Renaissance of the Prince

Ollie

If "progressive" is the mess that Mandy and his pals have dished up in the past 12 years, then I'd rather have no more of it, thank you.

TrevorsDen

Tories talk sense, claim the progressive agenda and Mandelson screams like a stuck pig. Big surprise.

Mandelson's comments are garbage. I am a Conservative and I know what progressive means - and I do not choose to be told what I ought to think it means by the toad Mandelson.

And may I point out that the quote "But the ideological Tory approach to reducing the size – as opposed to focusing on the effectiveness and efficiency – of the state" - is a big and total lie and a traducing of what Conservative policy is.
The clear tory policy is 'getting more for less, which is exactly the opposite of what Mandelson claims in his lying article.

And the Tory party would not be still here today if it were not progressive.

Mandelson can 'characterise' all he wants. It is HIS words which are lies. Indeed you know he is lying when he opens his mouth.

I fail to see any logic - only hare brained fawning to Mandelson - in your last sentence. The election is time to bring out policies - why give months of time for the opposition to steal or counter them?

Sharon

Does anyone believe Labour has spent a single penny of their taxes wisely?

Mandy, too, still thinks this is 1997.

Rob C

We live in an ever evolving world and as such politics have to evolve also - so the progression argument is a no-brainer for me. What interests me is who's policies offer fairness and a common sense solution to problems we face and that clearly isn't Labour. Having grown up on a council estate in a one-parent family, cared for a crippled mother and never claimed unemployment despite some really difficult times, I'm not a stereotypical Tory. I believe passionately in the NHS, private education and grammar schools, small state and above all value for money. Mrs Thatcher did far more for social mobility than either Blair or Brown. The state's duty is to help provide people with the opportunity to progress, not run their lives for them or tax to the hilt those that 'have'. Despite hard work and toil, our own social mobility has floundered under New Labour and for the first time in my life I've had to claim benefits in the form of tax credits. Labour have achieved NOTHING for the poor and the rubbish spouted by this obnoxious little man really makes me angry! He is a typical Labour 'lie and line your own pocket' politician and nothing else.

BrianSJ

Well, David, his NLP training has certainly worked on you. I am afraid your analysis leaves much to be desired, including contact with reality.
Given the entrenched opposition by Brown to reform, Lord Greenslime is proposing himself as the heir to Blair, and doesn't like Osborne as a candidate. He has now found himself stuck with 'labour investment vs. tory cuts' as a mantra, which he knew was inadequate when Brown proposed it. He has been seriously out-manoeuvred and is not happy.

Perhaps you could remind us of the Government's reform agenda, after 12 years in office? Hattie on equality perhaps?

Chris lancashire

The man is utterly contemptible. Yesterday on radio he defended the Govt's subterfuge on the Rover MG report by claiming that Ken Clarke was protecting the Phoenix Four in demanding immediate release of the report. Breathtaking and, he will get some people believe it. This ugly boil on the public face needs lancing.

Publius

OK. I give up. Clearly all of you at the Speccie have been so indoctrinated by left-wing Newspeak that "progressive" is a politically meaningful term for you. Talk about letting the enemy set the agenda!

Steve.W

I've not only read the Guardian article but the comments from readers, and rare for me I listened to the BBC R4 Today programme. Guardian readers now mock him and the BBC interview was a disaster, Mandy is tending towards lists of tractor production statistics just like his partner (I was going to write boss). He's lost it big time and it shows.

Ray

"Mandy characterises the Tories as a nasty, superficial party, engaging in ‘political cross-dressing’ as an expedient to appeal to disillusioned centre left voters."

So when in 1997 Mandy promised New Labour could deliver all-embracing public services AND low taxes was he too expediently 'cross-dressing' to appeal to centre right voters?

Don Logan

Mandelson is pretty old news now, I really think you should all let go and move on.

