The Real Power Behind the Labour Throne

It may be that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer survives the week, protected by threats of another bond market crisis – no doubt briefed to obedient media by the financial inchoates with which he has packed his Treasury.

A war footing has said to have gripped his loyalists but the scandal exposing his former ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, as much closer to the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein than he initially claimed, and the crisis sparked by the subsequent departure of his once-indispensable chief of staff Morgan McSweeney presents the country an opportunity to eradicate a pernicious, enduring consensus from its body politic.

The Starmer project is actually the Mandelson project, as were the Blair and Brown projects. Since 1997, the British Labour Party and, for that, much of the country has existed under one of the most ambitious and vengeful political theories ever conceived in the history of the English-speaking world.

Nobody in politics in the United Kingdom (UK) had ever witnessed anything like it. At appearance it was edgy, fast, young – it ridiculed the stodgy chumminess of conservative tradition at the same time embraced the boomer pacifist left, convincing the latter that a strong economy and real progress were not mutually exclusive. With a once-curious media kettled, or bullied, into submission, New Labour was projected as hip, right on, and filled with promise, but stripped away, it was merciless, featuring schemers and thugs eager to avenge their great enemy.

The country itself.

Success?

How successful was it? Not even an illegal war could stop it. Not even the spectacle of a Labour prime minister – Labour – cosying up to a Texan, trigger-happy Republican in an arrangement based on false information was enough to dissuade voters; in 2005, three years after the Iraq catastrophe, Tony Blair’s Labour triumphed in the general elections, a mere eight points off 1997’s landslide. New Labour was so successful that when power was eventually handed to opposition for the first time in 13 years in 2010, it was done so on the proviso that David Cameron’s governance accorded Blair's (Cameron was happy to oblige).

This condition enabled a generation of conservative careerists reminiscent of the West of the 1980s – officials too scared of Margaret Thatcher’s (at times radical) agenda whose loyalty to the Blairite consensus would see them squander 14 years.

But those who wanted more from what appeared as a left-wing government did not realise it was anything but. In addition to war, the UK became awfully lawyer-y, with the number of people employed by the state rising dramatically, along with government bodies tasked with monitoring everything. Blair has claimed throughout his life that elections are won at the centre, but by the late 2000s his government seemed just an exercise in poaching bad social ideas from the left and bad economic ones from the right.

Architect

The architect of this political imposter was Peter Mandelson, and the skills he possessed left people disgusted, enraged, terrified, and confused: was he designed in a laboratory, or just the recipient of exceptional fortunes? While personal scandals consumed him – even as a young gay MP he couldn’t resist men with money – his epic comebacks point to somewhere in the middle.

But what New Labour actually was, and what it had done, would only be revealed in 2009 with a simple admission from one of Tony Blair’s former speechwriters, Andrew Neather. Writing in the London Evening Standard, Neather confessed that, behind closed doors in the early 2000s, New Labour enacted the first stages of its revenge by committing to mass immigration for no other reason than to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”.

These were not people cursed with a memory of Empire or possessed with divine social justice. This – swamping the UK with people of antithetical views and culture – was no great act of charity, but a tactic designed to incapacitate the opposition via humiliation and scorn, with the act of objection being seized as racist and the objectors subsequently unelectable.

Seen through only the most narrow, brutal measurement of effective political science, it was brilliant. Mandelson’s fingerprints were all over it.

Amusement

The most amusing event from this era involves the relationship between New Labour’s heavies – Mandelson, Blair, and Downing Street’s communication chief, Alistair Campbell. Of the three, Campbell, a recovering alcoholic, was the maddest.

He was jealous of Blair’s relationship with Mandelson, with the pair said to gossip outside the guardrails he imposed. When Blair was around Mandelson, Campbell hated Blair, and he hated Mandelson all the time everywhere. Last week Rod Liddle, writing in The Spectator, revisited, once again, the moment where it became clear to the country that it was being governed by unwell people.

The story involved a fight between the three men. Lapels on jackets were grabbed, there was panicked screaming, Campbell is said to have run to the bathroom and thrown up before heading back for more swearing and fingers in faces. The argument? It was about which pair of trousers Blair should wear that day.

In 2017, the country came within a hair’s breadth of a real left-wing government, headed by Jeremy Corbyn. This jolted Mandelson. Within the party’s mechanics, a young strategist called Morgan McSweeney had caught his eye. Mandelson groomed McSweeney into his dark arts, and soon the young Irishman was doing Mandelson’s work for the least inspiring and indecisive leadership candidate the party ever fielded: Keir Starmer.

McSweeney added his own darkness to Mandelson’s operating instructions. He and his associates were instrumental in the construction of today’s censorship complex, a repulsive device of social engineering conceived in London, exported to the world. Indeed, it is impossible to measure how the thinking of New Labour has influenced the world – from Canberra to Ottawa to Washington. Even countries like France, Germany, and now Spain.

Starmer cannot exist without the McSweeney / Mandelson supremacy. He doesn’t read or dream. He doesn’t possess even the faintest political instinct or a faculty for discretionary judgement. His fate is now in the hands of people considerably less politically effective than his former chief of staff. They want their own things – prestige, prominence, and probably power too. What happens next is the logical – deserved – fate for the most destructive political pathogen most of us have known in our lives.