Peter Mandelson: ‘my member states’

25 March 2006

The EU trade commissioner tells David Rennie that life in Brussels is more fun than a Cabinet job and broods on his possible fate under Prime Minister Cameron

But Mr Mandelson treats it seriously. ‘He is not going to be able to call on counterparts in Berlin, Paris and Rome and elsewhere and be given an audience. To think that the fortunes of the Conservative party, and our country, are going to be served by linking up with this rag-tag and bobtail collection of individuals on the fringe of European politics is crazy.’

To many, Mr Mandelson’s claims to being a champion of free trade are gravely undermined by last summer’s ‘bra wars’, when he slapped punitive safeguard quotas on surging Chinese textile imports, only to reverse course as docksides filled with tens of millions of impounded Chinese bras, T-shirts and sweaters.

Mr Mandelson’s allies in Brussels know the trade dispute is a blot on his public reputation. They describe, for the first time, how he feels he was trapped into the conflict. As his allies tell it, Mr Mandelson was appalled when he took office to discover he had inherited a plan to slap import restrictions on Chinese textiles that had been nodded through by his predecessor, the French bureaucrat Pascal Lamy. He tried to resist, arguing that European industry had known for ten years that long-standing restrictions on Chinese imports were to be lifted in 2005.

Mr Mandelson fought a pitched battle with protectionist governments, and with his own top Commission official for trade, throughout early 2005. He only lost the fight when Germany’s then chancellor Gerhard Schröder switched sides to the protectionist camp in response to an appeal from President Jacques Chirac.

Mr Mandelson himself says, ‘I would maintain that the Chinese textiles deal, far from being protectionist, was anti-protectionist, given what I was under pressure to do, and given the arrangements I inherited.’ Last month Mr Mandelson came in for fresh withering criticism from British retailers and manufacturers, for slapping ‘anti-dumping’ tariffs on Chinese shoes.