Mandelson

[Protheroe]

I’m simply asking you for a credible alternative

That's predicated on the assumption that the current lot are credible. All the evidence of this continuity-Sunakism with added Mandelson suggests that's one big assumption.

[baggy1]

I’m simply asking you for a credible alternative

That's predicated on the assumption that the current lot are credible. All the evidence of this continuity-Sunakism with added Mandelson suggests that's one big assumption.

It really isn’t though is it.

[Protheroe]

It is. Pre-election Starmer built his (only) appeal beyond Sunak on the aura of competence and a forensic legal mind.

Since his election we have had government by U-turn, sanctimony, incompetence and now through his appallingly poor judgement one of the greatest scandals in modern political history.

Every Wednesday he parrots the same list of "achievements" which clearly fall flat with the electorate as none of them even begin to deal with the fundamental issues of our time, which are felt most acutely in our wallets and our fears about the future for our kids. Rachel Reeves has overseen the type of contract breach on our kids that would have me jailed if I tried it on with my clients, let alone what she's done on the incentive to save and invest.

He's a dead man walking, and what's worse the PLP is horrendously unprepared for what may come next. If they don't get a grip (they won't) then I guess we'll be sleepwalking into our own form of fascism-lite. What a legacy.

[baggy1]

So your view is that you can only ask for a credible alternative if you consider the incumbent as credible. It really isn’t.

[Protheroe]

So your view is that you can only ask for a credible alternative if you consider the incumbent as credible. It really isn’t.

No, my view (and the pertinent question) is, who is the credible PLP alternative to Starmer - now that he's been completely defenestrated?

[baggy1]

I’m not certain if you’ve been paying attention but that is what I’ve been asking.

[Shabby Russian]

Not at all, I’m simply asking you for a credible alternative. You don’t have one, and a large enough proportion of the country are swayed by the media coverage and see Farage as that alternative. You keep moaning and you’ll get what you want.

For someone who thinks they can talk down to others, you can’t seem to recognise your support which I’ve noticed has now shifted to ‘least worst’ for Starmer is the reason Reform are doing so well. He’s lost support from the left if his party, left leaning voters and for what? To be popular with whom? A very narrow demographic in the right of his party?

You're right Derek.

Labour look done to me. They have exhausted the patience of their most loyal supporters and I'm not sure they can get them back. Their only hope was Burnham to become leader in the summer, but even then when he's your big hope, the reality is you have no real hope.

The next GE will be messy, because I think we have passed peak Reform support, and there is a very real prospect of 5 national parties attracting support of between 15 and 20 %, with in Wales and Scotland the Nationalist Parties getting the most support.

How that works out in a first past the post system is anyone's guess.

[baggy1]

In such a divided country that is always going to be worry Shabs. The Labour Party will move back to the left (and losing elections) at some point leaving the middle ground open for a further party to emerge. Trying to be all things to all men in today’s world is near impossible. The Lib Dem’s have so much of an open goal if they could get their act together but they are afraid of the middle ground and the responsibility it brings.

[Protheroe]

Nick Cohen writes:


In 2008 Maggie Darling, wife of the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, invited journalists to a briefing at 11 Downing Street on the collapse of the global financial system.

An appropriately Chekhovian scene awaited us when we reached the first-floor drawing room. Outside the wind was blowing a gale, lashing leaves and branches onto the windowpanes. As it howled, we stood around waiting for the Chancellor – and we kept on waiting.

Where was he? What was going on?

Finally, Darling appeared.

‘Been busy, Chancellor?’ asked my colleague Martin Bright.

‘Do you know what, Martin,’ Alistair replied, ‘all my life people have been telling me to stop being so left wing. To move to the centre. To think about what middle-class, middle-England wants and give it to them.’

‘Now they want me to nationalise the fucking banks.’

Ah, yes, the banks.

Darling was delayed because the bankers were telling him there would be no money in the cash machines in the morning unless he acted.

Suddenly, the masters of the universe, the heroes of the free market, the world’s most extravagantly rewarded men needed humble taxpayers to bail them out or civilisation would collapse.

The crisis Darling and Gordon Brown had to manage haunts us still. We were overdependent on financial services and have never really recovered from their fall.

The crash brought in our stagnant world of zero-sum politics, where the right can portray every benefit for a poor mother as an attack on the middle class. Naturally it destroyed whatever hope the then Labour government had of re-election – so you can argue that the crisis led to austerity, Brexit, Liz Truss, and all the other disasters of the Tory years that so battered this country.

Brown and Darling did what they had to do. They stopped British banks collapsing and lobbied for a global rescue package.

And then Brown brought Peter Mandelson back into government. The two men had given the strong impression of loathing each other. In the arcane turn-of-the-century battles between Blairites and Brownites, Mandelson was very much Tony Blair’s man. But in a moment of national crisis Brown wanted all the available talents in his government.

