As coats go, it was very nice. A dark blue cashmere Loro Piana number that reeked of quiet luxury. But for a man who once identified as a communist, it was laughable. It was 2016 and I was standing in the atrium of the newly remodelled Design Museum on Kensington High Street. As assistant to the museum’s director, I was engaged in a normal day on the job: as Peter Mandelson’s coat bearer. Other humdrum days at the coalface involved talking to Terence Conran about his dogs, making sure Alexandra Shulman had a hard hat on and holding then culture secretary Matt Hancock’s champagne glass while he posed for pictures.
Mandelson, soon to be announced as the chairman of the museum’s trustees, was in the museum for a state visit. Great preparations had been undertaken ahead of his arrival even though some members of the museum’s staff were lukewarm on his appointment. ‘Dome me up, Scottie,’ one chortled at the photocopier. When the titan of spin arrived, he was smaller than I expected and had a feline air. Although I was often ignored, he made a point of greeting me by my name with a firm handshake; the infamous charm was alive and well. He also wasted no time in handing me his coat. Soon, he toured the museum’s galleries of the functional avant garde and said important things about connectivity, AI and 5G. I trotted after him, bearing the coat.
Peter Mandelson was appointed chairman of the Design Museum trustees in 2017. His predecessor, the financier Luqman Arnold, had overseen the museum’s transformation from the faintly shambolic bohemian outfit in London Bridge to its supposedly glorious revolution in the ‘modern ruin’ of the former Commonwealth Institute in November 2016. From the embers of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth building sprang a thoroughly modern enterprise bankrolled by Conran’s millions and with aspirations to rival the V&A, where Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran had started out. With its altars to Ray Eames chairs and minimalist oak shell, the late Queen can hardly have been a fan. But her husband, the great moderniser Prince Philip, showed up to open it – himself, like former London Weekend Television employee Mandelson after him, a huge evangelist for the power of pizzazz.
In the world of design, Mandelson had designs. Many of them didn’t fit. More worryingly, he moved with the dubious authority of legacy. Mandelson’s maternal grandfather, Labour MP Herbert Morrison, had been instrumental in the building of the Royal Festival Hall, the only remaining architectural structure of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Designed by Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin, it was also the unironic choice of venue for the launch of Mandelson’s memoirs The Third Man in 2010. During his time as a cog in the New Labour machine, Mandelson devoted considerable time to the new industrial revolution as he saw it. In the Department of Trade and Industry he authored the 1998 white paper Building a Knowledge Driven Economy, in which he elaborated on Britain’s potential to house its own Silicon Valley. Like his good friend Jeffrey Epstein, who dabbled in the arts via connections to MoMA, Petie, too, saw himself as an arbiter of taste. Both considered themselves architects of the cultural zeitgeist, both took experimentation – at any cost – to be their lawful preserve.
Although I was often ignored, he made a point of greeting me by my name with a firm handshake; the infamous charm was alive and well
And then came the Dome. Mandelson’s involvement in one of the biggest architectural and design embarrassments of the last century can hardly be overstated. It was, as Stephen Bayley has rightly observed, ‘a mad woman’s breakfast’, the ‘crassness and incompetence’ of which leaves the disgusting structure as the most fitting testament to the hubris of New Labour. But this indignity was not enough to stop Mandelson dipping his toe back into design in 2017 as chairman of the Design Museum, a role he bent to his narcissistic will, waffling on about policy and that frightful buzzword of Blairism, ‘globalisation’. This, during a period in which Labour was out of power, and he was kicking around in his £10 million stucco-fronted house in nearby Notting Hill, hungry to stamp his influence once more.
As a man who once said that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, he must have found himself in like-minded company. Although the political tide had firmly started to skew towards populism in late 2016, the Design Museum stood its ground as a New Labour-style outfit with champagne socialists such as Jony Ive flocking to celebrate its exhibitions. These included Fear and Love (featuring a sneering, tone-deaf installation of a Brexit living room) and Ferrari: Under the Skin. So far, so luvvie. As chairman of trustees, Mandelson spoke of his desire to export the museum into a series of design ‘satellites’ across the country. Mercifully, these have not materialised.
Unsurprisingly for the Prince of Darkness, there were dubious deals. On a July evening in 2018, the Design Museum hosted a reception for arms manufacturer Leonardo alongside a panel discussion entitled ‘Corbynmania: Social Media and Jeremy Corbyn’, part of a series of events intended to coincide with its Hope to Nope show charting the intersection between graphic design and socio-political movements. Unsurprisingly, the museum’s progressive contributors fulminated against the ethical entanglements of a museum hosting an arms dealer under the umbrella of social responsibility, claiming ‘art washing’. More than 40 contributors withdrew their work while the museum wanly reminded them to think of the visitors’ experience. Mandelson, someone who knew better than anybody the power of spectacle at all costs, remained in place as chairman until 2023. The show went on.
Until, of course, it didn’t. As I watched Mandelson exit the US Embassy earlier this month, disgraced but probably undeterred by public opinion of the lurid evidence of his friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, I had just one thought. Who’s carrying the coat now?
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