Michael

I think rank and file conservatives have seen the 'progressive' charade for what it is too, and it is only the political classes that seem to be obsessed with it - far better the Conservatives ditch it, and stop forcing their thinking to dance to the tune of a left-of-centre think tank.

Percy

When Lord Foy bangs on about anything:

"We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich"

is all you need to know about this man.

Peter Mc

Straight from the recent Brown @PMQs playbook (author, P. Mandelson):
• Define the issue and solution in your own terms
• Say the opposition don't support it
• Therefore the opposition are wrong.

R King

I think that "Cross Dressing" was an unwise choice of phrase coming from Mandy!
Or was it a Freudian slip revealing his affection for George?

oldtimer

This is not so much a "Renaissance of the Prince", to use your headline as a retread of a worn tyre that is running flat. PM is an unreliable witness when it comes to describing Conservative policy (a bit like his past statements on mortgage applications). Clever with words - yes. But reliable and believable? No.

johnny come lately

Well the only thing of note in all this is the revelation that TrevorsDen is a TORY..now who would have guessed?

But when will you, Mr Blackburn, and your Westminster colleagues decide to take this villain Mandleson to task. Why are you all afraid of him?

Just what does he imply when he talks about Osborne and cross dressing? A most odd description, save that Mandleson does indulge in split tongue language at times. Is he implying that Boy George is a cross dresser? If I was the Boy George I would be taking certain action.

mandleson needs to have his trousers taken down, in public, and shown to be nothing like he wishes to be seen!

Sorry, people, that is a ghastly thought!

Mark C

What has Mandelson got on you lot at the Spectator? He gets endless plugs and praise. The rest of us saw through him years ago.

Aladin

I must apologise on behalf of my Mother - she always reverts to type eventually...

Aladin

I must apologise on behalf of my Mother - she always reverts to type eventually...

Chuck Unsworth

So, Mandelson continues to address the man rather than the ball. Vilification is no substitute for discourse. Mandelson seems not to have grasped that.

But his real problem is that the oppostion have successfully and repeatedly demonstrated that Labour's standard response to all criticism is solely to attack the individuals making the comments. This is yet another instance of that technique - and it will be recognised as such.

Gary Williams

"Progressive" - another word, like "liberal", that the Left have usurped and perverted. What is it with these people and their fundamental intellectual dishonesty? Oh, I forgot: the end justifies the means.

JONNY

Is there anyone out there, apart from the credulous Westminster Village, who will listen to this serpentine Machiavelli? This purveyor of stale and perfumed political commodities?
Is there in the whole UK one single voter who might be swayed by such camp sophistry?
Or is the dear Prince a busted flush?

Victor Southern

A scarecrow in the field but a straw man at heart.

Who actually gives Mandelson any credence at all except the Press?

Scary Biscuits

To Mandy: 'progressive' means what the dictionary says it means. What I think you are talking about is 'Progressive' (with a capital P). This can mean whatever you want it to 'this month' and it sure as hell isn't what you thought it meant when you were a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and yet still called yourself a progressive.

Socialists like to position themselves as forward thinking and the Tories as backward. The truth, however, is that both the Tories and Labour are forward thinking; they just differ on their visions for the future. Socialists want everything run by the state and regard that as self-evidently good whereas Conservatives believe in a small state as a more effective means of achieving exactly the same ends. Conservatives would agree with Ronald Reagan, that if there is a problem in your country it is more likely that the government is part of the problem than part of the solution.

Progress for places like Hull and Hartlepool, for example, doesn't mean yet more money thrown at them by well-meaning people unconcerned with results. It means getting the state out of these people's lives, intervening only where you can prove an improvement that outweighs the cost, and freeing their own creativity. Reducing the passivity of Labour's client state is going to be very painful and no sensible Conservative is approaching this 'gleefully'. The next decade may well make the strife of the 80s look like a walk in the park.

Barman at The Red Lion, Whitehall

@ Don Logan

Mandy, is that you?...

