Crisp and brave

Among my guests last weekend as I read Lord Mandelson’s book was Ben, aged two and a half.

Among my guests last weekend as I read Lord Mandelson’s book was Ben, aged two and a half. Ben’s language skills are precocious, but he is passing through a stage, as some infants do, of preferring to speak in the third rather than the first person. Thus ‘Ben wants an ice cream’; or ‘Ben was a bit disappointed’. Once, even, he declared: ‘Ben’s quite tired’ (thoughtful pause), ‘he said.’ If the unexamined life is indeed not worth living, this child has taken the lesson to heart.

Peter Mandelson, who has called his memoir The Third Man, might have benefited from following Ben’s lead. He might have written in the third person. Had he penned, as it were, his biography rather than his autobiography, the logic of the grammar itself might have forced him to confront questions and admit to talents that the ‘I’ makes eccentric. ‘It is extremely unclear why I did that’ does not flow naturally. ‘It is extremely unclear why he did that’ does.

For this is my central difficulty with what is in many ways a revealing and important book by a more winning individual than I had expected to encounter. What on earth did he think he was up to? Where did he imagine it was going? What in the end was it all for? Questions unanswered because never posed.

The questions Mandelson does pose, I think, he answers in the main truthfully and in good faith. This is not a feline, slippery or waspish account. It’s remarkably straightforward, clearly if rather limply written. Nor is it (Mandelson’s Labour critics are wrong) self-serving. The central figure, the third man himself, emerges as frailer and more fallible — and, fascinatingly, more uncertain — than his reputation has suggested.