Peter Mandelson

The Right Honourable The Lord Mandelson PC
File:374705841 a279f8aabf o.jpg
Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and President of the Board of Trade
Incumbent
Assumed office 3 October 2008
Prime Minister	Gordon Brown
Preceded by	John Hutton
European Commissioner for Trade
In office 22 November 2004 – 3 October 2008
President	José Manuel Barroso
Preceded by	Pascal Lamy
Succeeded by	The Baroness Ashton of Upholland
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
In office 11 October 1999 – 24 January 2001
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Mo Mowlam
Succeeded by	John Reid
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry
In office 27 July 1998 – 23 December 1998
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	Margaret Beckett
Succeeded by	Stephen Byers
Member of Parliament for Hartlepool
In office 9 April 1992 – 23 July 2004
Preceded by	Edward Leadbitter
Succeeded by	Iain Wright
Majority	22,506 (59.1%)
Personal details
Born	Peter Benjamin Mandelson (1953-10-21) 21 October 1953 South London, England
Political party	Labour
Alma mater	St Catherine's College, Oxford

Peter Benjamin Mandelson, Baron Mandelson, PC (born 21 October 1953) is a British Labour politician who is the current, unelected, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, appointed on 3 October 2008, and one of the most widely unpopular and despised figures in UK politics. Mandelson is regarded as one of the main players, along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, of the modern Labour Party and its rebranding as "New Labour". He is often referred to by the nickname "Mandy" by much of the British news media. He was inducted into the House of Lords on 13 October 2008, thus finally completing the total discrediting of the notion of 'nobility' in that House in any sense whatsoever.

Having helped Labour come to power in 1997, he was then forced twice to resign from Tony Blair's government while holding Cabinet positions. After his second resignation he served as the European Commissioner for Trade for almost four years, embracing the total lack of democracy and corruption of EU procedures with characteristic enthusiasm and pocketing huge amounts in earnings, pensions and departing pay-off in the process, before being brought back into mainstream British politics by Gordon Brown.

Before Labour came to power, he was author (with Roger Liddle) of The Blair Revolution (1996). More recently, he contributed to the book The City in Europe and the World (2005). Mandelson served as Member of Parliament for Hartlepool for twelve years, a seat he vacated in order to become a European Commissioner. When he returned to the Cabinet in 2008, he was created a life peer so that he would have speaking and voting rights in the House of Lords.

Early life

Mandelson was born in London in 1953, where his father was the advertising manager at The Jewish Chronicle. On his mother's side, he is the grandson of Herbert Morrison, the London County Council leader and Labour cabinet minister.

He was educated at Hendon County Grammar School. In his youth, he briefly rebelled against his family's Labour tradition due to Labour's support of the USA in the Vietnam War and in 1971 left the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) to join the Young Communist League, then the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This move was partly a result of disagreements with the Trotskyist Militant tendency that had just won a majority in the LPYS nationally.

He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine's College, Oxford University (1973-1976) and, after returning to the Labour party, became director of the British Youth Council in the late 1970s. As BYC director, he was a delegate in 1978 to the Soviet-organised World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana, Cuba, with Arthur Scargill and several future Labour cabinet colleagues. He was elected to Lambeth Borough Council in September 1979, but retired in 1982, disillusioned with the state of Labour politics.

Spin doctor

He worked as a television producer with London Weekend Television on Weekend World, where he formed a durable friendship with John Birt, then LWT's Director of Programmes, before his appointment as the Labour Party's Director of Communications in 1985. Mandelson was able to secure close friendships within the labour party due to uncle Alexander Butler who had worked alongside many important labour politicians during the 1960s. In this role he was one of the first people in Britain to whom the term "spin doctor" was applied; during this period he acquired the nickname "The Prince of Darkness" (originally coined in the satirical magazine Private Eye). In 1986 he ran the campaign at the Fulham by-election that saw Labour defeat the Conservative Party.

He managed Labour's widely admired but electorally unsuccessful 1987 general election campaign. During this campaign, the News of the World published a story about his private life based on the revelations of a former lover.

