SEAN WALSH
I try to keep out of the “who’s your favourite cannibal?” debate because it always gets too political. If you say Anthony Hopkins then some lefty grievance fetishist will start screaming in Glaswegian something which sounds a bit like “Brian Cox”. Dahmer used to be a safe choice but he was eating people before transexuals were invented, and these days would probably be a spree killer or mass shooter, something like that. He had that alternative vibe.
Then there’s Mads Mikkelson, whose Hannibal Lector is a very dark turn indeed, although he arguably exaggerates the eating disorder side of things. I found Hannibal quite hard to watch, until I discovered the trick of thinking of Mikkelson’s cannibal as Peter Mandelson hosting a dinner party. Then the whole thing became what a friend of mine calls “chucklesome”.
Because let’s be honest. Mandelson is preposterous.
I never bought the whole “Prince of Darkness” routine. It’s always seemed a bit Wizard of Oz. Apparently the meme goes as far back as when Mandelson sported a moustache (which is back even further than memes I suppose). Isn’t it axiomatic that moustaches are ridiculous, especially on men? He got rid of it around 1997, presumably when Tony Blair forced him to choose between a stable and serious career in front line politics or a precarious and seedy one in the gay porn industry. Being “New” Labour, Mandelson triangulated and found a third way, opting for a precarious and seedy career in front line politics. Some of this is speculation of course.
Mandelson’s talent has always been to spot a political trend, associate himself with it, and then to take credit for “shaping” it. I point this out not to endorse a Hegelian view about the necessitarian nature of the historical process. There are great and consequential political figures. But Mandelson is not one of them. True, he has a certain low cunning, but cleverer people than him long ago saw through his schtick.
He is the sort of “political operator” admired by people who refer to Sun Tzu at fashionable dinner parties.
So it turns out that his appointment as US Ambassador was against the advice of the spooks. This will not have been because of the seedy Epstein stuff or the questionable loans or even the associations with the dubious rich. It’ll be because he keeps getting caught. The people at Thames House and Vauxhall Cross look at Mandelson and see a rank amateur. A Bill Haydon wannabe who, if he ever did get the tap on the shoulder would end up as a Slough House detainee under the not so tender care of Jackson Lamb.
And yet again the Prince (Andrew?) of Darkness has come unstuck because of the audit trail. Mandelson must by now be Epstein-rich on the back of severance payments alone. The “Mandelson Resignation” has become integrated into the national story like the Trooping the Colour or Ronnie O’Sullivan quitting snooker.
Pity, he was probably doing a good job as our lady in Washington because if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s gossip, and the accumulation and collation thereof. Gossip is in the end what juices the political system. It was when Kemi Badenoch told the Spectator that she didn’t “do lunch” that we knew she was doomed, politically speaking.
So now we’re told that the latest Mandelson irregularity calls into question the Prime Minister’s judgement. Starmer told the Commons last week that in respect of the Mandelson appointment “the process” had been followed. And who’d doubt that? The PM would drive off the Dover cliffs if the SatNav told him this was the quickest way to France. In the dead air of the Starmer interiority “process” is the only constant, so we have been led to believe.
Except, of course it isn’t. In the case of Mandelson he went against advice.
It’s too easy to say that Starmer is a managerialist, a human rights lawyer turned politician, who approaches things legalistically, and for whom words on a page – when written by the appropriately credentialed – are more important than the pesky rhythms of the human heart. That syntax trumps meaning, and that process is his narcotic of choice.
Easy, but wrong. The above is camouflage, and the latest embarrassment shows that his relationship to “process” is capricious and expedient.
The talk now is that Mandelson has “the goods” on Starmer and is plotting his downfall. If he still had it he’d be twirling the moustache. This could be very funny, although I suspect that were some dirty north London sexual secret come to light it might make Starmer more popular not less. And that’d be unfortunate.
It is Hopkins, by the way.
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Sean Walsh is Associate Editor of Country Squire Magazine. You can follow him on Substack.
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This article (Mandelson: More Wizard of Oz Than Prince of Darkness) was created and published by The New Conservative and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Sean Walsh
Featured image: © European Communities, 2004 / EC, Photo: Christian Lambiotte
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