He talks as if sound-bite land didn’t exist, as if a wizened old media hack would never jot down a phrase and use it to frame him. If flattery were his intention, it would be an immensely flattering technique. But I think it’s just him. He simply wasn’t born for the game whose harsh rules he has done so much to make binding. On only two topics did he press the on-message replay button: Blair and Millbank. To take them in reverse, Millbank was wonderful, doing a great job, practically infallible. Blair had ‘intelligence, integrity, selflessness’ and many other qualities in common with Solomon, Einstein and Albert Schweitzer. But even here – in fact especially here – the beamed dogma suddenly expanded into genuine eloquence. Spotting that the tendency of my own argument was to suggest that Blair had been managed into existence by his back-up team, Mandelson took several minutes to explain that the opposite was true. New Labour’s new direction, new deal and new society: it was all Blair’s idea. Blair was a unique combination of vision and practicality. The job of his managers had been to hold the wall while he got on with it. I interrupted the flow to contend that they had also managed the media in order to project him. ‘Protect him?’ Mandelson asked, misinterpreting my mumble. ‘No,’ I said, ‘project.’ Mandelson said that for better or worse, ‘we live in a personality-driven media age’.
Clearly, in his own case, he thinks it is for the worse. One day it might be known as the Mandelson Paradox: he accepted and mastered, on behalf of his party and the two men who led it to transformation – Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair – a set of atmospheric conditions in which he himself could hardly breathe. To pursue the cause in which he believes, he rated reality above his own tastes. There is a sacrificial element, which in his more vulnerable moments he might be tempted to admire in a mirror: that face out of a Renaissance painting could easily take on the pained resignation of St Sebastian shot full of arrows. Those of us whose bloodstreams have been tainted by cynicism might say he asked for it. There is certainly at least one man-trap question that not even he will find it easy to talk his way out of, even if his memoirs run to the full two volumes. If Blair is so great, and you did nothing wrong, why did he accept your resignation? Surely the truth is that he was done in by the silent borrowing, and not the supposed leg-up for the Hinduja Brothers. When it came to the crunch, Mandelson was in the position of the small boy who gets away with burning down the school and then gets busted for riding his bicycle on the footpath. But here again, I think, the weakness comes from the strength. For a man like him, elegant conviviality and conversational brilliance amount to a talent which is death to hide. He could no more be expected to lead the simple life of Arthur Scargill than Metternich could have been expected to live like a peasant. The civilized dinner table was not his aspiration: he felt it to be his natural entitlement. But in the modern, media-sensitive politics of the Mandelson age, what seems natural to you is the very thing you have to examine in advance for its possible effects. It seemed natural to John Prescott that an egg-thrower should be thumped in the face.
What Mandelson lost will be seen only in the long run. What Blair lost in the short run was dramatically on view that same afternoon, when Mandelson visited High Tunstall School. It’s an ordinary school that anyone local can send their children to, but even by the exalted standards of St Olave’s it looks like Arcadia. The children had organized themselves into a miniature House of Commons, complete with canopy for the Speaker, played by National Best Speaker Stuart Bevell (13) who can do a stunning impersonation of Betty Boothroyd. The Prime Minister had a bother-boy haircut but turned in a notably more fleet-footed Question Time performance than his model, and the Leader of the Opposition, son of a doctor from the subcontinent, had Hague’s every needling technique well covered. What was astonishing, however, was the high standard of argument. Mandelson listened in unfeigned delight, and when he rose to commend them he paid the participants the compliment of being delightful on his own account. ‘Do you feel you were unpleasant and aggressive enough?’
But the tease play was only the start. He gave them a run-down on what the House of Commons is like to be in, and how the close confinement encourages verbal aggression. ‘It’s not that they’re nasty people. But you forget yourself, and before you know where you are you’re shouting with the rest of them.’ He gave the kids everything he had, and didn’t patronize them for a second. The son of a prominent local Tory was given exceptional respect for his views. If Millbank had filmed the whole event, they could have had a PPB for the future: Labour education policies for the primary schools have worked, they could say, and the secondary schools are next. But whether Mandelson could have done all that with the camera on him is another question. Essentially it was a private performance.