Bert

Mandelson is loathed on all sides. I'm sure he is aware of this.
Could his recent extensive high profile be supposed to make us grateful for Browns eventual return?

Dan

I'm with Don: Mandelson is old hat and, in reality, a disaster for the Labour Party. Indeed, he is the Conservative Party's best friend.

Let's imagine a scenario where Mandelson hadn't returned to the fold. Brown would be out on his ear by now and the prospects for Labour much enhanced. Bt propping up Brown, Mandelson is leading Labour to electoral annihilation.

It's not as if Mandelson is in some way popular with the public either: I suspect he is electoral poison - a shady, sinister, unpleasant individual who was brought back by Brown to save his own skin. This is a man who effectively committed mortgage fraud - anybody else would have been in the dock. Instead, he is now the the most powerful man is Britain, and wholly unelected to boot. It's a national scandal.

I'm still waiitng for Mandelson to debate with Ken Clark on TV -why hasn't it happened yet? There's good reason for Labour's reluctance here - Mandelson would be slaughtered. The waffling idiot would be eaten alive by Clark - and everbody knows it.

Having said this, it sems plausible that Mandelson must have a plan up his sleeve. He's not completely stupid and must know that Gordon Brown cannot win the next election. I would guess he'll be one the break the bad news the PM in the next couple of months, i.e., that he has to go - no doubt after the Irish have been coerced into voting 'yes' to the Lisbon Treaty.

Frank P

I suppose some of you must have heard Mandy and Evangelina having their pmt spat this morning over the Radio 4 today clothesline. Spitting out their clever cliches as they tried to outdo each other in esoteric LSE babble, constantly interrupting each other. What's the betting that it all ended in a mutual hand-shandy when the Mics were switched off. I'll bet the producer had to separate them with a bucket of scented cold water (laced with Eau de Cologne). Of course in the ensuing news bulletin the leftie editor made sure that the sound bite featured one of Mandy's more plausible sentences, taken out of context to ensure that Mandy appeared to know what he was talking about. The Beeb is completely sewn up by this malign Marxist mob. Does anyone listen to this crap except to gather material to take the piss.

Hawkeye

This is not about being "progressive" whatever the heck that means. This is a denigration and smear job intended to rubbish the opposition and secure power for another 5 years.

This is about being in control and staying in control. It is about frightening the sheep to make sure they stay in the sheep pen.

Whatever you think of Osborne and Cameron, they have two huge selling points - Osbourne is not Mandy and Cameron is not Brown. That alone should be enough.

Brazen

Frank
Evan did a good job of stopping PM getting on his soap box to evade the questions put to him. The fact he is proud of the fact labour has paid trillions of pounds to secure 500k jobs that would have been lost if they had not intervened? I would suggest tripling the unemployment benifit during this period would have been cheaper.
Looking forward PM has no idea what to do and hate the tories for even having the guts to look reality in the face.

Katie

Would these be this be a jibe against the *political* crossdressers who claim to be as egalitarian/gender progressive/LGBT-friendly as NuLab or merely further exploitation of the *actual* crossdressers (and other non-state certificated transgendered people) whom self-proclaimed 'egalitarian/gender progressive/LGBT-friendly' NuLab deliberately omitted from their new 'Equality' Bill after dismissing us as a mere 'lifestyle choice'?

Prodicus

The Official Labour Party Dictionary of Marxoid Political Language defines 'progressive' as 'Socialist; integral to progress towards the achievement of a Socialist state; definitive of the philosophy of the Labour Movement'.

Osborne's using it? How very dare he. No wonder Mandy choked. Ahahahaha.

Keep going, George.

EC

Sharon: "Mandy, too, still thinks this is 1997."

Good point. Despite all the grisly attrocities committed by New Labour in the last 12 years the Tories are still not looking good.

Without the orchestrated support of the MSM the Tories are going to find life difficult. Dave and George do not have the Obama, or even the Blair, factor so at present the chances of a media frenzy seem remote. If it was going to happen it would have started by now.

