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History is being rewritten. The story we are told is that an evil man called Peter Mandelson, pursuing his own interests, went rogue to collaborate with a serial abuser of girls and women, undermining the good work of people seeking to defend the public interest. All this is true. But – and I fear many will find this hard to accept – it is only half the story.
The much harder truth is that Mandelson’s disgraceful dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were less a betrayal of his brief than an unauthorised extension of it. In 2009 – just as, we now know, Mandelson was passing sensitive information to Epstein – I argued that the government department he ran, called Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Berr), “functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest”.
Berr was a smaller and less chaotic version of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Its purpose, I suggested, was to bypass the House of Commons on behalf of capital. It allowed Gordon Brown’s government to create the impression that it was defending the public interest while simultaneously, but more quietly, appeasing powerful lobbyists. In contrast to other government departments, Berr was largely run by unelected lords, who had either been corporate executives, corporate lobbyists or, like Mandelson, members of a concierge class operating on their behalf. I wrote that these ministers, appointed by Brown, “appear to have formed their own lobby group within government”.
Berr sought to part-privatise Royal Mail, breaking a manifesto commitment. It succeeded. It tried to block the EU working time directive: UK government filibusters delayed and weakened it. It attempted, less successfully, to undermine the equality bill, whose aim was to ensure equal pay for women (Mandelson’s simultaneous dealings with Epstein were not the only respect in which he showed disdain for women’s rights). It undermined environmental legislation. It was “quietly building a bonfire of the measures that protect us from predatory corporate behaviour”.
So when Brown, who was prime minister at the time, expresses his shock and betrayal, please forgive me a small gasp of frustration. In his interview on the BBC’s Today programme, Brown claimed that in 2009: “We were solving a major financial crisis … all my thoughts were on how we could save people’s jobs and savings and their livelihoods.” But not only did he allow Mandelson to attack the public interest on behalf of business, he greatly increased Berr’s budget. This was despite the fact that, as I noted at the time, Mandelson “was partly responsible, both in Blair’s government and as European trade commissioner, for promoting the culture of deregulation that catalysed the economic crisis”. On one hand, Brown was trying to solve it. On the other, at the behest of corporate lobbyists, he was setting up the next one.
Brown also told the BBC, in justifying his appointment of Lord Mandelson, that the man had “an unblemished record as the [European] trade commissioner”. An unblemished record of what, exactly? Neocolonialism, perhaps. While Mandelson was in that post, he sought to impose draconian trade provisions on some of the poorest countries on Earth. He put pressure on them to let EU corporations muscle out local firms and make privatisation legally irreversible, threatening people’s access to health, education and water. He sought to force African countries to hand over crucial resources at the risk of widespread hunger.
Yes, when Mandelson was a minister in Brown’s government, he betrayed the national interest. But this is what, by other means, he was appointed to do. His treachery, while it went way beyond his official mandate, was not a bug, but a feature. The corrosion of democratic values was institutional. And this spirit has prevailed ever since. Keir Starmer’s government of all the lobbyists is no exception.
Brown, in proposing remedies for the secretive machinations Mandelson conducted, writes: “Conventions about commercial confidentiality should no longer prevent public service contracts delivered by private companies being subject to reasonable freedom of information requests.” I could scarcely breathe when I read that. It is exactly the demand some of us made when Brown rolled out the private finance initiative (PFI) across the public sector, enabling businesses to get their hooks into every aspect of state provisioning. When we tried to see the contracts, to understand what was being done in our name, Brown’s Treasury repeatedly blocked our information requests on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”.
The sense of betrayal that Brown quite rightly feels is the same sense of betrayal some of us felt towards the governments in which he served. Yes, Brown had and retains some great qualities, and did much good. But he is also a remarkable escapologist. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten how his PFI programme planted a timebomb in public services, enabling corporations to take the profits while leaving the risks with the state: one of the reasons why they are now in so much trouble. Almost everyone appears to have forgotten his crucial role in the Iraq war: standing with Tony Blair and financing it. He rightly called for Vladimir Putin and his “enablers” to face justice for their crime of aggression in Ukraine. Yet it’s the same crime that Blair and his enablers (including one G Brown) committed in Iraq.
But it is not just Brown who is rewriting history. The media are 50% of any problem, and the story most of it loves to tell is of one bad apple. Heaven forfend that we see the systemic problems. There is a reason why Mandelson kept returning to government, despite sackings for his over-enthusiastic relationships with plutocrats. He was brought in to do the dirty work. The governments in which he served could loudly claim to be doing something, while subtly and simultaneously undoing it.
Mandelson’s treachery is an extreme instance of the dominant mode of UK politics over the past 45 years: the subordination of democracy to the demands of the ultra-rich. Abuse and exploitation – of women and children, of poorer countries and their people, of workers and contractors, renters and customers – are baked into the system.
If you cannot diagnose a problem, you cannot fix it. We urgently need to see this for what it is. Mandelson’s grovelling to the sinister rich is disgraceful, disgusting, deceitful, a crushing of women’s rights and of democracy. But it is not a deviation from the system. It is a manifestation of it.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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