Onward to a regeneration committee meeting at the Council chambers, where a Newsnight team was on hand. Immediately Mandelson tightened up. By arrangement, Newsnight filmed him only in the corridors and for the first few minutes of the meeting. When they backed out of the door he was himself again. Once again he was impressive, and this time for doing more listening than talking. As chairman of the cross-party committtee he got the best out of everybody. For a gifted talker there is always a temptation to crush the less eloquent by summarizing their long arguments with a single phrase, but Mandelson did not succumb. What he said was either usefully supplementary or else neatly summarized the points of contention. Though he would probably rather die than say so, a Labour-dominated meeting would have been less interesting. He told me afterwards what a joy it was to be able to draw on the experience of the Lib Dem old hand: ‘good, solid, civic stock’.
For Mandelson, ‘civic’ is a big word. His fondness for the idea is one of the things that make him remarkable, because those who help to paint and frame the big picture are often impatient with local detail. In the eye of history, Mandelson will be seen to have helped alter the course of British politics from one millennium to the next, but the view of his influence will be impoverished if it does not include his respect for what should not alter: the unglamorous but necessary work in the constituency, the long meetings where everyone gets a say, the depressing moment when you recommend a skateboard ramp for the local layabout youths and find out the hard way that the vicar doesn’t know what a skateboard is. I saw it happen, and wondered if it ever happened to Machiavelli. But Mandelson managed the moment well, as he can manage everything except the fundamental contradiction of his life. He is a master artist of politics, but politics is not an art. Machiavelli, who thought it was, found out it wasn’t when the very people he had sought to advise put him to the rack. That evening Mandelson went out canvassing. I thought he was quite good at that too, but I suppose they all are, or they would never get elected. I left him there, and thus missed the episode when he was monstered by Jeremy Vine in the Newsnight minivan.
2. Incredible Shrinking Tories
In any democracy, there is never a more fascinating election than when only one party can win no matter how repellent its campaign. The fascination comes from the unblinkable fact that the future of the opposition is on the line. In 1983 I followed Michael Foot’s campaign on its way to catastrophe. Clinging with the rest of the Keystone Kops to the running-board of his Model T as it swerved zanily between the trolley cars, I had only one thing on my mind: this is an accident that had to happen. Out of the wreckage, they might build something. Today the same goes double for the Tories. At least the crash of Foot’s doomed vehicle left his party divided merely in two, even as the Kops took parabolic flight in all directions to wind up demolishing pie-stalls or disappearing into the windows of shops selling lingerie. But after this election the Tories might be left with hardly any party at all.
On Tuesday the spectre the Tories are facing was in plain sight at Clapham Junction station, in the constituency of Battersea. Like Gaul in the time of Julius Caesar (Conservative), the borough of Wandsworth is divided into three parts: Putney, Tooting and Battersea. Wandsworth is a Tory fiefdom, and if a fiefdom can have a flagship, Bat
tersea is it. Unfortunately for the local Tory stalwarts, in 1997 it was lost to Labour by 5,300 votes. Not a hell of a lot, but except in the conditions of the then-prevailing apocalypse it would never have happened. On the questionable assumption that an apocalypse can’t happen twice, a plumply pretty and terribly nice woman called Lucy Shersby has been deputed to get the votes back. If a Nigella-sweet voice and a cuddly deportment could do it, she would do it, even with the assistance of her local young Tory troops. Their amiably clueless arrangements reminded me vividly of the Labourite dogsbodies on the Foot campaign trail who couldn’t assemble water, jug and glass into the same position before the visiting orator was on the point of expiring from thirst.
