In London, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle (and Hartlepool) this week, thousands of party members and the public have heard or will hear the third man speak about his book. They were interested and most bought copies. It seems a far cry from the condemnatory statements made by some of the Labour leadership contestants upon the book’s publication. They hadn’t read it, of course, but since then many others have.
After the party has suffered electoral defeat, it is timely to debate our past as well as our future. The two are linked. And we don’t have to dismiss one in order to make progress in the other.
In The Third Man, I take the reader back over twenty five years of our party’s fall and rise, not simply the thirteen in government and not just that period after the Iraq war until 2006 when relations between our Prime Minister and Chancellor entered a trough and when their policy differences over NHS and schools reform, university financing and pension policy flared.
Political change on the scale we undertook it, in the creation of New Labour, required intense and sustained teamwork and partnership, trust and mutual support, over a long period of time. Tony and Gordon were at the centre of this – in the main – productive and creative activity. But in a truthful memoir and autobiography, when I was personally a part of this relationship over so many years, you cannot explain the good and the bad times without describing what the participants said and did, to as well as with each other. And it is better to tell the story earlier rather than later, before preparing for the next election.
If I have one abiding memory of the period when we were creating New Labour it is the friendship and comradeship amongst all those who made it happen. And that friendship endures, including in the election campaign this year. It has been a happy time and a very successful one. We must have been doing a lot right, although you might not think so to listen to those hastily announcing the ending of New Labour as if you can turn its principles and precepts on and off like a tap.
Millions of voters didn’t think this way and we have to ask – as my book does – why so many of them decided not to support us in this year’s election. Was it because they thought all of a sudden that we were too New Labour? I think not. And that is the central message of The Third Man.
Peter Mandelson is a Labour peer, a former cabinet minister, and author of The Third Man: Life at the heart of New Labour.
