Mandelson tells it straight

February 17, 2009 by
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics 

I have known Peter Mandelson for fifteen years. In the early years, before the 1997 election, I worked for him directly as part of the Labour campaign team. Generally, he tolerated me, presumably judging my willingness to work hard and do what I was told unquestioningly almost made up for my inexperience and naivety.

When Peter was in Government and me left working for the Party (I wasn’t one of the chosen few invited into the corridors of power) our relationship became more attenuated. I would occasionally get a call demanding I think up some amusing one liners for this speech or that. Sadly, few of my ideas were repeatable let alone appropriate for a speech by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry; the calls finally dried up when I suggested an opening line for a speech to Westland Helicopters which included reference to ‘riding on a big chopper’!

There was also a brief and unhappy time in Number Ten after Peter’s second resignation but before he went to Europe when he would be virtually smuggled into Number Ten. He was supposed to be overseeing strategy, but lacking any formal role and still bruised at the manner of his second resignation, he had the power to interfere but not the capacity to lead.

Last week I met up with someone from the current Downing Street set up. He isn’t the kind of person naturally to get on with Peter. Indeed I can recall him in the past suggesting Mandelson represented everything that was wrong with New Labour. But now my friend is effusive; ‘wise’, ‘thoughtful’ and ‘approachable’ were just some of the words in the paean of praise.

I was reminded of this when I read about Lord Mandelson’s speech today in New York. I am relying on press reports but, for once, it feels like a Government minister is getting it right about the politics of the recession.

There are three aspects to what has been briefed that I welcome. First, Mandelson is encouraging minsters to resist the temptation to come up with new ideas every day which they claim are justified by, or will have a major impact upon, the recession. Given the scatter gun nature of much of President Obama’s stimulus package this is good advice on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, Peter is honest about the sheer unknowability of the course of the recession. Labour ministers have veered between empty reassurance and Ed Balls’ ’we’re doomed’ analysis. The reality is that none of us know how bad this will be and there is not much point speculating. Third, most significantly (and in line with an argument I have made in this blog), Peter is philosophical about the political impact of the recession. The message implied is ‘we are bound to be attacked by the media and criticised by the public. There is no point trying to win people over at the moment. Instead we need to be seen to be focussing totally on responding to an ever changing situation’.

This speech won’t change much. It won’t have an effect on the economy and, politically, as I have often said in the past, the key factors all point to a Conservative victory next year. But it was a speech that needed to be made. It is honest and direct; new adjectives to be applied to the man who used to be the Prince of Darkness.

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5 Comments on Mandelson tells it straight

  1. Tom on Tue, 17th Feb 2009 11:40 am

    2. And did your friend say that people in Downing Street consider you “wise, thoughful and approachable”? ;-)

  2. Steve on Wed, 18th Feb 2009 12:01 am

    3. Mandelson’s comments seem to be the only sense that I’ve heard in the past couple of weeks. People are smart enough to know that we’re entering a harsh twelve months, but much Govt action goes unnoticed because it is a whirlygig of initiatives. Seems to me that Labour needs to stand back, explain the situation and parameters of what can be done, the core principles of intervention and then act as necessary.

    There are two fronts to be addressed: the inevitable short-term fire-fighting, such as bailing out the banks; and as with all fire-fighting, we can’t be certain what’s coming next, but we need to be prepared for it.

    That, and putting in place the long term foundations for when things eventually turn around.

    If I’ve understood correctly what Mandelson was saying, it is this: treat people as intelligent human beings; accept that we can’t be certain about what might happen, but explain principles and stick to them. The Labour party will lose fewer people by being open and honest about the current situation than they might otherwise.

  3. Michael in UK on Wed, 18th Feb 2009 12:27 am

    4. “he had the power to interfere but not the capacity to lead”
    that’s what I call a memorable line, and an insightful message and measure for all managers, private and public sector.

  4. Josh W on Wed, 18th Feb 2009 2:12 am

    5. I saw some really strange reactions to this today; the obvious message as I saw it was that a blueprint is not a house, and the danger of people deciding big stuff at summits is that it takes months to get the stuff down to the ground, and people can get disappointed.

    At first I thought it ridiculous that people would take this as an attack, because it is inevitable, but I think I have now realised why:

    The opposition skip the real problem, by blaming the government as people they obscure the problem of implementation time, which I think is what people are really angry about:
    Where we wait for a summit, then we declare that will be done, and then eventually that gets to people.

    Now closing that loop of problem->study->policy->implementation seems to be the trick. Now one way to do this would be to split it into smaller and smaller loops, like your suggestion that ministers send decision making down the line. Of course this would require public feedback getting into all kinds of crannies with some and a map of responsibility, so you can get the message fast to the right desk. But that’s only part of it; is there some way to normalise the vertical relationships, so that finding out what is possible is not ad-hoc but a continuously generated and periodically checked picture. So instead of saying “can we do this?”, “no because of cows” we have a constant record of the constraints cows produce!

    Now in weird situations like this, normalised relations are almost impossible, as I can understand, because you may well start treating banks very differently, so your old relationships with them would not be that helpful.

    So I haven’t got much of a solution to the current stuff, but I suspect this is the place where public outrage actually lies, and understandably when dealing with something as time-based as a recession. I’m not sure that people should give up on engaging people, as like I mentioned before, that kind of thing surely speeds implementation.

  5. Being made a fool of by Peter Mandelson … and other thoughts on the third sector and recession | Matthew Taylor's blog on Wed, 18th Feb 2009 1:55 pm

    6. [...] Mandelson has made a fool of me once again.  There I was in yesterday’s blog, and in a short clip on Newsnight, praising his speech and willingness to address head on the [...]

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