After months of back and forth, today the government finally released the latest tranche of the Mandy documents, which have become their own spin-off version of the original incriminating releases – a sort of Holby City to the Epstein Files’ Casualty. There are reams of them and, as some backbenchers pointed out stroppily in the Commons today, the government’s decision to release them late this afternoon hardly made it easy to garner much in time for questions to the Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary, Darren Jones, today.
However, a cursory look at the content shows a mixed bag. Doubtless more will be revealed as a fine-tooth comb is applied. Some ‘revelations’ are eminently predictable – what journalists would call a ‘dog bites man’ story. Torsten Bell emerging as a slimy and nakedly ambitious Mandy cupbearer is one such example. ‘You. Are. Here.’ he gushes upon Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador.
Some ‘revelations’ are eminently predictable – what journalists would call a ‘dog bites man’ story.
We learn that Jonathan Powell lobbied hard for the grubby Chagos deal to be wrapped up the day before Starmer’s meeting with Trump, to avoid journalists asking disobliging questions about it. Handing away sovereign territory to smooth over a press conference? We used to have a word, and several cells at the Tower of London, for that sort of behaviour, but by now it’s not exactly unexpected.
Meanwhile, Pat McFadden comes across as the exasperated straight man among a group of woefully incompetent colleagues, whose only contribution to meetings is to wonder, ‘Who can we tax to pay benefits to others?’ But this is only confirming what most taxpayers have known for a very long time. The WhatsApps and emails are, on one level, the Labour equivalent of lifting up a paving stone to find a load of squirming bugs beneath it: hardly surprising but not likely to change your opinion of bugs either.
Mandy himself is the main character, a man who seems to have been glued to his WhatsApp 24/7, like one of those slot-machine-addicted pensioners who die in American casinos having not gone outside for a week. You notice a few recurring tics in the hundreds of messages. For example, Mandy approvingly refers to those he likes as ‘grown-ups’, sometimes even ‘proper grown-ups’. Inevitably, the marker of being a grown-up is whether you share the views of Mandy. Ironic, given he was brought down by his association with someone who actually hated hanging out with grown-ups.
However, the real revelation that comes across time and again is that Mandy didn’t actually want to be US ambassador at all, since the gig he really craved was Chancellor of the University of Oxford. The election, in 2024, saw Mandy just about manage to eliminate Dominic Grieve while getting trounced by Lord Hague, Lady Eilish Angiolini and Baroness Royall. This was not for lack of trying. The single most common theme of the WhatsApps is probably an endless badgering campaign of junior MPs and cabinet ministers who went to Oxford, to get them to vote for him, even amid the most turbulent diplomatic events. One can imagine Mandelson enjoying the gold braid of the Chancellor’s gown, the hissed Latin of degree ceremonies and the inevitable access to some of the dodgiest donors on the planet.
He bothers Selby MP Keir Mather about the election, then accosts Wes Streeting about why Mather hasn’t replied to him. He sends Shabana Mahmood four separate messages about his campaign, which all get ignored. Ellie Reeves receives no fewer than ten and likewise ignores them. Ed Miliband wisely leaves his out-of-office on. Mandelson is a sort of relentless bothering machine, combining technological cluelessness – he assumes there must be a problem with Mather’s phone when he fails to get back to him – with an utter shamelessness, born of vaunting ambition.
Queen’s Park MP Georgia Gould, also the daughter of Tony Blair’s pollster Philip Gould, is persuaded to canvass Alastair Campbell’s nephew, also an MP, for support. It’s a reminder that for all the Blairite guff about ushering in a meritocracy and for all their vandalism of the ancient constitution, the Labour party is an intensely incestuous beast. There are species isolated for millennia on the Galápagos with wider gene pools than the Blairite mafia. They have all the inbreeding of the Habsburgs but with the cultural and intellectual heft of the Poddington Peas.
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