Harriet Harman, leader of the Labour Party pro tempore
(again) after the party suffered (another) heavy election defeat, has reassured
the world that the post mortem of this election will be based on facts. Fear
not, she says, for she has ‘commissioned work’ to look at how Labour lost so
badly. Quite what kind of ‘work’ had been ‘commissioned’ we do not know, though
her phraseology makes it sound like paintbrushes and chisels might be used. Perhaps
we should all sit in anticipation of a painting or sculpture of some kind.
As various Labour people begin to assess various Labour
losses, the reasons for which seem, for the most part, pretty obvious, somewhere
in London, a huge and terrifying political behemoth awoke over the weekend and
delivered his own take on the reasons for Labour’s latest drubbing. And this
monster is one worth listening to.
New Labour: A Family Affair
If New Labour is a family, Peter Mandelson is the
Grandfather. (To make sure we’re all on the same page, think ‘Mafia Boss and undisputed
oracle’ rather than ‘Werther’s Original and slippers’ – perhaps Godfather would be a more appropriate
phrase). He built the empire, he ran the
show. As communications director and campaign director in the 1980s and 1990s,
he identified the minds most capable of modernising an aging and broken Labour
Party, he schooled them, and in so doing, he masterminded a revolution
politically, allowing the party a run of historically unparalleled success.
The minds he chose were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; the two
men who - save for Mandelson himself and perhaps the late Philip Gould - did
more for New Labour than anyone else. And as a trio, Mandelson, Blair and Brown
were a formidable force and a political dream team. Blair was very much the
better politician, presenter and people-person; the public face of New Labour.
Brown was every bit as sharp as Blair, and what he lacked in presentational
proficiency, he more than made up for in the areas of policy and political
architecture. His intellect, political savagery and sheer force of personality
both laid the foundations on which New Labour policy would be built, and
cleared plenty of (sometimes human) obstacles to its implementation. Meanwhile,
Mandelson masterfully pulled the strategic, communications, and PR strings in
the background.
(They say Mandelson is
a Kingmaker, that he would never be a King. But they also say that true power
is controlling events without ever showing the mechanisms of that power. If
this is so, a photo of Mandelson should accompany the definition of ‘true
power’ in the dictionary).
These two parents of the New Labour movement were capable,
intelligent, and on occasion, as dysfunctional as the worst of marriages. On
their own they may have been able to change Labour; Mandelson ensured it would
an astonishing and lasting transformation.
Succession Planning
The logical succession plan, likely considered – if not
wholly planned - by Mandelson, would have been for New Labour’s ‘Second
Generation’ to seamlessly pick up where Blair (and to an extent, Brown) left
off. Whether it was actually a Blairite faction or a Brownite faction didn’t
really matter in the long run, the important thing was that it was New Labour
2.0; a slightly altered, slightly improved version to reflect the current
political climate. And among the group of young New Labourlings, there were a
handful who could have been top dog; Balls, Miliband, Miliband…
Mandelson had remained fairly tight-lipped throughout Ed
Miliband’s leadership. In politics, silence is usually a sign of disagreement. Often,
pre-configured lines are trotted out which, whilst not doing any damage,
certainly don’t improve relationships or dispel rumours. Mandelson’s silence
was tacit acknowledgment that he knew something was about to go wrong. And when
it did we didn’t have to wait long for him to clear his throat and give us a
rundown of the what, the why, and the how.
If anyone has earned the right to comment on Labour, it is
Peter Mandelson, but it would also be true to say that nowhere in British
politics, let alone within the Labour party, is there a more divisive figure
than the Prince of Darkness himself.
But that doesn’t make him wrong. His point is essentially
this: Labour lost in 2010 thanks to a diluted, half-hearted version of New
Labour, and they lost in 2015 because they abandoned New Labour entirely
instead of tweaking it and developing it in to something relevant to the
British public. ‘Revitalising and reenergising’ Mandelson called it.
Lessons from Bill
Tony Blair echoed these thoughts. ‘The route to the summit
lies through the centre ground’ he said. This was true long before even New
Labour took power in 1997. Bill Clinton had provided a masterclass on how to
decimate Right-wing Republicans with his fledgling ‘Third Way’ back in 1992, even if the ideology wouldn't be 'officially launched' until a conference with Blair in 1998. Clinton led the
Democrats out of two dark and winless decades by making them less Left and more
Centre. The route to the summit lies through the centre ground, said Blair.
