Rereading

Look back in wonder

As Peter Mandelson makes another return to the cabinet, Julian Glover revisits his book The Blair Revolution. What did the architect of New Labour get right - and wrong - a dozen years ago?

• 
• • Julian Glover
  • The Guardian,
  • Saturday October 11 2008
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  • Article history

In early 1996, Peter Mandelson saw the future, and it worked. The man who returned to the cabinet last week with an instant peerage, a red V-neck sweater and a tricky past was present at the birth of New Labour as he is now present at its death. Every political age needs a book, and Mandelson delivered it almost 13 years ago in The Blair Revolution, serialised in this paper and immediately demolished by it in a review from Roy Hattersley. He complained of "soft options, vague generalities and reassuring platitudes". He was right about that, but missed something. The book is shallow, but it has lasted. This is a guide to stale Blairite hopes, as recooked by David Cameron.

Open a copy, the cheap old binding snapping to spill pages from the pistachio-green covers (the colour of Labour's conference set the year Blair took over), and much is familiar. The language about community - "Britain desperately needs to promote a flowering of voluntary initiative and civic pride" - is pure Cameron gush. All Cameron's favourite words and phrases are present: family, responsibility, strong society and, most of all, change. Some of the policies are here too. Labour now attacks the Conservative fixation with marriage, but readers are told "marriage itself can and should be strengthened directly by public policy". Mandelson advocates "a public dowry available just once in a lifetime" (no divorce tolerated), which, with a salesman's guile, he suggests should be offered to voters as the "Getting Off to a Good Start" scheme.

That never happened. But much in this book did. This is no political dreamland, where wild thoughts roam before being forgotten in the sensible daylight of government. It is a specific list for power - devolution, freedom of information, public investment and so on: the substance of Blair's administration before its leader ran off to Iraq with George Bush. It is written in the tone of a doctor talking a patient towards a necessary but awkward operation. It represses daring, substituting that for "what works" - or is supposed to work, since so many of its proposals stuttered and failed. Some of it reads ironically. "Labour based its public spending plans on optimistic forecasts of economic growth that failed to materialise. Eventually taxes had to be raised which ... led to the alienation of Labour's better-off supporters," it warns - of 1979, and perhaps again today.

The book is less the product of one man than a movement of which he was a leading member. Mandelson and his co-author, Roger Liddle (who presumably did the bulk of the writing), were part of a circle that also included Derek Draper, thanked fulsomely in the acknowledgments before his own Mandelsonian fall from grace and recent rebirth in Brown's kitchen cabinet. Its pages revive the sense of liberation that accompanied New Labour's election in 1997. There was something brilliant about the single-minded attempt to set social justice alongside economic strength, a modernisation that put the party in tune with the public. It was led by a politician with the best retail skills in the business, against a Conservative party that deserved to lose.

In hindsight, the pettiness of New Labour can be detected too - the attacks on the media, which begin on page one of the preface; the boastfulness; and the denial of what is obviously true. "Today, of course, the Labour leader is elected by one-member-one-vote," Mandelson and Liddle claim, when that was not the case then and is still not the case now.

The strains that pulled at the New Labour government from its first hour are clear too: only two references to Gordon Brown in the index (though his ally Ed Balls makes the acknowledgments as a less blokeish Edward). There is hardly a mention of John Prescott, the deputy leader who hated Mandelson. Above all, Blair's 1994 election to the job Brown thought he deserved is skated over, given less than a page when the scrapping of Clause IV (much more on message) gets six. The closest the book comes to acknowledging that Granita moment is an arch reference to the fact that "within hours, to an extent that took everyone, including him, by surprise, opinion in Westminster was talking of Blair as the most suitable successor". It cannot have surprised Mandelson much, since he arranged it.

Now we are supposed to believe that Mandelson and Brown are friends again, which is unlikely, although Mandelson's commitment to Labour is real. His pride in it wavers, though. One page boasts of a bedrock of values inherited from Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee; almost the next tells us that "New Labour is, in Tony Blair's words, 'literally a new party'".

Reading the book now, with the knowledge of where it led, is to watch mice blunder around a maze in search of an exit. The omission of things that came to matter is telling, starting with foreign policy other than Europe. There is very little on the United States, then happily neutralised under Bill Clinton; nothing on Iraq, then back in its box, quelled by sanctions and the no-fly zone; nothing on Afghanistan, or Islam, or terrorism beyond Ireland. The book is ignorant of climate change ("the earth has not hit the buffers, contrary to warnings more than two decades ago"). Mobile phones are unmentioned luxuries, reserved for City traders, plumbers, rent boys and spin doctors. There is no text messaging and most of all no email or web, transforming forces that came about without being commanded by government. What, of that sort, awaits us now?

Social forces, too, are overlooked. Gay people get only one mention (a reassurance that "Blair is not a prude or a pig ... he is not judgmental about those friends who are not in conventional marriages"). Yet Labour's achievements in the area of social liberalisation, from civil partnerships on, turned out to be some of the greatest of the government. Britain today is a more liberal and generous place because of Blair's government. But not in every area. Race and migration are not discussed as potential issues. The Britain the book describes is without Polish plumbers or Islamic radicals, let alone Starbucks macchiato grandes, overpaid foreign footballers, hedge funds, online poker or music downloads.

