Another Voice

20 June 2009

Believe it or not, Mandelson has grown impatient with spin and presentation

By this weekend most people won’t remember the details of, and some won’t remember at all, the exchange of emails between Lord Mandelson and the former Labour blogger Derek Draper, which took place in 2008 and before Mandelson joined Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, but which was leaked to a Sunday newspaper two weeks ago. What lingers is the vague impression that Mandelson thinks Mr Brown an awkward public performer, and perhaps a conflicted private personality. These impressions will have sunk quietly into that great national collective unconscious where current opinions find their roots without our even knowing it.

One of those opinions, which that exchange was thought (and headlined) to reinforce, is that our Prime Minister may be a powerful thinker and a great policy strategist, but he’s so knotted up inside, and in public comes across so dreadfully, that these strengths are negated.

In fact that is not what Peter Mandelson was saying. It is what Derek Draper was suggesting, and Mandelson was chiding him for it. Mandelson was plainly irritated by talk of how Brown’s ‘public personality’ might be repaired, re-spun, and marketed. He was instead suggesting (I believe, but only by implication) that the real problem lay in Brown’s lack of any coherent policy ideas or direction. As this happens to have been precisely my own analysis for at least the last four years, I seized with interest on the tenor of Mandelson’s argument.

Not that you would have known the tenor from the way the leak was presented. The key phrases emphasised were all about Mr Brown’s failure at ‘masking and managing his insecurities’. He was not (Mandelson was reported as saying) ‘comfortable with his skin’; he was ‘self-conscious’ and ‘angry’. And indeed all these observations can be extracted from the exchange; such that Lord Mandelson (said one report) ‘has been accused of savaging Gordon Brown’s personality after his private emails were exposed by a Sunday newspaper’.

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