Strictly’s loss, it seems, is our gain. Fifteen years ago Peter Mandelson was in the cabinet as business secretary, having been recalled to frontline politics to try to rescue the premiership of his on-off friend/foe Gordon Brown. At the height of the 2008 financial crisis he revealed that he was relaxing by enviously cheering on the sequinned former BBC chief political correspondent John Sergeant. “It would be nice to be asked,” he added.
And he was asked, several times: while he was still in government and after Labour’s 2010 defeat. “Oh, my biggest disappointment is when I turned down Strictly Come Dancing,” he says now. “It was a terrible mistake. They came to me and I was teetering on the edge. I nearly did it and then I lost my nerve … disaster. And then, of course, Ed Balls took my place, took off and look — now he’s a superstar. I’m so envious. I lost my nerve. I just thought, suppose I fail? Suppose I make an idiot of myself? It’d be curtains.”
It is a rare moment of self-doubt from a great political survivor, the perennial comeback kid who famously declared, after hanging on to his Hartlepool seat in 2001, “I am a fighter and not a quitter,” in a speech he now says was “too shouty and overly emotional and slightly ridiculous … it still haunts me”. After a career that began as a producer on the Sunday political programme Weekend World, he became the Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s director of communications in the 1980s. “I hauled down the red flag and put up the red rose in its place, and helped drag Labour back from the brink.” With Brown and Tony Blair he helped to create New Labour, becoming known as the first spin doctor and “prince of darkness” (a nickname he hates), before serving in a cabinet from which he was twice forced to resign, then quitting Westminster for Brussels to serve as a trade commissioner. “Then I returned as first secretary of state to help bulk up Gordon Brown’s premiership — that worked very well indeed until it didn’t, but only because Polly’s Lib Dems got into bed with Danny’s Tories.”
Polly is Polly Mackenzie, a former Liberal Democrat policy adviser and speechwriter for the leaders Charles Kennedy, Ming Campbell and Nick Clegg, who over 15 years helped her party into coalition government and then — thanks to tuition fees and all of that — out again. “Basically, 80 years of political progress for the third force in British politics was all but obliterated,” she says. “I bear responsibility for lots of the decisions that we had taken. And I’m very aware that that will affect the shape of politics for probably the rest of my life.”
And Danny is, of course, Daniel Finkelstein, columnist for The Times and Conservative peer, who started out working for David Owen in the SDP before advising most Tory leaders and prime ministers over the past three decades. I have brought them together for a new weekly podcast, How to Win an Election, which will be essential listening in the run-up to next year’s campaign. They can give real insight into the slogans and stunts, policies and politics, that will shape how we vote.
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“I should probably be on How to Lose an Election as I worked for John Major and then for William Hague,” Finkelstein jokes. He does that a lot. He is very funny. His party trick is being able to come up with political jokes at a moment’s notice. It’s why he has spent years helping Tory leaders and prime ministers to prepare for PMQs. During our first meeting there are a lot of jokes. Gallows humour, even. These are three people who know the highs and lows of winning and losing.
Needless to say, Mandelson considers his role in the 1997 New Labour landslide his crowning glory, describing it as “a near perfect campaign”. At the end of it all, as Blair glad-handed crowds on his way into Downing Street, Mandelson felt a wave of relief and even anticlimax. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?’ and tears welled up in my eyes.” Mackenzie says the first time politics made her cry was when she was listening to a tub-thumping Brown speech about foreign aid in 2004. “Politics, if it isn’t making you cry with joy sometimes or anger at others, then it’s not really working,” she says.
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Finkelstein isn’t so sure. “British politics very rarely makes me cry, because I think the exchange of ideas and the sort of peace and solidity of the British political system is actually profoundly satisfying. But there’s lots about politics that makes me cry.” He thinks of how his mother survived Belsen (just), while his father was sent to Siberia by Stalin. “Politics killed my grandmother, and it exiled my grandfather, and it starved my mother, and it had a good go at freezing my father to death, and it stole everything that we had, every sofa, every house, every piece of crockery. So politics matters deeply. I can’t cry about an exchange in British politics but I can cry about some of the things that politics has done to my family and to many people worldwide.”
At some point in the coming year someone somewhere deep in a campaign team will have an idea for a stunt. They will think it brilliant. History — and the experience of my new colleagues — suggests that they should think again. In 1997 New Labour had a party political broadcast featuring a British bulldog called Fitz. As part of its launch, the party’s deputy leader, John Prescott, was supposed to pose for photographers walking the patriotic pooch. Prescott didn’t show up, so it was Mandelson who had to go walkies. “I felt incredibly self-conscious,” he recalls. “I looked rather stupid.” And then questions emerged about Fitz’s genitalia. “And in the end, in the broadcast itself, they had to be airbrushed out. I mean, they were so big and so prominent.”