People want a government that leans heavily against inequality in society, but
realises that people have aspirations, said Mandelson. In its simplest form,
beginning in 1994 or 1995 Blair & Co. would ‘do a Clinton’ and take New
Labour towards the centre; the traditional Labour folk from the left stayed
with them, they picked up a bunch of other non-traditional folk from somewhere
near the middle and made them ‘Labour folk’ too.
With Clinton’s ‘Third
Way’ becoming the new norm for the Democrats, Obama tweaked the election
strategy formula in 2008; he knew the perception of the Democrats was good
enough, his concern was actually getting enough people off their sofas and in
to polling stations to vote for it. Through an unprecedented grass roots
network he expanded the electorate, increased turnout by several million, and brought
his own landslide to the party. It was Clinton’s ‘Third Way’ with a sprinkling
of Hope and a few more logistical bells and whistles.
Elections are, in
theory, easy to win. You need more people to vote for you than the other guy. It
is ‘simply’ a case of appealing to more people and enabling more people to vote
for you, neither of which seemed to form part of the plan by Ed and Ed. As
Mandelson asserted, it was a campaign of hating the rich, loving the poor and
ignoring the vast number of people in the middle. Political philosophies aside,
in pure mathematical terms this very obviously leaves you with a very small
section of the population on which to pin your hopes.
New New Labour?
Labour 2015 was a Labour project run by the heirs to New
Labour. It could have been a glorious coronation and a testament to the
enduring architecture of the modernisation by Mandelson, Blair and Brown. Ed
Miliband and Ed Balls had an outstanding foundation on which to build. But they
jettisoned the formula, they thought people were utterly tired of New Labour
when perhaps it was simply the case that New Labour itself was tired and needed
a ‘remodernisation’, Mandelsonian or otherwise. Ed and Ed went out on their own,
went back to the left, lost everyone Blair had picked up with New Labour, and
paid the price. Perhaps it is unfair to lay this loss of the centre at the feet
of Ed Miliband. Perhaps it started in Gordon Brown’s Premiership, or even
earlier, under Blair. But the fact remains, Miliband did nothing to try to win
those people back. That in itself is tantamount to failure.
Now that the dust has settled on 2015, the question is what
kind of Labour do we get next? Do we see a New
New Labour? A vibrant, energetic reworking of the party based on the Third Way
2.0? Or do we see something else? It surely has to be accepted now that Labour
cannot win by being a left-wing party.
The shape of Labour to come largely depends on how close
Peter Mandelson can get to the centre of power. If he’s running the show, we
might just see a revitalised New Labour; older, wiser, complete with all the
clever bits from before, but with all the right tweaks in all the right places.
History shows us that Peter Mandelson is good at placing
himself close to the centre of power, and at the weekend he picked a new horse
in (almost) endorsing Chuka Umunna for the Labour leadership (Umunna confirmed
his candidacy at lunch time on Tuesday). In terms of style, intellect and
potential, Chuka Umunna is as close to the next Tony Blair as anyone in the
Labour Party ever has been. Young, energetic, intelligent. A little rough
around the edges, perhaps, certainly not the finished article, but as Mandelson
asserted ‘he’ll get there’. He certainly will get there if he has Mandelson
sanding down the edges and presenting him to the world.
 |
| Chuka Umunna confirmed his Labour leadership bid yesterday. |
When it comes to Mandelson, there will always be questions
asked of his intentions. He will never escape his Machiavellian reputation, nor
does he show any desire to do so. Is this Mandelson finding a winning way for
Labour, or is it his last ditch grasp at power, and at saving his New Labour
creation? Or, of course, to prove that the New Labour way was the right way all
along? Whether he’s chosen his horse for the good of the Labour Party, or for
his own ends doesn’t really matter. The last time Mandelson took the brightest
young things in the party under his wing, the result was an unprecedented shift
in the British political landscape. If he gets it right, Labour win the next
election.
They say that continued and enduring success comes from the ability
to constantly rebuild. This is spoken of often in football - people always talk
about the three or four truly world-beating sides Sir Alex Ferguson built at
Manchester United over a quarter of a century, how he built and rebuilt and changed
and improved where necessary to ensure the club was always challenging. In
politics this unceasing rejuvenation and success is unheard of, we might get
Clinton’s Democrats, or New Labour shifting the landscape for about a decade, but
no single group has really been able to make such game-changing shifts twice,
and power invariably shifts to the other side of the aisle before too long.
Are we about to witness Peter Mandelson’s final amazing act?
His transformation of the Labour Party first time round was astonishing. Can he
really do the unthinkable; modernise the Labour party and take them from an
unelectable disaster to obvious leaders in a brave new world for a second time?
And in Chuka Umunna, has Mandelson chosen the subject of his next coronation?
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