An apocryphal urban legend in the Labour Party says that Mandelson, visiting a fish and chip shop in his new constituency, saw the mushy peas and asked the proprietor about the "guacamole dip". However, the story has been traced to a question asked by an American trainee at the Knowsley North by-election of 1986, and Neil Kinnock has admitted to being one of the people who applied it to Mandelson as a joke. A related story, reflecting claims that he was unpopular in the party, is that he once asked Gordon Brown for 10p to phone a friend. Brown told him: "Have 20p, then you can phone them both." (The same story has been told about Herbert Hoover asking Andrew Mellon for a nickel and David Lloyd George asking Winston Churchill for sixpence.)

Member of Parliament

He left the job in 1990, when he was selected as Labour candidate for the safe seat of Hartlepool. He was elected to the House of Commons at the 1992 general election. Although many commentators regarded the industrial northern town of Hartlepool as an unlikely place for the metropolitan and urbane Mandelson to represent, he came to enjoy his time there and built up a rapport with the town.

He is sometimes nicknamed "Lord Voldemort".

Shadow Cabinet

He made several notable speeches in which his strong support for the European Union was outlined. He was close to two Shadow Cabinet members, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, both of whom were regarded as potential leaders. After John Smith's sudden death in 1994, Mandelson decided to back Blair for the leadership—believing him to be a superior communicator to Brown—and played a leading but initially secret role in the leadership campaign. This created long-lasting antagonism between Mandelson and Brown, who felt he had been betrayed.

Mandelson became a close ally and trusted adviser to Blair. He was a natural choice to be Labour's election campaign director for the 1997 general election, which Labour won by a landslide.

Government minister

After the election, Blair appointed him as a Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet Office, where his job was to co-ordinate within government. A few months later, he also acquired responsibility for the Millennium Dome, after Blair decided to go ahead with the project despite the opposition of most of the Cabinet (including the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport who had been running it). Jennie Page, the Dome Chief Executive was abruptly sacked after a farcical opening night. She gave evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee for Culture and Heritage in June 2000. In what was seen as a reference to the close interest in the Dome from Mandelson, known at the time as so-called "Minister for the Dome", and his successor Lord Falconer of Thoroton, Ms Page told the committee: "I made several attempts to persuade ministers that standing back from the Dome would be good for them as well as good for the Dome".

In July 1998, Mandelson joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. He launched the Millennium Bug And Electronic Commerce Bill and a Competitiveness White Paper, which he described, as 'bold, far reaching and absolutely necessary'. He also appointed a Net czar to lead the UK in what he termed the "new industrial revolution". In 1998 he was appointed a Privy Councillor.

First resignation

In December 1998 it was revealed that Mandelson had bought a home in Notting Hill in 1996 with the assistance of an interest-free loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire Labour MP who was also in the Government but was subject to an inquiry into his business dealings by Mandelson's department. Although Mandelson alleged he had deliberately not taken part in any decisions relating to Robinson, he knew he should have declared the loan as an interest, and he resigned on 23 December 1998. Mandelson had also not declared the loan to his building society (the Britannia) although they decided not to take any action, with the CEO stating "I am satisfied that the information given to us at the time of the mortgage application was accurate."

Mandelson was out of the Cabinet for ten months. In October 1999 he was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, replacing Mo Mowlam. In his very first speech in the post he made a gaffe by referring to himself as the "Secretary of State for Ireland." During his tenure he oversaw the creation of the devolved legislative assembly and power-sharing executive, and reform of the police service.

Second resignation

In January 2001, it was revealed that Mandelson had phoned Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the "Faith Zone" in the Millennium Dome. At the time, Hinduja and his brothers were under investigation by the Indian government for alleged involvement in the Bofors scandal. On 24 January 2001, Mandelson resigned from the Government for a second time, insisting he had done nothing wrong. An independent enquiry by Sir Anthony Hammond came to the conclusion that neither Mandelson nor anyone else had acted improperly. The front page headline in one of the newspapers at the time read 'Passport to Oblivion'.

