Most vendettas, at least in Sicilian legend, are accompanied by omertà, a belief that it is shameful to betray your worst enemies even if it would benefit your cause. New Labour has long felt at ease with the vendetta, but has struggled with the concept of omertà. The Mandelson memoirs, the Blair memoirs, the Campbell diaries, the Cook diaries, the Blunkett diaries, the Deborah Mattinson assessment, the Rawnsley confessionals, the New Labour literature and score-settling would make even the most capacious Kindle fuse at their sheer volume.
Much of the advance publicity for the Mandelson memoirs has surrounded the now dreary impasse between Blair and Brown, a relationship that looks all the more ridiculous when put alongside David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s government of functioning adults. If leaders from different parties can coexist and settle disagreements without shouting matches, why could not those at the top of Labour?
The rivalry seems to have wormed its way so deeply into Labour’s culture that it is impossible to expunge. One suspects that if Tony Blair dies before Gordon Brown, it will soon emerge that there was ‘an understanding’ that Brown should have the first experience of death. ‘You ruined my afterlife,’ Brown will rage to his diminished court in Kirkcaldy. But the Mandelson memoir, serialised alongside a toe-curling video mercifully behind the Times’s new internet paywall, is a more weighty piece of work than the advance publicity suggests.
The book is published at a critical time for Labour, when the party is in the middle of a leadership contest that appears to be going nowhere. For years, Labour figures have been calling for a healthy discussion about the party’s values, policy, organisation and direction. It is the debate Gordon Brown neurotically prevented by gathering the names of 300 MPs to nominate him, thereby obliterating the chances of even Michael Meacher standing against him. Now the party finally has the opportunity to conduct a big cleansing debate, and it seems not to know how.
Many inside Labour have been dismayed at the quality of the leadership debate. As one party adviser put it to me: ‘We have waited all these years, and it has turned into a contest to see who can get onto Twitter first to denounce the government. They don’t sit there thinking, they sit there texting.’ The rest of the time, the candidates haul themselves around the country in a hustings format designed to minimise clarity and maximise entertainment. Like some repertory theatre company locked in a bad production, they can recite each other’s indifferent lines in their sleep, acutely aware they are not heading for the West End.
Extraordinarily, at these hustings, few mention the deficit. Yet if Mandelson’s book has a future purpose, it is to underline the extent to which the last few years were not just about Brown’s dire communication skills but also a debate about the public finances. Almost all of the policy disagreements in the last two years of Labour government come back to that issue. The party simply could not decide whether or not to admit that large spending cuts were coming.
People did try. James Purnell gave up when Brown silenced him for suggesting the government needed a fresh spending review. Even Ed Balls almost had to beg Brown to use the word ‘cuts’ in his 2008 speech to the Trades Union Congress. Darling fought Brown for two weeks over the same issue ahead of last year’s Pre-Budget Report. On the instruction of the Prime Minister, even mild references to spending challenges were excised from Mandelson’s speeches on growth. Yet the cuts were indeed imposed by the Treasury — albeit described as ‘savings’ and deliberately relegated by Brown to the small print.
This is Labour’s problem when opposing the cuts now. Their own policy, on which they fought an election, was to halve the deficit over four years. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies demonstrated, this would mean public spending cuts, for each department, in the region of 20 per cent. Nonetheless, Labour tried to fight an election on the investment vs cuts narrative. With no credibility on the deficit, it is hardly surprising their campaign was a disaster (as Mandelson freely admits in his book).
Now Labour’s leadership candidates find that the debate has moved on. The coalition government has persuaded the public that cuts are inevitable, that Labour was profligate and had turned public spending into a false idol. The Lib-Con government is thereby absolved of all responsibility for these cuts. So when the axe starts to fall in the autumn, with the 25 per cent cuts that the Chancellor warned about in the Budget, Labour will have difficulty complaining given that their own plan was for cuts of a similar magnitude.
Some of the leadership candidates believe they can argue that Labour’s cuts would have been more compassionate, in contrast to the ideologically driven and unfair cuts being planned by the government. Some candidates are striking out to the left. Ed Balls, for a few weeks now, has been saying he regarded the Brown–Darling deficit reduction plan as too aggressive. This frees him to oppose government cuts now.
Another leadership candidate (with a better chance of winning) is, I understand, developing a similar stance on the public finances. To the all-important question — where to find that clear, red water — he proposes a simple solution. First, he would declare that the public finances are better than Labour had thought when it drew up its own deficit reduction programme. So, it can be argued, Labour’s cuts would not have been so harsh as it had previously imagine. Next, propose higher taxes, thereby reducing the need for further cuts.
But whoever is elected Labour leader on 25 September will face a substantial logistical problem. By then, there will be just four weeks remaining until George Osborne announces his spending review. It is a tight deadline on which to forge an economic policy, especially if the new leader has to wait until the results of the shadow Cabinet elections to find out who the shadow chancellor will be.
Amidst all this, some of the party’s Blairite wing fear that such an approach represents a retreat to the party’s comfort zone. Pat McFadden, the shadow industry secretary, used a speech on Wednesday to warn that voters won’t listen to Labour if it simply tries to wish the deficit away. His is, at present, a rather lonely voice. But if Mandelson’s Technicolor interventions managed to get the debate started, then his memoirs will have served some small purpose.
Patrick Wintour is the political editor of the Guardian.
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