Politics

Lord Mandelson’s memoirs left the real questions unanswered, says Trevor Kavanagh. If even he won’t tell the truth about the Blair-Brown years, who will? Peter Mandelson had a rich seam before him as he sat down to write The Third Man. He was present at the birth of New Labour, helped plot its path to power and then sat on the burning deck when it sank. From start to finish, Mandy was in the thick of it. Little wonder that there should be excitement about his memoirs. But anyone reading the three-part serialisation this week would be left wondering — where is the dynamite? Either the Times had missed the

Asks Jeff Randall in a pugnacious column for the Telegraph. The memoirs, Randall argues, have finally exposed the conceit that Mandelson was a tactical genius. Randall says that Mandelson was a devious and divisive backroom spinner. Well, he ain’t the Prince of Darkness for nothing. But Mandelson’s career and political persona were fashioned in a bygone era. Today, ambitious homosexuals climb the greasy pole out in the open – both in terms of their careers and their sexuality, (David Laws was an exception in the latter case). Mandelson’s modus operandi was determined by the conclusion that the 1980s were not an era for gays in politics, whether preening or discreet.

Reading Ed Miliband’s piece in today’s Times on how Labour can win back southern voters, I was struck by this section: ‘We need to be clear that part of the job of social democratic politics is to conserve those things in society that free-market Conservatism would destroy. Our communities are too precious to be dictated to by markets. Take the example of how our towns have changed. If you travel through the market towns of the South, too often you find them dominated by late-night bars, clubs and betting shops, even when local people want a more friendly place to live.’ Ed Miliband has made this kind of argument before,

Pat McFadden, the sullen-looking Shadow Business Secretary, has given an important speech to the Fabian Society. He said: ‘Fight the cuts is a tempting slogan in opposition, and there are indeed some that must be fought. But if that is all we are saying the conclusion will be drawn that we are wishing the problem away.’ He is the first shadow minister to recognise that Labour’s current approach is counter-productive, and Ed Balls’ philosophy is suicidal. He notes: ‘In fact, that is the position the Tories and the Lib Dems would prefer us to adopt. They want Labour to retreat to its comfort zone and allow them to say that

Much ado about the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth predictions in the Treasury Select Committee earlier, especially as an OBR official admitted that the cuts and tax hikes in the Budget could conceivably tip us into a double-dip recession. So are the OBR’s official forecasts too optimistic, as some are now claiming? Only time will tell, but we can get a decent sense of things by comparing them with the independent forecasts that the Treasury collect here. And this is the result: In other words, the OBR growth forecasts stick pretty closely to the average independent forecast, although they are a touch more optimistic. Admittedly, these independent forecasts were collected