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Medes and Persians

Paul Foot: The Government’s Favourite Accountants, 2 November 2000

... however. Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, was obliged to resign when it was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while Mandelson, the man who borrowed the money, was reinstated a year later. Robinson’s special ...

Labour and the Lobbyists

Peter Geoghegan, 15 August 2024

... his previous employers without our knowing that they had a connection.Another Labour grandee, Peter Mandelson, who was made a peer in 2008, also has his own consultancy business, Global Counsel, which recently spent £36,000 on seconding a staff member to the office of the Treasury minister Tulip Siddiq for six months (another member of Siddiq’s ...

Phwoar!

Suzanne Moore: Amanda Platell, 6 January 2000

Scandal 
by Amanda Platell.
Piatkus, 297 pp., £5.99, November 1999, 0 7499 3119 1
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... the end the best woman wins, whereas in real life the best woman got fired for dishing the dirt on Peter Mandelson and now faces the Herculean task of sexing up William Hague. I wonder if this is the terrible karmic fate of any journalist who becomes too cynical about their trade. If you really hate journalism you don’t write longingly about this ...

Short Cuts

William Davies: Cambridge Analytica, 5 April 2018

... from the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated psychometrics. As for Nix’s boast that they ‘operate in the ...

After the May Day Flood

Seumas Milne, 5 June 1997

... and benefits, Lord Hollick, chairman of United News and Media, to advise on industrial policy, and Peter Jarvis, Whitbread chief executive, who was asked to head the Low Pay Commission, charged with setting the rate for the planned legal minimum wage. In previous Labour administrations, it was trade-union leaders like Ernest Bevin and Frank Cousins who were ...

Route to Nowhere

Peter Mair: European parties of the Left, 4 January 2001

The Heart Beats on the Left 
by Oskar Lafontaine, translated by Ronald Taylor.
Polity, 219 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 7456 2582 7
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... evident reliance on Bodo Hombach, described here as having the ambition to become ‘Germany’s Peter Mandelson’, whose intriguing Lafontaine later found to be ‘intolerable’. Although the parallels with the early experiences of New Labour are fascinating, they are also often misleading. First, although both sets of social democrats eventually ...
... The threat from the Alliance was the main reason for the modernisation of the Labour Party. Peter Mandelson was given a tree hand to follow where the SDP had already led. Labour remains cautious on Europe, uneasy on defence and conservative on constitutional reform. The institutional authority of the Trade Unions, enhanced in 1980-81, is ...

More aggressive, dear!

Zachary Leader, 31 July 1997

My Aces, My Faults 
by Nick Bollettieri and Dick Schaap.
Robson, 346 pp., £17.95, June 1997, 1 86105 087 9
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... off debts, he sold out to Mark McCormack of the International Management Group, recently hired by Peter Mandelson to raise funds for Britain’s millennium celebrations. IMG runs the finances and Bollettieri runs everything else. Bollettieri emerges from the memoir as an endearing hustler, vain (about his waistline, his teeth, his muscles, his tan) but ...

I-need-to-work!

Lizzy Davies: ‘The Night Cleaner’, 3 November 2011

The Night Cleaner 
by Florence Aubenas, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 184 pp., £14.99, 0 7456 5199 2
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... at the Foreign Office nursery, she clenched her teeth in fear that passing figures – including Peter Mandelson, ‘the ever elegant, sharp-suited paragon of style’ – would recognise her. She needn’t have worried: in her uniform, she was invisible. Mandy glanced, gave ‘half a nod’, then looked away. A sense that all good things were out of ...

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy 
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 78396 634 9
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... to ensure that their cables were never ‘flabby’ or ‘cute’. ‘Be strategically nasty,’ Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, recommended.The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables (only 6 per cent of them classified as ‘secret’) was treated by the national security establishment and its helpmates as ...

Showing Off

Laleh Khalili: Superyachts, 9 May 2024

Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquillity and Ecocide 
by Grégory Salle.
Polity, 122 pp., £12.99, January, 978 1 5095 5995 4
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... of these Russian billionaires had wined and dined European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the ...

What did Cook want?

Jon Lawrence: Both ‘on message’ and off, 19 February 2004

The Point of Departure 
by Robin Cook.
Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 7432 5255 1
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... that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five years – and when he finally ...

Home Office Rules

William Davies, 3 November 2016

... after people. This is very different from the neoliberal state, whose job was characterised by Peter Mandelson, Bill Clinton and other Third Wayers in the 1990s as ‘steering not rowing’. The target political audience of the neoliberal politician was always the ‘hard-working family’. This imaginary unit had ‘aspiration’ and wanted to ‘get ...

Educating the Utopians

Jonathan Parry: Parliament’s Hour, 18 April 2019

The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000 
edited by David Brown, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland.
Oxford, 626 pp., £95, April 2018, 978 0 19 871489 7
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... more than a cosmetic choice. Displaying all the insouciant condescension of a Walpolean oligarch, Peter Mandelson mused that ‘the era of pure representative democracy is coming slowly to an end.’ Each party adopted the same techniques. If they were aware that they were making the political class look alien, uncaring and fake, there was no electoral ...

Missing the Vital Spark

Mark Ford: Tony Harrison, 13 May 1999

Prometheus 
by Tony Harrison.
Faber, 86 pp., £8.99, November 1998, 0 571 19753 1
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... an old-style socialist, and Hermes – described by Harrison in an interview as ‘the Peter Mandelson of Zeus’ – engage in an agonistic conflict. From the cinema screen Hermes taunts the unregenerate ex-miner with the failure of all his hopes: History spat you out like phlegm, shop-steward of the NUM expecting, of all things, to create ...

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