My dream of Mandelson as Labour leader

A semi-conscious Simon Hoggart attends a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party in which the Prince of Darkness has replaced Gordon — and is cheered to the rafters

It was one of those dreams we all have. It had its own internal logic: everything that occurs seems to make perfect sense, and it’s only when we wake up that we realise the whole thing was absurd and silly. The other night I dreamed I was a Labour MP and we were in the Grand Committee Room welcoming the new leader of our party.

In my semi-conscious lucubrations, it seemed perfectly natural that this should be Peter Mandelson. The fact that no majority of the MPs, unions and party members who choose the new leader would find Mandelson acceptable was irrelevant. Possibly the fact that Ladbrokes had just announced they were taking more money on Mandelson for next Labour leader than on everyone else combined had addled my brain.

It seemed so natural. The disastrous Norwich by-election, followed by the shattering result in Michael Martin’s Glasgow seat, a conference which was the political equivalent of cage fighting, coupled with poll ratings in freefall, heading in the same direction as sterling and the stock market as the money people realised that ‘quantitative easing’ was just smart new jargon for debauching the currency — all these had created uncontainable panic among Labour MPs. They had long assumed that they were heading for opposition; what they actually faced was obliteration. There was no longer any such thing as a safe Labour seat. The election could make Blair’s 1997 landslide seem a minor blip.

Inevitably the men in the M&S suits — including the prime minister’s old friend, the chief whip Nick Brown, and the man who ran his ‘campaign’ in 2007, Jack Straw — had gone to Downing Street with the bad news.