Top 50 Political Scandals: Part Two

18 July 2009

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Part Two of The Spectator’s Guide to the Top 50 Political Scandals — counting down from No. 25 to No. 1

There is one word that frightens politicians more than any other: scandal.

They know that scandal can bring about personal ruin, cut short a promising career and even bring down a government.

The power of scandal is that it imprints itself on the public mind. Some are about sex, others about money, drugs or espionage. But they are all about power: the corrupter, the ultimate aphrodisiac.

This is your guide to the scandalous world of Westminster. Read on.

And if you missed the first part, you can catch up on the countdown from 50 to 26.

Mandelson: the one-man scandal machine

It is the greatest paradox of contemporary politics: the master of spin, the lord of the dark arts, the king of the fixers — who even managed to save the flatlining premiership of Gordon Brown last month — has also been the most scandal-prone minister of the New Labour era, a man who scarcely seems able to pop out to the shops without generating a flurry of innuendo-packed headlines. Few doubt his political genius. Peter Mandelson can spin anything, with one notable exception: himself.

So it is only proper that His Lordship gets a section all to himself in our guide to political scandals. Before Labour swept to office in 1997, Mandelson and his friends fretted that his sexuality would be an issue: in the event he was outed in October 1998 by our own Matthew Parris on Newsnight after the resignation of Ron Davies — and the nation responded with a collective shrug.

Not so two months later when it emerged that the then secretary of state for Trade and Industry had borrowed £373,000 from Brownite Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in west London. Mandelson had failed to declare the loan, even though Robinson was under investigation by his own department. Both ministers were forced to resign in this tit-for-tat street battle between the Blairite and Brownite gangs. Not for the last time, Mandelson’s political career was pronounced dead.

But those who wrote him out of the script forgot both his resilience and the extent to which Tony Blair depended upon him. When Mandelson resigned, the two exchanged pious letters about the need for New Labour to be ‘whiter than white’ and free of the sleaze that had helped destroy the Tories. But Blair always said that if world war three ever broke out, the first person he would phone would be his old friend Peter. So, only ten months after his first departure from Cabinet, he was back — this time, as secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

And this time, his fall was more complex, more dramatic and probably unnecessary. It centred on the Hinduja brothers, the money they had given to help fund the Millennium Dome (a Mandelson project) and whether or not he had lobbied Mike O’Brien, a Home Office minister, on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, who was seeking British citizenship. Had it been any other Cabinet minister, Blair might have waited for the Hammond inquiry into the whole messy affair. But it wasn’t, and he didn’t. Mandelson, devastated that he had been so quickly ditched by his Blairite comrades, resigned in January 2001.

And that, it was assumed, was that. In November 2004, having resigned as MP for Hartlepool, he became Britain’s European Commissioner for Trade, and headed off to join the Brussels elite. From time to time, the word ‘Mandy’ and ‘investigation’ would appear in a headline, for old times’ sake. In April 2005, it emerged that Mandelson had spent the previous New Year’s Eve on the yacht of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, which was the subject of a major EU investigation. But there was no allegation of impropriety in the story: Mandy, a yacht, a tycoon. Such stories had become almost traditional.

So it was business as usual when, in October 2008, a furore broke out over his presence in Corfu on a yacht belonging to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Of course Mandelson had been there. It was a yacht, after all. Much more attention was paid to what had been said and asked for by Mandelson’s fellow guest, shadow chancellor George Osborne. For once, ‘Mandy’ was not the first word in the headlines.

Now restored to the Cabinet — in one of the greatest twists in modern politics — by his former deadly foe Gordon Brown, Lord Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the County of Durham is the second most powerful man in the government. He hovers between national treasure and public enemy number one. You never know what’s coming next. Which is why, in our Scandals Special, it would be rude not to award him this special commendation for all the joy he has brought us over the past 12 years.

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EyeSee

July 16th, 2009 7:28pm Report this comment

Of course, if Dr David Kelly didn't commit suicide as the medical profession (and the facts) keep reminding us, then maybe, following the principle of 'who stood to benefit' we might have a new (and very deserved) No1. And some justice.

Kevin

July 18th, 2009 8:10pm Report this comment

If by "loss of public deference" after Profumo you mean that the man on the Clapham omnibus no longer doffs his cap when he sees one of the political in-crowd passing by in a chauffeur-driven limousine, then fair enough.

Otherwise, I do not think we could be more deferential when we put up with the government filming us, eavesdropping on us, recording every possible fact that could trace our present whereabouts, ordering us to separate our rubbish into multiple different bins based on false science and even more false economies, impeding our ability to defend ourselves from violent attack, taking our money through PAYE before we even have a chance to question it, forcing us to pay for a state television channel, failing to punish violent crime, penalising people for having "incorrect" political opinions, forcing spouses to part with half of their earnings and lose custody of their children even in the face of a separation caused by the other spouse's infidelity, funding the killing of children in the womb, teaching sexual incontinence to schoolchildren - to name a few things.

This deference is all the more remarkable given what we know about politicians since Profumo and "The Telegraph" expenses scandal.

MarkyMark

July 19th, 2009 1:47am Report this comment

I think that Kevin has really summed it all up perfectly.
Lets also never forget that having been caught Profumo acted with a display of decency that will probably never be seen by any politician again.

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