Rod Liddle: Under New Labour, it really was the loony left

There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at the time, we were being governed by people who were mentally ill. It is yet another furious, bitter, gut-churning row involving Campbell, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and concludes with Mandelson stamping his little feet and screaming: ‘I am sick of being rubbished and undermined! I hate it! And I want out.’ The cause of this dispute was not whether or not Labour should nationalise the top 200 companies and secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry. Don’t be silly. It was about whether Blair should wear a suit and tie to deliver a speech or if, instead, he should put on a nice pair of cords. Mandelson was in favour of the cords, by the way.

It is impossible to read this sort of thing without coming to the conclusion that the most senior elements of New Labour were mad as hatters, candidates for a longish stay in the booby-hatch. I do not mean mad-eccentric, as in the manner of some Ukip councillor who thinks women should be exterminated or something. I mean seriously damaged, deeply troubled people. If you read on through those diaries, this view is amply confirmed: these awful, awful people who are perpetually wracked with a paranoid fury, drunk or constipated or hunched over the toilet bowl with their fingers down their throats or visited by the Black Dog of depression, or ulcerated or prostate on some sofa to banish the clamorous headaches. And of course continually lying to one another when they weren’t lying to the rest of us, continually stitching each other up, dissolving in a vat of their own bile.

There have been plenty of diaries emanating from the rule of New Labour (and its hilariously incompetent vestigial tail presided over by the maddest of them all, Gordon Brown) by various unelected and now dispossessed political munchkins, most of them expressing a commercially expedient contrition along with the grotesque outrages, the infractions of democracy, the utter contempt not just for the electorate but also for most of their elected MPs.