The Battersea junior task force had, however, managed to organize a cardboard sign: INCOME TAX UP TO 50P ADMITS BROWN. This powerful device was held up to face the prosperous crowds of homecoming evening commuters as they poured down the Shopstop chute from the station to the street. The young men in chinos, poplin summer jackets and Timberland footwear had stepped out of a Ralph Lauren advertisement, the slit-skirted young women out of a re-run of This Life. There was the usual London admixture of delinquents, fast-food mutants and deadbeats of all ages, but on the whole you would have said that this was the middle class at the throbbing peak of its reproductive cycle. Forty years ago – thirty, twenty, even ten – I would have been able to tell how they voted just by the way they dressed: Conservative. But now you can’t tell, and that’s the Tory nightmare.
The young Tory helpfuls seemed not to realize it was a nightmare, which meant that here was the nightmare compounded. They thrust leaflets into the well-groomed hands of the hurrying horde and showed no signs of surprise when the leaflets were returned to them as if tainted with botulism. But Lucy was due to receive a visitor, and he realized it. Unfolding from a needlessly small car came the radiant presence of Michael Portillo. Whether he was here to share Lucy’s evident belief that his blessing might swing the vote, or whether he was here in the same spirit of posthumous defiance that sent El Cid (Loyalist Royalist) riding out dead in the saddle to meet the enemy, was not apparent from his demeanour. Nothing was apparent from that except gentle manners. A camera can easily make his features look brutal, but seen in real air they look sensitive even in their chunkiness, rather in the way that Michelangelo (Gay Rights) turned Brutus (Republican Revolutionary) into a pugilist with a taste for Stoic philosophy. Unlike Tony Blair’s smile, which would remain fixed even if perforated by the bullets of a firing squad, Portillo’s smile comes and goes; but when it is there, it is the smile of a man who has known indecision and suffering, and has overcome both while forgetting neither.
As the commuters continued surging towards us like Labour MPs into the division lobby, Portillo got going with a smoothly practised double-handed meet-and-greet routine, his eyes reassuringly suggesting that although there might possibly have been some fleeting reason for voting Labour last time, normal service had now been resumed. Portillo can get a lot into his eyes, including everything happening around him. He spotted me edging up and gave me the tolerant smile for media pests. I pointed to the sign about Brown’s alleged admission. ‘Did he admit it?’ Portillo’s answer was already tried and tested, but he threw in a conspiratorial twinkle. ‘Well, he’s not denied it.’ Instant buddies: that knack of bringing you in on a secret is one of the most valuable a politician can have. Con men, of course, have it too: but they have nothing else. Portillo’s geniality is real.
Attracted by the splash and swirl of a big fish, a television news crew showed up. Lucy’s team got tremendously excited, and, being so well bred, tremendously shy. One of them – a tall, gorgeous young man with a circa 1964 James Fox haircut and a closely tailored Heseltine-style blue pin-stripe suit, his whole appearance out of a mould you would have thought was long since lying in pieces somewhere in a Surrey lane – was audibly puzzled as to the news crew’s provenance. ‘Is it the Beer Beer Sear?’ It was ITN. Imagine the equivalent young New Labour operative not knowing.
Flushed with their media success, Lucy’s Gamma Force hoplites ushered their guest into a car bound for what they assured him was an even hotter spot, Battersea Park station. Since nobody else had thought of it, Portillo kindly suggested to the troops that I be guided by one of them towards the rendezvous. The terribly nice young man who got the job managed to get thoroughly lost, and we saw a great deal of the district before we reached the target zone, where I thought the show was all over. But apparently it had never happened. Though Portillo, Lucy and her praetorians were all present, there were no commuters in sight. I had memories of Michael Foot being led by sweating local worthies into a Peterborough roller-skating rink populated by a mass meeting of twenty-six people, two of them holding balloons.
