They have no sense of shame, as well as no deep sense of Britain
BRUCE ANDERSON
Jonathan Aitken once said that politicians who suddenly lose high office take two years to recover their equipoise. He was thinking of Margaret Thatcher and Norman Lamont, but it may also now be true of Peter Mandelson. If so, his former Cabinet colleagues are in for an interesting couple of years.
One can understand why Mr Mandelson feels the pain of exclusion so acutely, for he played a vital role in the election and success of this government. Yet he is not only to be denied the rewards of his labours; he has to endure slights and scorn from the likes of Jack Straw and Clare Short, whose contribution was negligible compared with his own. Mr Straw, indeed, is a candidate for the job Peter most wanted: Foreign Secretary (though the odds have now moved in favour of Robin Cook surviving). It is a bitter cup for poor old Mandy. No wonder if like Malvolio, the Shakespeare character he most resembles, he is saying, 'I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
But this is not just high-camp farce. It plays on deeper political emotions and will have long-term consequences. It is also the worst possible background noise for the beginning of an election campaign, especially when the other running story is missing body parts. (Though Dr Mandelson is not to blame for that. He tried to ensure that old Labour's heart and brain were cremated along with the rest of the corpse.) Until a generation ago, many doctors treated their patients as if they were living anatomical specimens. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some doctors regarded dead patients as a fruitful source of anatomical specimens, and did not trouble themselves with niceties such as consent. The government is not to blame for all this, but do the public realise that? It will certainly add to a growing sense of unease and to the feeling that Labour has welshed on its promises.
But Labour's loss of credibility has not yet helped the Tories to enhance theirs. The voters are still more likely to say 'they're all as bad as each other' than 'perhaps it's time to give that Hague fellow a hearing'. William Hague must find ways of projecting himself while hoping that the press continue to persecute Keith Vaz, whose conduct has been much more resignation-worthy than Peter Mandelson's, and that further scandals emerge. It is probable that they will, for there is mounting evidence of this government's casual attitude both to the truth and in its dealings with rich businessmen. Mr Mandelson has said that unless he is vindicated, his memory might be jogged over the Bernie Ecclestone donation. But even if he is blandished back to silence, his memory is not the only source-material for wrongdoing.
On one point, we can be clear. If there is further Ecclestone-style trouble. Mr Blair will not be able to deflect it merely by insisting that he is a 'fairly straightforward sort of guy'. Such a claim would now be greeted by near-universal howls of derision. Mr Blair is still likely to win the election, but his moral authority had been impaired even before the Mandelson affair. It has now suffered further damage just when he needed it most, and not only for his election campaign.
Before Christmas, I informed my readers that the Foreign Office had plans for the autumn. It expected that a referendum on the euro would be held in September or October. This was then authoritatively denied, which does not mean that my sources had been misleading. Whether or not Rupert Murdoch reads The Spectator, there were reports that he had intervened to extract an assurance from the PM that there would be no early referendum. It is certainly in character for one of those men to demand such a guarantee, and for the other to give it.
If Mr Murdoch did intervene, he was not the only senior figure to do so. Gordon Brown, far from being opposed to the euro, still believes that Britain should and will join. But on one point he is adamant: that this should happen at a moment of his choosing. His quarrels last year with Stephen Byers. Robin Cook and Peter Mandelson were not about matters of substance. They were merely turf disputes, provoked by the Chancellor's desire to show who was boss. The FO preparing for a referendum? The FO will do what it is told, and not until big Gordon decides to tell it.
This delay makes it much less likely that Britain will ever join the euro. Mr Blair would probably have won a referendum in the autumn of 1997, and might have done so later on in this Parliament. If there were another substantial Labour win in May — no longer a certainty — there would have been another window of opportunity this autumn. But that will rapidly close.
For even if Mr Blair does win comfortably, it seems inconceivable that he will be able to enjoy a second honeymoon with the electorate. It is much more likely that British politics will return to normal in the next Parliament, with the government losing by-elections and stricken by mid-term travails. If Mr Blair were to win a euro referendum, he would have to persuade a substantial section of the electorate to vote against its own settled instincts. That seems less and less possible, and there is an irony. No Cabinet minister was more enthusiastic about the euro than Peter Mandelson, and no Cabinet minister has done more to sabotage the prospects of British membership than he has, by the way he left office.
Can we infer from Mr Blair's loss of moral authority that his government is thoroughly corrupt? Yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that New Labour has always been wholly corrupt. From the outset, it was all pose and no principle. It was led by people who wanted power as a means of personal gratification and had only the vaguest idea what to do with it. They had no knowledge of history, no intellectual or moral depth, no deep sense of Britain — as well as no sense of shame.
But when it comes to financial corruption, their wrongdoings are mere peccadillos, especially in comparison with continental Europe, and above all with France. If British standards applied there, a majority of those who served in the French cabinets of the past two decades would be on their way to gaol. There has been systematic large-scale corruption at the highest level for many years. It may be that there will not be full exposure, for neither the socialists nor the parties of the Right are in any position to accuse the other. So when we contemplate events across the Channel, we can congratulate ourselves on the probity of British politics, and there is a further reason for selfcongratulation. The sovereign people are not as dumb as Mr Blair hoped, or many of the rest of us feared.
For three years, it was as if Tony Blair had proved Abraham Lincoln wrong, and that it was possible to fool all of the people all of the time. We seemed to be doomed to government by focus groups and pop groups, by pap masquerading as the New Labour project (and applauded as such by Tony's tame intellectuals) and by the ghost of the Princess of Wales. Well, the whirligig of time is bringing in his revenges, with the added piquancy that Peter Mandelson is doing the whirling.
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