Then there was the breach in the Blair-Mandelson relationship,
Will George Galloway retract his claim that Libya was framed John Rentoul Independent Eagle Eye Blogs, over his second sacking from Cabinet over the Hinduja passport business. Here Mandelson looks back at Blair’s solicitousness after the event and says (p322), “Perhaps he was just stringing me along.” And, later, when he is appointed European Commissioner (p390), he claims to have said to Blair: “You know, you have played me like a fiddle.”
Recent Posts on Eagle Eye After the AV horse has bolted ...David Cameron's meaningless tribute"Why I, a Conservative say Yes to AV"Now it's really personal: Prescott savages KinnockGoldman Sachs cannot see the future
On ancient history,
pandora charms,
Why is policy obsessed with teenage pregnancy Dr Jan Macvarish Independent Battle of Ideas Blogs, the big picture is confirmed, of an irreparable breach in the Blair-Brown relationship from the moment in 1994 that Tony Blair refused to defer to Gordon Brown after the death of John Smith. Which was also the cause of a long-lasting but not irreparable breach in the Mandelson-Brown relationship. What is new is that Mandelson now agrees with the Charles Clarke view, that he and Blair should have encouraged Brown to stand for the leadership (p173):
An open contest with a clear result would have removed the temptation for him to agonise about what might have been, and brood over the sense that he had somehow been unfairly pushed aside.
However, there is no way that Brown would have stood for the leadership against Blair, because he knew he would have lost,
Pandora Letter Charms sale Rugby League Visiting, as Mandelson puts it, “in all probability heavily”.
Running out of time before the “biggest publishing event since Gutenberg” hits the wall of Blair hate tomorrow. And I still haven’t reviewed Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man.
It is in the details of the dysfunctionality at the heart of the Blair Government and then at the heart of the Brown Government when Mandelson made his remarkable return in 2008 that this book will be most valuable to historians. What was common to both was the personality of Brown – “there’s something wrong with him”, Mandelson reports Blair as saying. Once the psychological curio of Mandelson’s rapprochement with his deadliest enemy fades, that is the one great mystery that will remain, and on which this book shines such an important if partial light.
It is an unexpected delight to read – unexpected because Mandelson, a brilliant talker with a subtle political mind, has never been much of a stylist of the written word. Yet this story is fluently and concisely told.