Portillo never even snarled. He told me that there was a more serious gig coming up on the forecourt of a local service station: an interview with ITN about the National Insurance thing. Perhaps mischievously, he left it to the Battersea bunch to get me there. My two young guides, a male and female who were clearly meant for each other, pooled their knowledge of the area and took me off on a circumnavigation of the constituency that eventually got us to the destination, which was just around the corner from the departure point. Half an hour having elapsed, Portillo had already wrapped up the interview. With his apparently infallible courtesy he congratulated the Battersea Young Tory Commandos as if the future of the party lay in their hands: a daunting prospect. He might have thought he owed me one for putting me at their mercy, because he offered me a trip back to Smith Square, and yes, if I really thought it might be useful I could grill him when we got there. Shortly he would have to disappear into the depths of Central Office for a strategy meeting, but meanwhile how could he help? With just such grace and style, Thomas More (Christian Conservative) once bade the executioner to do his work well, but Thomas More knew that he was going to a better life. Portillo has less reason to believe that bliss is imminent, so his faith in humanity must be deep indeed.
As we settled into the leather chairs, he was already fielding my first question, and what other first question could there be? Yes, he admitted, in 1997 Labour ate into what should have been the natural Tory vote. After eighteen years the crucial centre of the electorate was fed up, and besides, Labour had done the necessary job of reforming itself in order to take over the Conservatives’ economic views. ‘In those terms it was an epic political victory for us.’ Since Portillo himself lost his seat in 1997 and must have felt the deprivation keenly, this was a large gesture of respect. It was also a clever way of glossing the disaster to make it sound like a triumph. As to that, there is some truth to it, although it should be remembered that Labour was not reformed by Mrs Thatcher’s example, but by the long influence of its own social democrats.
But Portillo was only bantering. He got down to cases when he admitted, if only by implication, that there was no automatically certain base in the landed and business interests to which the Conservatives could return. Everything would depend on an inclusive view of society that would compete with Labour by offering a real answer to the problems they would never solve by goal-setting management from the top down. Only ‘the devolution of power and authority’ could give the schools and the hospitals what they were crying out for: motivation. Pay was important, but motivation was everything. And if every critical issue in every institution had to go all the way up to state level and back down again before it could be dealt with, no amount of tax money would meet the case, because the people in charge of other people’s destinies would never take effective responsibility if they did not feel that they were in charge of their own. Portillo expounded these arguments with passion, but even more striking was his lucidity. It might not seem much to say that he is the best mind on the Tory front bench, when he, Hague and Ann Widdecombe possess the only three faces most of us can put a name to. But even if Kenneth Clarke and Chris Patten were not in purdah or exile, Portillo would still count as a political intellect on a
scale above tactics and even above strategy: a sectional interest can be given up for a national plan only on the basis of an historic view.
The stipulated few minutes had turned into many more and history was what we were now talking about. Flatteringly he asked for an addition to his reading list, and I suggested Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, a book that brings out how right Churchill was about the Dardanelles, and how completely the War Council – a Millennium Dome committee avant la lettre – converted a vision for shortening the war into a sure-fire formula for lengthening it. Portillo countered by recommending John Lukacs’s Five Days in London, in which it is stated that Chamberlain had the casting vote in the matter of a possible capitulation to Hitler in 1940, and sided with Churchill for two reasons – because Chamberlain had learned that Hitler was a bad man, and because Churchill had treated Chamberlain with decency after his ejection from power. So the time to say goodbye was the time to trail my coat. ‘Will you and Hague have to rebuild the party together after the defeat?’ The smile went off like a light: no irony, no complicity. ‘We contemplate nothing except victory.’
He knows better than that, but he said the right thing, which is the political thing. Out there being led by her eager young troops in the wrong direction around Battersea, Lucy Shersby might drop in her tracks if Portillo spoke the truth. And anyway, the truth is that you never know. It’s an election for the House of Commons, not the Politburo, and the fact that not even the most predictable outcome is ever a sure thing is the best reason for voting. And even if you had the power of Nostradamus (Liberal Democrat) to foresee the event, your vote could still affect the aftermath. If the Conservatives lose in a big enough way, Hague will probably get the push, and there is nobody except Portillo to take his place. But supposing that the Lib Dems do not expand into the vacuum, and the Tories do well enough for Hague to keep his credibility, it would not necessarily be a bad thing for Portillo, and could be good for the country.