Mad Men and Bad Men by Sam Delaney

Author:Sam Delaney [Sam Delaney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571312399
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

8

DON’T LET IT END IN TEARS

Peter Mandelson used to enjoy his visits to the fashionable offices of Boase Massimi Pollitt, the ad agency in Paddington that for many years had served as the headquarters of the Shadow Communications Agency. ‘He used to spend a lot of time here,’ says Chris Powell. ‘It was a decent environment, nicer than his own office. And there was always a bit of hostility towards him at Walworth Road among the old guard. Here we were pleased to see him.’

The SCA continued to thrive after their acclaimed work during the 1987 election. Mandelson was now as much an adman as a politician, devising Labour’s marketing strategy with Philip Gould and briefing Powell’s creative team in Paddington. But those at Walworth Road who thought that he had been seduced by the superficial glamour of what John Prescott would later call ‘the beautiful people’ were wrong. In 1988 he walked away from his high-profile job as the party’s communications director in favour of running for selection as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in the north-eastern constituency of Hartlepool. It was a blow from which the party would take years to recover.

Mandelson had thought the party leadership would be happy for him to keep his job as director of communications. He was wrong. ‘Neil [Kinnock] felt I’d let him down badly,’ says Mandelson. ‘And I don’t think he ever forgave me for it.’

‘He deserves it but he’s left us in the shit,’ is what Kinnock told his chief of staff, Charles Clarke, when Mandelson successfully won his candidacy in December 1989. Labour had been building upon the modest successes of 1987, and the party had established a double-digit lead in the opinion polls over an increasingly unpopular Maragret Thatcher.

But the next campaign would have to be every bit as carefully stage-managed as in 1987. Losing Mandelson, the man who had revolutionised Labour communications in four short years, was a colossal blow. ‘Peter was the first person to take control and give us the freedom we needed to deliver a powerful campaign,’ says Chris Powell. ‘We knew right away that things could fall apart without him at the centre of things.’

But however much he enjoyed straddling politics and adland, Mandelson understood that no amount of spin would work without real political change. ‘I believed I could make more of a difference as an MP,’ he says. ‘But I felt sure that that didn’t have to stop me managing the way we ran communications.’

The formidable Charles Clarke summoned Mandelson to the shadow cabinet room in the House of Commons. The two were old colleagues; it was Clarke who had spotted Mandelson’s potential during the Brecon by-election in 1985. He had backed him for the job as director of campaigns and communications, and the pair had formed a tight team around Neil Kinnock. But their meeting at the tail end of 1989 was less than friendly. ‘I’ve never known Neil so angry over anything,’ Clarke told the spin doctor. ‘You cannot stay, you’ll have to leave and we’ll find someone to replace you.

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