Peter Mandelson's memoirs - candour without charm

Book review

Political memoir-writing has always been a hazardous business, not least for those who on the Westminster stage never quite rose above the level of being a supporting player.

If one message emerges from this book, it is how much Peter Mandelson would have loved to have been a box-office star.

But he was never anything of the kind, leading his political life always in the shadows cast by others - first, Neil Kinnock, then Tony Blair and finally, and highly improbably, Gordon Brown (for good reasons or bad, the late John Smith in his brief period as Labour leader between 1992 and 1994 would barely even give him the time of day).

But he still clearly sees himself as someone with his name in lights - a man who, as he is never shy of pointing out, was "born into the Labour movement" and whose career, if not quite as durable as that of his grandfather, Herbert Morrison, at least could claim to compete with his in terms of public identity.

Fame - or perhaps more accurately, notoriety - can, though, be a two-edged weapon. What matters when it comes to selling political memoirs is not whether the public has heard of you but rather whether they have favourable opinions or otherwise about you.

And here, Peter Mandelson's The Third Man - its very title a none-too-modest reference to his role in the founding of New Labour - thus starts out at something of a disadvantage.

In all his successive incarnations - director of Labour Party publicity, No10 consigliere, Brussels Commissioner, Cabinet minister (three times) - "Mandy" may have fascinated the British political class but he never won the admiration, still less the affection, of the broad mass of voters. Here the various nicknames he was given - "the Prince of Darkness", "the Sultan of Spin", "the New Machiavelli" - all told their own bleak tale of his lack of humanity or warmth.

Unlike Tony Blair (redeemed by his charm) or even Gordon Brown (respected for his achievements at least as Chancellor), Mandelson never enjoyed a solid bedrock of support within his own party, still less in the electorate at large.

As those grotesque TV commercials accompanying the serialisation of this book in The Times vividly demonstrated, it was almost as if he gloried in his reputation for being both sinister and creepy.

Oddly, in an autobiography that is not always a handicap. No one is going to be able to claim that the figure emerging from the pages of this narrative is a shining Galahad - the ease with which he betrays former colleagues with compromising quotes from their own lips is sufficient proof of that.

But, on the other hand, his own armour-plated self-righteousness lures him into a candour that is by no means characteristic of the mass of political memoirs. Self-esteem may steam off every page but at least that quality allows the author not to worry overmuch about the consequences of what he has to say.