For most people, an appearance before a select committee is a sweaty affair, a time when their shortcomings can be systematically exposed. Peter Mandelson views the experience rather differently. Partly because he is a man blessed with no memory of ever having made a mistake – each day for his lordship is a tabula rasa on to which his brilliance can be written anew – but mainly because he has never properly understood the process. In Mandyworld, a select committee hearing is more like a late night chat show. With himself as both host and guest. Peter meets Peter.
For some months now, the business select committee has been wrestling with the government’s industrial strategy. In particular, what it is and whether we actually have one. The committee is aware that the government believes it has an industrial strategy but it has been struggling to find any concrete evidence for its actual existence other than a series of reactive measures to ongoing crises. In its bid to find more meaning, the committee had now turned to Mandelson as the man who believes he invented the idea of an industrial strategy.
The country had been in a complete mess in 2008 when he was brought back into government as global business tsar, he said, and without his key interventions Britain would still be a complete industrial backwater. “I was like a doctor in a casualty station,” he said with characteristic modesty. Few others recall his role as national head of triage with quite such clarity, remembering instead a period when the government lurched from one financial crisis to another.
But Mandelson was not to be deterred. “I aspire to a world where industrial strategy is part of the government DNA,” he announced. “I reclaimed industrial strategy from the smokestacks of the 1960s and 70s. It wasn’t about propping up failed industries. I saw myself more as an industrial activist.”
Various committee members nodded their heads enthusiastically, even though it wasn’t at all clear what this meant beyond writing a few cheques for businesses he quite fancied and pulling the plug on ones he didn’t. Much of the strategy appeared to be mainly a figment of Mandelson’s own imagination.
It was unfortunate, Mandelson continued, that not everyone had always appreciated his brilliance. The CEO of the Redcar steelworks had sent some extremely disobliging letters about him to the then prime minister, and Vince Cable had been far too hopeless as business secretary during the early years of the coalition, but these were crosses he had learned to bear. Yet these were nothing compared to the Brexit hurricane that threatened to sweep away the country’s industrial strategy.
“I fear that Sir Ivan Rogers’ [the UK’s ambassador to the EU] comments that trade negotiations to leave the EU will take five to 10 years ring true,” he said, sounding rather more thrilled than fearful at the prospect. The Prince of Darkness was moving towards the light. “Trade negotiations are easier to start than finish. We are risking a very severe deterioration in the UK business environment. This deterioration is not going to happen straightaway. That was the mistaken impression given in the referendum. It will be a gradual, inexorable worsening of the conditions for business in the UK.”
Labour’s Anna Turley was the only committee member to make Mandelson pause for thought. It was the Labour working class who had voted for Brexit because they felt the government’s industrial strategy had let them down. What could the man who had done his bit to run down many of these traditional industries offer them?
“There’s a splendid new course at Manchester Metropolitan University, of which I am chancellor,” he added unnecessarily, “where students can learn at the screen school.” Forget swords into ploughshares. Turn steel workers into live bloggers and video-makers. It was no worse than the government’s industrial strategy but it still left a lot to be desired. Let them eat granola.