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They don’t make stunts like they used to. In the late 1990s Finkelstein was tasked with organising a “bonfire of regulations” on the seafront at Bournemouth. He pointed out that people throwing the Maastricht treaty into the flames might look a bit like Nazis burning books in the 1930s. In the end the bonfire plan was blocked … by regulations. A decade later Mackenzie was advising the Lib Dems when Ed Davey, then the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, was struggling to get attention for the party’s demand for an in-out EU referendum (yes, really). “We thought it’d be really clever for Ed to basically have a strop about that in parliament, upset the Speaker, get thrown out, and then all the Liberal Democrats would walk out.” So they did. And nobody cared. “It was like, ‘Yeah, bye, then.’ Absolutely zero political impact at all.” She understands why the Lib Dems will not go into the next election talking about rejoining the EU, after what she terms the “collective madness” that Brexit imposed on our politics, but also asks: “If we can’t tell the truth about Brexit, in a way, how do you tell the truth about anything?”
One of her first jobs in politics was as an adviser to Davey, now the Lib Dem leader. Not that it was always easy to be honest with him. In 2004 they were travelling together on a train to Wales when she noticed that there was a tear in his trousers, which meant his boxer shorts were just about visible. “And I didn’t tell him, because I thought, ‘We’ll just get through it.’ But then, extraordinarily enough, a month later I was in his office and I noticed he still had the same tear in the same trousers — he just hadn’t noticed.”
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Despite the impeccable CVs of the trio, there will be some who question the need for another political podcast. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are busy agreeing agreeably on The Rest Is Politics, George Osborne and Ed Balls have taken up the habit with Political Currency, and Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan have given in to the clamour to hear more from them with The Today Podcast. We have, some feel, reached peak political podcasts.
How to Win an Election will be less about the week’s news and more about how it feeds into an election campaign, with lessons from history from three people who have been there and done it. Mandelson, who spent years trying to bring down Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, is clear about what he hopes to get from his reinvention as a podcaster: “I want to finally put an end to Labour’s brilliant election-losing history that scarred the last 50 years. If you just think of it before 1997, we were lose, lose, lose, lose. We then had Blair, Blair, Blair. And then we reverted back to lose, lose, lose and lose again. So how on earth is Labour going to win not just once, but more than once in order to ring the changes that they say they want to?”
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Before we even get to the how, we should discuss the when. One of Boris Johnson’s last useful acts was to restore to the prime minister the power to call an election by abolishing the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which had been introduced in 2011 to sustain the Cameron-Clegg coalition. So when should Rishi Sunak go to the country? The latest an election can be held is January 28, 2025, but should he use the element of surprise and go early next year? Or cling on until the bitter end, Micawberishly hoping something turns up?
Finkelstein reflects on his time advising Major in the mid-1990s, when his boss decided to run down the clock until the last possible moment in May 1997. He now thinks they might have reduced the size of the defeat by holding the election sooner: “The longer it went on, the more aggravated people became with the government, the stronger the ‘time for a change’ feeling was, I think the greater the defeat.” But which PM would give up No 10 sooner than necessary?
Mandelson, who remembers that Major government looking as if it were “decaying before people’s eyes”, expects Sunak to call a general election on May 2, the same day as council elections, “rather than have Conservative councillors sort of incinerated across the country and then have to plan an election campaign a few months later”.
Mackenzie thinks it is “totally nuts” that the date of the election is even in the gift of the prime minister again. “Of course, when I get to change all the rules of everything, we can also have a proportional system and more of a healthy sense that a parliament has to find a way to sort its problems out.” Mandelson, though, is unimpressed by the idea of proportional representation: “You’d have more parties, more MPs, more configurations, more people arguing and negotiating in smoke-filled rooms trying to forge majorities here and there.”
The Tories now are trying to portray the Labour leader Keir Starmer as Mr Flip-Flop, who changes his mind all the time, and are saying that nobody knows who he is or what he stands for. Finkelstein thinks they’re right, but that it doesn’t matter. “It’s essentially true but if I was Keir Starmer I would basically do nothing about it. I think all he has to do in this election is make sure people think he’s reassuring, reasonably safe, not going to make alarming big changes that scare people. And not be a Tory.”
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Mackenzie wants more substance: “You can have beautiful icing, but you need the cake that is underneath it.” Mandelson also thinks Starmer has to do more, providing some hope and optimism to a cynical country that is feeling pretty “down in the dumps”. But that must not tip over into triumphalism. Some in Labour, especially those celebrating at the party conference in Liverpool this month, felt the election was already in the bag. “That is so poisonous,” Mandelson says. “It is so corrosive for a party.” Complacency leads to half-baked ideas presented half-heartedly. “The election hasn’t taken place, so calm the giddiness.”
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While the polls point to a big Labour win, I suspect a hung parliament remains underpriced. Mackenzie was there in 2010, negotiating with both Labour and the Tories. She doesn’t think there will be a repeat of the coalition talks this time, claiming it is too “poisonous” for the smaller party, but has some advice just in case: “I remember that [the Tory policy chief] Oliver Letwin brought Viennese chocolate sandwiches — every time I see them I get flashbacks to the coalition agreement. But those little dynamics of [the Tories] trying to be friendly and warm and open were so different from the conversations we had with the Labour Party, which was in some weird corner office in Portcullis House. No snacks. Definitely bring snacks.”
Never mind Strictly, perhaps Labour needs Mandelson to sign-up for Bake Off.
Listen to How To Win an Election here or wherever you get your podcasts, available every Tuesday
