The Things We Think and Do Not Say

What Mandelson tells us about the death of the old politics

Written by Mark McVitie, Director of Labour Growth Group. He writes in a strictly personal capacity.

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Everyone knew. Not the full extent now laid bare by the files, sure: not the leaked government intelligence, not the payments, not the casual callous devotion to a convicted sex offender. But enough. More than enough. Peter Mandelson’s proximity to Jeffrey Epstein was public knowledge. His pattern of entanglement with extreme wealth stretched back decades and had already twice cost him Cabinet positions. The character we were dealing with was known and understood by everyone who mattered. And yet.

Much has been made of the failure of vetting and due diligence. The focus is misplaced. A process should not be required to pre-empt moral and political judgement. The real explanation is more fundamental and more damning: this is the relational logic of Britain’s political sphere operating exactly as intended. Within the social world that made this decision, Mandelson’s status as a tribal giant, architect of New Labour, vanquisher of the hard left, a man who had devoted his life to the party’s cause, overwhelmed what should have been an obvious and absolute disqualification. He was ‘one of us’ and a scourge of ‘them’. A serious figure. The kind of person who deserved reward. That calculus, made in dinner parties and WhatsApp groups, overrode moral judgment so completely that the appointment was treated not as a gamble but as a masterstroke.

Many of us thought it was wrong. Very few said so. Not only because Mandelson was personally feared, though he was. But because to challenge the appointment was to break with the consensus of an entire social world, one in which your colleagues are your friends, your friends are your spouse’s friends, and dissent carries consequences that go far beyond the professional. To speak up would not have ended a career overnight. But it would have marked you out: the difficult one, a bit of a kook, the person who draws uneasy looks at social gatherings and stops getting invited to things. That is enough. So, silence prevailed, as it so often does, and the system positioned itself to deal yet another catastrophic blow to the waning belief the public has in its integrity.

What allowed this culture to calcify was the gradual abandonment of politics as a contest of moral vision. Over decades, the political mainstream came to treat arguments animated by genuine moral force — about power, about who gains and who loses, about control— as crude, almost infantile. The serious person’s politics was one of management: focus-grouped, poll-tested, triangulated into a thin gruel of calculated transaction. The relationship between those who governed and those who were governed reduced to a science, inoffensive and bloodless. Real conviction became a liability. Confrontation rebranded as populism.

A political class that ceased to believe moral conviction mattered in its arguments was never going to sustain the belief that moral character mattered in its people. Once politics becomes management, the only relevant question about a person is whether they are useful. Character is made redundant, because the domain in which character operates — genuine contest over what is right — has already been declared obsolete.

This is not a problem confined to one party. Both major parties have become professional environments shaped by that logic, in which moral character is virtually unconsidered against the twin currencies of alleged talent and tribal loyalty. The filtration process that produces our political class aims to select for people whose entire relational world is organised around the machine. It does not select for healthy deviation, independent judgment, or the basic moral seriousness required to look at a man like Mandelson and say: not him, not now, not ever. No wonder these institutions have atrophied. No wonder the public are sick of us all.

The Mandelson scandal is not an aberration. It is the latest and most grotesque signifier of a political culture that cannot carry on in its current form. What is undoubtedly worth saving in the liberal democratic settlement will not be saved by the people who have presided over its decay. Revival will require breaking the bonds of the old loyalties, with no reverence for sacred cows, no attachment to a mythical past and no instinct to protect the familiar.

Many of us have known this for a long time. Knowing the cost of speaking, we stayed silent. That silence has not served us. It has not served the party. More importantly, it has not served the country. It is time for those who believe this can and must be different to find each other and say plainly what until now we have been willing only to think.