But the headline writers were somewhat premature. Mandelson was challenged by Arthur Scargill of the Socialist Labour Party and by another Left-winger at the 2001 general election, but was re-elected with a large majority. This prompted him to make an exuberant acceptance speech, which was televised live, in which he declared that "I'm a fighter, not a quitter" and referred to his "inner steel".

After the general election, Mandelson was chair of the Policy Network and the UK-Japan 21st century Group, a columnist for GQ and president of Hartlepool United FC.

European Commission

Despite his exoneration by the Hammond Inquiry, Mandelson's reappointment to the Cabinet seemed politically difficult. He indicated his interest in becoming the United Kingdom's European Commissioner when the new Commission was established in 2004 (both of Britain's incumbents, Neil Kinnock and Chris Patten, were standing down). Appointment as a Commissioner would require his resignation from Parliament and therefore a by-election in his constituency. While some were concerned that the seat would be difficult for the government to retain, Mandelson convinced his colleagues that Labour would perform well.

His appointment was announced in the summer and Mandelson resigned his seat through appointment as Steward of the Manor of Northstead on 8 September 2004. His predictions about the state of play in the Hartlepool by-election proved accurate as Labour kept the seat with a majority of more than 2,000.

On 22 November 2004, Mandelson became Britain's European Commissioner for Trade. In April 2005, The Times revealed that Mandelson had spent New Year's Eve 2004 on the yacht of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, which is at the centre of a major EU investigation, although it did not allege impropriety.

During the summer of 2008, Mandelson had a widely publicised argument with Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France. Sarkozy criticised Mandelson's support for free trade and accused him of being responsible for the no vote in the Irish referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon. Mandelson protested that his negotiating position in world trade talks had been weakened by Sarkozy's comments and that he would stand up for himself.

In 2008, melamine added to Chinese milk caused kidney stones and other ailments in tens of thousands of Chinese children, and killed at least six. To show his confidence in Chinese dairy products, Mandelson drank a glass of Chinese milk in front of reporters. Nine days later, he was hospitalized for a kidney stone.

Return to UK government

On 3 October 2008, as part of Gordon Brown's cabinet reshuffle, it was announced that Mandelson would return to government in the re-drawn post of Business Secretary, and would be made a life peer, entitling him to a seat in the House of Lords. On 13 October 2008 he was created Baron Mandelson, of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, and took his seat in the House of Lords the same day.

Personal life

In October 1998, during his first period in the Cabinet, Mandelson was the centre of a great deal of media attention when Matthew Parris (openly gay former MP and then Parliamentary sketch writer of The Times) mentioned during a live interview on Newsnight, in the wake of the resignation of Ron Davies, that "Peter Mandelson is certainly gay". Mandelson's homosexuality had been well-known but not widely publicised except on the front pages of The People newspaper, and Mandelson had not wanted it discussed. After Parris's remarks, the press felt free to discuss his personal life (in particular his relationship with the Brazilian Reinaldo Avila da Silva) to a much greater extent.

Mandelson's reputation may have been harmed rather than helped by the initial decision by Anne Sloman, the BBC's chief political adviser on editorial policy to block any mention of his private life on the BBC. It was suggested that the Director General of the BBC at the time, John Birt, had had a direct hand in the ban. The popular BBC TV show Have I Got News For You refused to comply and discussed this matter almost openly - Ian Hislop said, "We're not allowed to say that Peter Mandelson is a hom...eowner," to which Paul Merton replied, "What's wrong with gay people owning homes?"

In November 1998, William Hague, then Leader of the Opposition, caused a political uproar during a speech in the House of Commons in which he said that any appointed House of Lords would be packed with New Labour cronies. He suggested that Peter Mandelson would become "Lord Mandelson of Rio". This was taken to be a reference to unsubstantiated gossip about Mandelson's behaviour while on a visit to Brazil. Mandelson also acquired the nickname "Mandy" by reference to his surname.

In April 1999, Peter Mandelson supported his biography in The Independent by Donald Macintyre to discuss his homosexuality and being outed. In 2000, Peter Mandelson publicly recognized his long term relationship with da Silva by allowing photographs of them together.

