Chris Trotter says there are 'heaps' of lessons New Zealanders can learn from what is unfolding in the United Kingdom

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” – Benjamin Disraeli.

By Chris Trotter*

The latest revelations from the “Epstein Files” have precipitated a dangerously destabilising political scandal in the United Kingdom. Many commentators are drawing parallels with the similarly disruptive “Profumo Affair” of the early 1960s.

That scandal, which blended sex and espionage in high places to deliriously toxic effect, set the scene for the “Swinging Sixties” which, for a few brief years, transformed London into the global capital of “cool”.

Sadly, this scandal, precipitated by the revelation of Lord Peter Mandelson’s extraordinary dealings with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, will not usher in a period in which “England swings like a pendulum do”. Rather, it will cause the already dreary skies over the British Isles to grow even darker.

The Profumo Affair signalled the end of the Age of Deference. No longer would one’s position in society count for more than one’s personal conduct. No longer would the key institutions of the realm be protected from scrutiny and satire.

For many Brits this was a thoroughly welcome development and long overdue. Far from the skies darkening, the sun seemed to have broken through. In the eyes of the rising post-war generation, the future glowed with promise.

Sixty years on, broken promises litter the blighted streets of Britain like uncollected rubbish. What the latest tranche of the Epstein Files has hugely facilitated is a forensic analysis of how and why those promises were broken, and by whom.

For more than thirty years Mandelson plotted the course of British politics: sometimes out front, more often from behind the scenes. He called himself the “Prince of Darkness”, others preferred the “Dark Lord”. Neither sobriquet is suggestive of sweetness and light. While practically everyone agreed that Mandelson was preternaturally clever; almost no one was silly enough to suggest that he was good.

What Mandelson and his friend Tony Blair did was harness the disillusionments of the 1970s and 80s to a new way of doing politics. Sure, values would play an important role in the marketing of the “New Labour” project, but they must never be permitted to get in the way of what works.

The New Labour project was driven by the relentless logic of an amoral pragmatism, forever captured in Mandelson’s quip: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” It was a critical signal to the City of London that it should pay no attention to what a Blair-led Labour Government might say, but keep its eyes firmly fixed on what that government’s ministers were ready, willing, and able to do.

So far, so far away. There’s a measure of grim entertainment in watching the slow-motion implosion of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government, and in discovering just how utterly and ruthlessly committed the party’s New Labour faction was to preventing the election of a Labour Government led by Jeremy Corbyn. But are there any lessons New Zealanders can draw from what is unfolding in the United Kingdom?

(Apart, of course, from the lesson delivered by the Nineteenth-Century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who said: “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”)

The answer, sadly, is “Yes, there are heaps of lessons.”

Starmer’s rise to power was effected largely by the man who is currently (but possibly not for much longer) his chief-of-staff, Morgan McSweeney. Crucial to the success of McSweeney’s political scheming is what the political journalist Paul Holden, author of “Fraud: Kier Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the crisis of British Democracy” has portrayed as the unprecedented intensity of McSweeney’s hatred of Labour’s socialists, and the lengths to which he, along with his mentor, Mandelson, were prepared to go to purge them from the party.

Similar levels of hatred were evident in the New Zealand Labour Party between 2009 and 2017.

The Helen Clark-led Labour Government had come to power in 1999 with the critical support of the left-wing Alliance and the Greens. This fact, alone, was enough to require the enactment of a number of unabashedly social-democratic reforms. That both Clark and her finance minister, Michael Cullen, were themselves social-democrats (or had been in the not-too-distant past) made this requirement a lot easier to fulfil.

With Clark’s retirement in 2008, however, open ideological warfare broke out in Labour’s ranks, pitting those who favoured a return to Labour’s social-democratic roots against those who, drawing inspiration from Blair’s New Labour project, were committed to replicating its amoral pragmatism in the New Zealand Labour Party.

Anticipating by several years McSweeney’s extreme factionalism, the MPs who ended up dominating the Labour Government installed by Winston Peters in 2017, Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, and Chris Hipkins, waged an unceasing war of attrition against a Left which in 2012 Hipkins memorably characterised as “the enemy within”.

As Jeremy Corbyn discovered in the UK, enjoying the support of the party membership was no protection against the variety of factional rust that never sleeps. David Cunliffe was psychically ill-prepared to withstand the relentless hostility of his caucus enemies. In 2014 he led Labour to a crushing electoral defeat.

The eventual triumph of Ardern-Robertson-Hipkins triumvirate in 2017 ushered in a government distinguished by Ardern’s extraordinary ability to “sell” a values-based transformation of New Zealand society.

The arrival of the coronavirus, and the emergency measures required to fight it, made many New Zealanders feel that her promise had been kept. Their world had been transformed. Ardern’s government was re-elected in 2020 with more than 50 percent of the Party Vote.

Mandelson’s besetting sin is his belief, communicated to New Labour since the mid-1990s, that words spoken in pursuit of a parliamentary majority do not need to be matched by deeds. The New Zealand variant was spelled out by Labour’s Steve Maharey, who shrugged-off a government failure with the words: “It’s just one of those things you say in opposition and then forget about in government.”

Voters notice election victories, but very few monitor closely the actions of their party in government. Providing the economy keeps ticking over more-or-less adequately, people quickly lose track of politics.

It is only when Labour governments insist on keeping their left-wing election promises, ruffling the feathers of the powers-that-be, that things start going wrong.

What Mandelson and his ilk, both in the UK and here in New Zealand, have always struggled with is how to govern when the economy stops ticking over. Instinctively, Labour voters turn to “their” government for support, unaware that, objectively-speaking, it’s not their government any longer.

Large sums of money have changed hands; important economic changes have been promised. Betraying your voters is one thing, betraying your friends at the big end of town is something else.

Perhaps that’s why Mandelson refused to cut his ties with Epstein. Perhaps, when the economy turned sour, Mandelson (and a host of others like him) needed someone to intercede on their behalf with the men to whom so much had been promised, and who were now clamouring for their pounds of flesh. An intercessor who had all the billionaires’ phone numbers and knew all their dirty secrets.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.