Nor is there any warning of the dangers of a credit-fuelled boom, of the sort that has exploded over Britain this week. The text diagnoses Britain's problems in 1996, many of which remain problems today. But it does not offer much in the way of solutions. Optimism is the easy part. Again, in this it is a sort of prequel to Cameron, charged now by a government that has too many old policies of having no new ones of his own. The long empty moan of opposition is always with us.

It is useful to be reminded of how light New Labour's policy baggage was in the mid-1990s - nothing substantial on the NHS; a bit on skills and jobs; a lot on Europe, most of which was made redundant by Brown's obstreperousness; some stuff on the constitution to keep the Scots and the Guardian happy; a warning to the trade unions to keep quiet. In place of substance, the authors wander off into an imaginary world of Peter's friends. This is the sort of place where politicians often feel happiest. Brown entered it in his conference speech a fortnight ago - meeting "the dad who lives to walk his daughter up the aisle and the gran who is there to clap and cry at her grandson's graduation". But Mandelson and Liddle got there first and the trick was as horrible then as it is now.

A large part of the book involves a series of stereotypical characters, all of whom have been let down by Tory cruelty and are to be redeemed by Labour good sense. There is nothing threatening about these people. Like all loyal members of New Labourland they have hearts of gold, even naughty little Peter, the 14-year-old scamp let down by his local comp (the name surely a joke between the authors). Peter is poor, so is his mum (inevitably called Tracy) who "got pregnant in her late teens ... married her boyfriend. But it didn't last." At least, under New Labour, they might have got Mandelson's dowry. Tracy's dad is dead (though the NHS did its best) and her mum Eileen is a hard-working school dinner lady who rarely sees her upwardly mobile son Derek (think Draper), a man who bought into the Thatcher dream as an electrician in Harlow ...

But enough of these unfortunate people. Peter (the MP, not the truant kid) becomes bored of them too. He wants us to meet another couple, of the kind he might, in 1996, have joined on holiday, before he discovered the joys of associating with the seriously rich. Ben (the name of another Mandelson staffer) and Laura are terribly nice types, who live in a late Georgian house in Kennington and might even vote Labour, of the Blair rather than Foot variety. New Labour's offer to the fictional Ben and Laura is mainly to get rid of the guilt about being rich, without getting rid of their riches.

Their kids, of course, have to go to private school (blame the Tories) and Ben has private medical care just in case. But they have the potential to be solid citizens of the progressive state. As things stand, their life is one horrible mass of middle-class anxieties: burglary, the hell of the Northern line and most of all "the fearful example of a colleague's eldest son at a leading London day-school with one of the finest academic records in the country, but now gone off the rails, addicted to drugs and a drop-out". What a waste of the fees, apart from anything else.

There is a very Mandelson touch in the book's interest in Ben's furniture: "the private domain of his working existence is a joy - the tasteful office with its comfortable sofas, designer lamps and expensive wallprints; the client entertainment; even the twice-weekly workout at the private gym". The image of an earlier ministerial Mandelson, feet up in an Eames chair in that too-expensive Notting Hill house which cost him his first job, swims into view.

One hopes that the office of the new business secretary will be equally well furnished. He was shocked in the 1990s by Blair's asceticism - "Blair's friends know that he is not especially interested in creature comforts and how things look". That, at least, has changed. The former prime minister is now the owner of a No 10 replica in London and a Chequers substitute in Bucks, Sir John Gielgud's old home.

The authors soon move on to subjects closer to their heart, media management and the "widespread culture of sleaze, which the modern brand of Conservatism has nurtured". If the Tories gave birth to modern sleaze, we now know that New Labour educated it into adulthood. Put aside the seriousness or not of the two sins that brought down Mandelson, New Labour's boast of moral purity was one of the more foolish parts of its development. In 1996, the authors could argue primly that "the idea that there is nothing objectionable about a public figure pursuing a dubious private commercial interest as long as it is declared is one of the most corrupting principles in private life today". In 2008, plenty of Labour figures claim exactly this defence.

What, though, about those unlucky citizens we met earlier? The Blair Revolution ends on a bizarre note. In sweeping italic type, their fate in the then distant year of 2005 is described. The Tories won, god forbid. Ben and Laura have had to flee London after their house was burnt down by a mob, enraged by "the Portillo crackdown". The army patrols the streets and "trips to the theatre or their favourite restaurant have to be planned long in advance". Peter, meanwhile, "has been in and out of prison twice by now", just as his namesake has been in and out of cabinet jobs. Eileen is shocked to see "even posh parts of her neighbourhood going downhill". "How had it happened? Could it have been different?"

It could, of course, for the story of New Labour has a happy ending after all. The Tories didn't win. Peter becomes a garage-owning entrepreneur. Eileen's flat is done up. Ben's business is booming. "Some great public-private deal has been done for the London Underground. Revamped and on time, the Northern line isn't a bad way to get about now." As the sun shines, our happy cast of characters gathers to cheer in the clean, safe streets. "Ben hadn't been able to quite put his finger on it, but Laura had said it felt as if we had become a young country again."