Mandelson was famously named one of Blair's 'Jewish cabal' by Tam Dalyell, the Father of the House, in May 2003. In reply Mandelson said: "Apart from the fact that I am not actually Jewish, I wear my father's parentage with pride."

Mandelson was, until 8 October 2008, the president of Central School of Speech and Drama. He was replaced in this unremunerated post by playwright Harold Pinter, who died some weeks later.

Recent controversies

In October 2006, Mandelson generated more controversy when asked what he thought of Jack Straw's remarks about Muslim women and the veil. Mandelson was overheard by a journalist to remark: "I have no doubt that Gordon Brown would agree with me that, for all his remarkable qualities, he would come over much better were he to agree to wear a veil. Gordon looks pretty dreadful without his face covered up".

In February 2007, the Daily Express reported that as EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson “requested a luxury £80,000 Maserati as his official EU car”. The Express claims Louis Michel, the Belgian EU Commissioner, was the source of the story and that Jose Barroso, the President of the Commission, rejected the request saying EU taxpayers "would not understand" the justification behind an £80,000 car.

In March 2007 an interview made public by The Guardian revealed Mandelson to be critical of concessions Tony Blair made to Sinn Féin.

On 6 March 2009 environmental protestor Leila Deen approached him outside a summit on the government's carbon strategy and threw a cup of green liquid in his face, apparently in protest over Lord Mandelson's support for a third runway at Heathrow airport. Ms Deen was quoted as saying “the only thing green about Peter Mandelson is the slime coursing through his veins.”[2]This action was greeted with great anthusiasm by the majority of British people who deeply resent the unelected 'Lord' Mandelson being involved in decisions which profoundly affect their lives.

Deripaska affair

In October 2008 Mandelson was reported by the press to have maintained private contacts over several years with Russia oligarch Oleg Deripaska, most recently vacationing in August 2008 on Deripaska's yacht at Taverna Agni on the Greek island of Corfu. News of the contacts sparked criticism because, as European Union trade commissioner, Mandelson had been responsible for two decisions to cut aluminium tariffs that had benefited Deripaska's United Company RusAl. Mandelson denied that there had been a conflict of interest and insisted that he had never discussed aluminium tariffs with Deripaska.

On 26 October 2008, Tory shadow foreign secretary William Hague said the "whole country" wanted "transparency" about Mandelson's previous meetings with Deripaska. In response, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Mandelson's dealings with Deripaska had been "found to be above board". The following day, in a newspaper interview Mandelson declined to say how many times he had met Deripaska or what they discussed."

On 29 October 2008, while Mandelson was on a ministerial visit to Moscow, he was reported in the British press to have availed himself of the services of the KGB Colonel-General Valery Pechenkin, head of security at Deripaska's company Basic Element. It was alleged that Pechenkin had organised a swift entry visa for Mandelson when he turned up in Moscow to visit Deripaska in 2005.

On 14 January 2009 the Mail on Sunday asked how he had financed the purchase of a villa in London. Public records showed that he had paid £2.5 million for the property in 2006: almost 16 times his then salary as an EU commissioner. Reports at the time said that he had sold his shares in an advertising agency and received a large legacy from his mother, but Companies House records showed that the shares were not sold until 2007, while a copy of his mother's will revealed that he had been left only £452,000.

Further reading

• Jones, Nicholas (2000). Sultans of Spin: The Media and the New Labour Government. Orion Books. ISBN 0-75282-769-3.
• Macintyre, Donald (1999). Mandelson: The Biography. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-00-255943-9.
• Mandelson, Peter (2002). The Blair Revolution Revisited. Politico's. ISBN 1-84275-039-9.
• Rawnsley, Andrew (2001). Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-140-27850-8.
• Routledge, Paul (1999). Mandy: The Unauthorised Biography of Peter Mandelson. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-85175-X.
• Seldon, Anthony (2005). Blair. The Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-3212-7.

External links

• BBC profile of Peter Mandelson
• Peter Mandelson named "protectionist of the month"
• Peter Mandelson interview on sovereign wealth funds with PublicAffairsAsia
• Annual Dinner of the British / Israel Chamber of Commerce

Offices held

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