to do so out of jealousy. You, after all, have suc- ceeded where they failed in getting close to the leader. There are many precedents. It fits in with my own experience. Lord Thomas's long-standing drive to de-Sher- manise the Centre for Policy Studies suc- ceeded only when he enlisted nominal right-wingers who resented my success in turning round Keith Joseph and then Mar- garet Thatcher in 1974 and thereby inau- gurating what came to be seen at the time as a new era.
Mr Mandelson is under attack for his virtues rather than his shortcomings. He is an apparatchik, not an intellectual — as anyone who reads his book will recognise.
'Waiter, there's a piece of beef in my soup.' But apparatchiks have their place in the scheme of things. They make the system work. He played a crucial role in rescuing Labour from its slough of despondency under Michael Foot, thereby giving the party a new lease of life. Conservatives are within their rights to complain that Labour's post-Foot conversion is neither deep, wide nor lasting enough. But unless they put nar- row, proprietorial, party interests above those of their country, they must give some credit to a party which must now be regard- ed as a partner in British democratic politics no less than as a rival for office.
There are precedents. In the mid-Seven- ties, I was subjected to comparable treat- ment, 'fingered' — as they say — by Ferdinand Mount, then Spectator political correspondent as 'eminence grise, guru, Svengali'. David Howell consoled me: 'You should not take it personally, they are just getting at Margaret without wanting to appear disloyal.' The anti-Sherman cam- paign, as part of a wider campaign against Keith Joseph and Margaret, was orches- trated from inside the Conservative Research Department where Chris Patten then worked.
At the time logic should have prompted Keith Joseph, then appointed by a grateful Margaret as responsible for policy, to remove Mr Patten and his cronies and replace them with people who shared his aims. But Keith did not like grasping nettles, so Margaret let herself be persuaded to sac- rifice control over the apparatus to a vision of party unity. Mr Mandelson take heed. A few years later, Sam (now Sir Samuel) Brittan, whose passionate loyalty to Nigel Lawson was emotional rather than logical, denounced Sir Alan Walters as 'Rasputin' for pointing out what everyone literate in economics already knew, namely that join- ing the ERM defied economic logic and would be catastrophic, as it indeed turned out to be. The campaign against Sir Alan Walters, orchestrated from No. 11 but joined enthusiastically by hacks who pre- ferred it to the intellectual dissection of economics, faced Margaret Thatcher with a dilemma. If she stuck by Sir Alan Walters and his adherence to strict logic in face of Euromania, Lawson could resign in a wave of anti-Thatcher feeling from all sides of the House, a smokescreen behind which to escape his responsibility for inflation. Con- versely, if she let Sir Alan Walters go, she would be ceding control over policy and become more vulnerable to the final assault.
The Conservatives' scapegoating of advisers is a mirror image of Labour's. Many features are reversed. It could hard- ly be otherwise. Socialism began in the realm of ideas, whence it captured the world of institutions and objects. Ideas have become instrumentalisgd and unre- constructed 'old believers' like Clare Short given short shrift. (There are cleverer ones than she, but they are biding their time.) By contrast, the Conservative Party began as an appendage of government, suspicious of ideas, subversive of the natu- ral order of things. Only the shock of suc- cessive defeats obliged Conservatives to stomach ideas at all, but they hoped to confine them to presentational instru- ments and never to apply them to policy- making. Hence, bearers of ideas like me were treated at arm's length and kept out of the drawing-room. Back in the saddle, Conservatives have downgraded ideas and `ideologues' — the very word tells a story — are shunned, at least till the next defeat.
The adviser's lot is not a happy one. The use of him as stalking-horse is as old as history. On ascending the throne, King Solomon made the chroniclers rewrite events of the previous few years to blacken the name of David's entourage, which he promptly purged. In Athens, blackguard- ing and threatening the Assembly's advis- ers was the method commonly used to intimidate representatives.
In Macedon, Aristotle fell victim to a witch hunt generated by inter-generational conflict. He was lucky to escape with a whole skin, and exiled from Athens because his Macedonian connections made him suspect.
In a long list of advisers targeted for the mistakes or shortcomings of their bosses, two figures stand out: Colonel House and William Mackenzie-King's dog. Woodrow Wilson, who was mentally unbalanced, was chosen by his party after having been got rid of by his university, and was catapulted into power thanks to a major rift in the dominant party. His impetuosity, demon- strated in his policies towards Central America, Mexico and Europe, worried People. But a long period of stability and
constitutionalism made Americans squeamish about imputing mental instabil- ity to their President. So Colonel House, his adviser, carried the can.
Mackenzie-King was mentally ill. Yet he was the only successful prime minister Canada has ever had, before or since. He was known to trust no one and held long conversations with his dog. No one dared criticise this in a nation of dog lovers. Per- haps it throws some light on the qualities required of a political adviser.
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