Quality | 2010.08.31
Labour's vain, venal has-beens should bow out and shut up | Polly Toynbee
The interventions of Blair and Mandelson are the last thing Labour needs as it considers its next leader and future path
They just can\'t stop themselves, yesteryear headline addicts, locked in the old quarrels, oozing sectarian malice to their last gasp. Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair elbow their way back into the limelight for one last show with their competing memoirs – a breathtaking self-indulgence dragging the party back, just when the ballot papers for Labour\'s future land on doormats tomorrow morning.
A wise party is unlikely to heed their ill-judged intrusions. Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher did their reputation no favours with sour backseat driving. Blair is reported in the Mail on Sunday as saying Ed Miliband would be "a disaster" while Mandelson tells the Times Ed would lead Labour into " an electoral cul-de-sac ". Naturally the Murdoch press and the Mail are only too keen to give them their last pathetic moments of attention, to Labour\'s detriment. But their day is over. Mandelson had one last chance to do his party a service when he could have ousted Gordon Brown before inevitable electoral calamity. But self-interest kept him taking notes for his memoir instead: pollsters show that a new leader would have won Labour the extra 20 to 30 seats to prevent the present coalition. That hardly makes his leadership advice valuable.
Mandelson\'s book has been an occasion to reflect on the damage he has done to Labour over the years – far outweighing his early red rose rebranding that started the party on the road to electability. A sulphurous fascinator, the flick of his tail flavoured New Labour from the outset with a venality that seduced Blair, too.
Mandelson knew, better than anyone, the importance of imagery. Much revulsion against New Labour sprang from those indelible scenes of Blair and Mandelson holidaying in palaces and yachts: see how Cameron has learned from that mistake. How could Mandelson be a Labour person, yet spend his leisure hours with tax-exile Tory bankers or powerful Tory society hostesses, Labour\'s natural enemies? Choosing such friends debased politics – was it just a day job like any other, forgotten in the evenings or on holiday, not a conviction or a way of life? No wonder voters turn cynical if all the party tribalism, the ideology, the fury and passion was only play-acting after all. So when Mandelson and the Blairites suggest any slight move leftwards from New Labour would be fatal, consider how oddly disorientated and distorted their position on the spectrum became. Power and money sent their compasses spinning, Blunkett and others were seduced too, so many of the Blair entourage now retired to very un-Labour worlds of lucre.
Mandelson\'s sole historic quote – being "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" – became lethally emblematic of New Labour\'s infatuation with super-money. It undermined them from the early days, from Bernie Ecclestone\'s £1m to Lord Levy\'s cash-raising, failing to bring in an austere state funding of parties. New Labour\'s insistence that the hyper-wealthy must never be offended became suspect. Why never raise tax on the richest, as boardroom pay rose by 30% a year and bankers\' bonuses soared? How did a Labour government let inequality slip backwards in those golden years?
Blair\'s retirement into an orbit of mega-wealth has done immeasurable damage to his legacy: far too late comes his gift of book earnings to the British Legion. Had he taken the Jimmy Carter ascetic route, devoting himself to good works, keeping no more than his sizable pension, he could have done himself and Labour honour. Neither Miliband is tainted with money fascination, but both need to recognise how much of that past needs vocal rejection.
Blair and Mandelson, now trying to meddle with the future, have had no new ideas for a decade: they would do well to go gracefully into their platinum-plated political retirement. If David Miliband were wise he would pick up the phone and blast Mandelson for his intervention. He would seize the next mic and chop him up in public. Spilling anti-Ed poison to the Times, which paid Mandelson more than £350,000 for his memoirs, is about as helpful to the elder brother\'s campaign as a gushing endorsement from Brown would be to Ed\'s chances. For his own sake, David should also warn Blair to keep his tanks off the lawn. At the same time he should publicly rebuke him for the appalling timing of his book this week as an act of selfish disregard for the Labour party, to whom he owes everything.
This contest is Labour\'s chance to make a clean break with the past, above all with the old Blair-Brown schism. That\'s not easy, since all but Diane Abbott were implicated – Ed Balls most conspiratorially, the Milibands a bit less. Some doomsayers think Labour will not be back in power until a new generation takes over. My own view is that the brothers can be fresh enough in their approach to make the break – but only by kicking away the worst of the past, which Ed Miliband is doing. That means celebrating all that Labour achieved in the NHS, schools, Sure Start, child care, crime, the minimum wage and restoring pride in civic spaces, when so much of that is about to be slashed by the coalition. But Labour also needs to escape the deadly tropes, the meaningless language of "modernising" and the unimaginative straitjacket New Labour locked itself into after 1994.
David Miliband needs his break-free moment, when he gains the independence to tell Mandelson and Blair to shut up. He might reprise Clement Attlee \'s laconic put-down, "a period of silence on their part would be welcome". Or echo his younger brother who, asked if Mandelson would form part of his cabinet, replied sharply: "All of us believe in dignity in retirement".
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]vain-venal-has-beens-mandelson