By the end of October or mid November Tony Blair will know if he is going to be the next EU President.

If he's thwarted in his Euro ambition then expect him back. Then it really will be 1997 all over again!

As Nick Ross on the BBC's Crimewatch program was wont to say, "Goodnight and don't have nightmares ....."

HedgePig

Easy tiger. Cameron as heir apparent, seems the Hamlet of this polity. As the pressure mounts in recent days, the measure of the Tories character is lacking.

paulgilboy

There is only one sense that labours stewardship is progressive and, that is the state is a train wreck going over a cliff and picking up speed.

If people are looking around at the wild eyed cries of the passengers on board and think this down ward trajectory is a good idea then hang onto your hats and enjoy it.

Derek

I don't think it is time to "move on" from Mandelson, because, wherever his personal career may be headed, he is trying to control “the narrative" for the next election. What he says is therefore the concern of everyone. Although there are important questions of foreign policy and the quality of our civil society which should be aired, my guess is that the economy and the state sector's role in it will be the focus of the election campaign.

Ideology and practice in politics are usually dislocated. Practice tends to alienate; ideology tends to reconcile. The Labour party has bought the loyalty of a substantial percentage of the electorate which votes for it by providing and promising more state employment, indirectly generating employment in the private sector as a spin-off from the employment provided or promised directly by the state, and by providing benefits subsidized by the state, all of which is funded or to be funded out of the public purse, or by the creation of vast ghostly funds which anticipate future taxation or a currency vastly to be devalued by inflation.

This expansion of the state’s clientele is mainly what Mandelson means by "progressive".

The ideological spin is that this expansion equals "a better society".

How big is the sector of Labour's vote which has been bought in this way? Do they understand that the game is up, that the funds are no longer available to maintain their client base?

The Conservative party has of course followed similar policies in the past where the ideological justification has also been to create "a better society" but one which can be achieved if the role of the state is reduced, a "withering away", in which the Conservative governments have proved in practice to have had little luck, whether intentionally or otherwise. The only government to have been 100% successful in withering away in recent years was of course that of the Soviet Union, which withered away somewhat reluctantly.

What is to be done? In the hope that life will be better under the Tories, the Labour party should be forced to debate its CV - "What are your qualifications for the job?" The Labour party should not be permitted to construct a Mandelsonian cloud-cuckoo land to be constructed, again, following a Labour election victory. By the same token, Labour should not be allowed to force the Tories on to the defensive by accusations that they intend to dismantle the present cloud-cuckoo land.

The Conservative party must be courageous enough to show that it itself is not offering utopia as a bribe to the electorate. The party must calculate where good house-keeping is vital in the state sector and those sectors indirectly dependent on state funding and see to it that as far as possible the cuts proposed alienate as few of its own supporters as possible. But it must come out and say what cuts it proposes, even as it attacks the government on its record.

Battle must be joined on the question of how and where to minimize the state sector's role and how best to maximize responsible productive forces in the country's economy. The Tories need to persuade the electorate that they mean to restore honour and a positive bank balance to our government, and must tell us what they think we will have to suffer to achieve that

Archie

And despite Mandelson's bluster and spin - evidently seen through by everyone here - where, exactly, does this leave the Tories and specifically one D. Cameron?

logdon

Frank P
August 13th, 2009 1:00am

From the Evangelina, through the mutual hand shandy to the scented bucket of cold water was brilliant.

Much as my thirst for news compells me, I just cannot listen anymore to the masturbatory crap that poses as Today.

It's not just the simpering Davis, but the whole effing lot.

Faux lefty patrician, Stourton. Wannabe Pulitzer, Mair. Man of truth (in his own head), John Humphreys.

All sold out hacks in the pay of the socialist masters.

And the spin off benefit is that I now don't get that radio left on, follow up orgy of whining self congratultory bitches which now passes for Womans Hour.