He gave Mandelson a peerage that turned him into Baron Mandelson of Foy (no less) and made him Business Secretary.

I guess Brown hoped Mandelson would be able to help the government by tapping his connections with political elites in Europe and the US and by exploiting his mastery of the dark arts of spin.

The spin was soon on display. Mandelson quickly had the whole cabinet repeating that the financial crisis ‘began in America’ or ‘began as a crisis for American banks’. The unsubtle message was that the financial collapse was the fault of American bankers who were engaged in insane trades in mortgage securities – not of the Labour government.

And it appears that Mandelson did indeed milk his contacts book. But not in the way Brown intended.

At the same time as he was blaming the American bankers for the financial crisis, it appears he was secretly lobbying on behalf of those same American bankers seeking to escape planned taxes Alistair Darling wanted to raise to help pay for the damage they had caused.

The level of betrayal is staggering. I have never seen anything like it in British politics. You would have to go back to Kim Philby spying for the Russians to find an equivalent.

Mandelson betrayed Gordon Brown, who had put his trust in him and revived his career. He betrayed Alistair Darling, who had every right to expect that his colleagues would not be working for foreign financiers. He betrayed the wider Labour party that was trying to limit the scale of its defeat.

And if you want to be grandiose about it – and in the circumstances, I absolutely do want to be grandiose about it – Mandelson betrayed his country.

I want you to picture the scene. It’s now 2009, Darling wants to announce a super-tax on bankers’ bonuses. He was looking for a small measure of justice. The failure to try and imprison bankers after the 2008 crisis had profound consequences. Cynicism swept the West at the sight of the richest men on the planet keeping their profits in good times, and demanding the public pay the costs of cleaning up their failures when the bills came due.

Darling wasn’t going to send the heads of NatWest and Northern Rock, and the London managers of the US banks to prison – even though I remember saying to him that he could order the Army to march into the City and the public would cheer him on.

His modest proposal was that bonuses of more than £25,000 would attract a 50 per cent tax rate. As Darling was doing this, Mandelson was working against him with his friend and benefactor, the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Through Mandelson, Epstein organised a campaign from New York to undermine the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer in London.

‘Any real chance of making the tax only on the cash portion of the banker’s bonus,’ Epstein wrote in an email on December 15.

The ever-obliging Mandelson replied within minutes. ‘Trying hard to amend as I explained to Jes last night. Treasury digging in but I am on case.’

Epstein came back with: ‘let me know before Jes please.’

As Jim Pickard of the FT notes this is ‘an apparent reference to Jes Staley, then a senior banker at JPMorgan.’ By this stage then Mandelson was passing information to both Epstein and JP Morgan Chase, America’s largest bank.

The emails show that Epstein and Mandelson then discussed how they could browbeat Darling into sparing the bankers who had just brought down the world economy. (Mandelson has said that every UK and international bank was making the same argument about the bonus tax: ‘My conversations in government at the time reflected the views of the sector as a whole not a single individual’.)

On December 17, Epstein emailed Mandelson asking whether Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, should ‘call Darling one more time?’

Mandelson replied, saying: ‘Yes and mildly threaten.’

Yesterday, the Labour MP, Justin Madders, said that ‘advising a foreign bank to bully our chancellor in a time of financial crisis – it doesn’t get much lower than that’.

Indeed, it does not

Mandelson was working for Epstein for money, of course. Mandelson accepts his husband received money to fund an osteopathy course. And it is alleged a further $75,000 was transferred to him in 2003 and 2004. Given the value of the inside information Mandelson appears to have later passed on to Epstein, if those transfers were made (Mandelson says he has no recollection or record of them) this was a pathetically small sum.

Having met him a couple of times, I suspect that money wasn’t the sole reason he betrayed his colleagues. He loved the self-importance intrigue conferred. He loved being a ‘player,’ who was always there in ‘the room where it happens’.

Look at Mandelson desperately trying to impress the people he most admires, stay on their good side, and on their guest lists, even after those same people have brought his government and his country to its knees. Imagine how important he felt.

I became friends with Alistair Darling and saw him just before his untimely death in 2023. He said the new generation of Labour politicians would occasionally ask his advice.

‘What do you tell them?’ I asked.

‘Always be honest,’ he replied. ‘Never promise more than you can deliver.’

Darling may never have made a fortune to compare with Mandelson’s, but he was a thousand times the better man.

[tHEgLASSdOORS]

Back to Mandelson, who deserves everything coming to him and more, isn’t it amazing how much faster the legal system acts on serving justice for finance than it does dealing with a royal nonce.

What a thoroughly depressing country we are.