The British are more insulated from the intrigues of their politicians than is the case in a small society like Guyana, where any number of people know some of their representatives personally, and where various of them can be encountered at one watering hole or another. And then there is the local gossip circuit, which is never short of tales containing unquantifiable elements of truth and fiction.
But our politicians are not given to committing themselves to paper about what goes on within the inner sanctums of their parties; there are no publications about internal debates and external negotiations on any matter – with the arguable exception of Dr Cheddi Jagan, who wrote The West on Trial many moons ago. Even he, however, left no memoir about the events relating to his assumption to office, or the frictions and negotiations during the period of his presidency. Perhaps he would have picked up his pen had he lived long enough to retire, but that is something we shall never know.
Occasionally, a little light is thrown on political events in the form of correspondence published in the newspaper. Such was the case with a letter from Mr Desmond Trotman to Stabroek News earlier this year about the demise of the Guyana Third Force; it recorded for posterity a sequence of events which the public would otherwise have simply not known about, and might consequently have been lost to history. This is not, however, something which happens often.
It is true that there are memoirs in print from officials who inhabited the corridors of power at some stage, like Tyrone Ferguson and Halim Majeed. Their reminiscences cover parts of the PNC era, but they were never at the core of the party, and while they had a certain privileged vantage point in the Office of the President, they would not have been privy to the full range of PNC debate, or even necessarily to some of the thinking of the presidents they served. Of course, in fairness, memoirs are not histories; they are not intended to be comprehensive and are invariably self-serving. They are just one more source for the historian (and follower of politics) to utilize in making an assessment of an era or a specific set of events. The best of them, however, do provide insights and information which might otherwise remain hidden from the scrutiny of posterity.
How useful political memoirs are depends in the first instance on the veracity of the author (making allowances for the various biases, etc, which historians normally do), and, most important, how close they were to the decision-making process. While the UK’s political gossip circuit might be fairly tightly circumscribed, there is a tradition of politicians – or more often former politicians – writing their memoirs. The thing is, the process tends to be undertaken years after the authors have left office or active politics, when their memories have become attenuated and been subject to a long period of reflection and revision. Time allows the editing of recollections in a way that immediate recall does not.
But now Britain is being treated to the revelations of Mr Peter Mandelson (one of the architects of New Labour and a cabinet minister who was at the heart of decision-making), not just about the Labour Party’s thirteen years in power, but the negotiations which produced a coalition government only a few months ago. It has generated a storm of commentary, most of it unflattering to Mandelson, although not all of it critical of the content of his book, which is entitled The Third Man. Mr Mandelson – never one who could be accused of modesty – intends it as a reference to the fact that he was the third man in power, along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
No one is in any doubt that Mr Mandelson is a self-promoter of class. The television advertisements for the book show him sitting in front of a fire in a Dickensian setting reading a ‘fairy’ story – one of them about a ‘king’ who never smiled. He then goes on to say, “Enter the Prince of Darkness,” but cuts the sentence short to tell his audience that that is for another day. ‘The Prince of Darkness’ is a name that his earlier critics coined to describe him, and he revels in it. Lord Kinnock, a former leader of the Labour Party acidly remarked, “so much was said about him as, for instance, the Prince of Spin and the Prince of Darkness, that he inhaled and he’s actually come to believe that caricature of himself.” Rather more succinctly the Independent observed that he would “eat himself if he were made of chocolate.”
While Lord Kinnock has been the most forthright of the Labour czars in their condemnations of the memoir, there is reason to believe that the officially more reticent were not amused either. Tony Blair, for example, allowed it to be known though the back door, so to speak, that he was “livid,” while through the front door he had his spokesman deny that this was so. If he wasn’t livid, he should have been; he is recorded by Mandelson as calling Gordon Brown “mad, bad and dangerous” and “beyond redemption.” The author also recounts how Blair reneged on a promise not to fight the third general election. In fact, one of Lord Kinnock’s main criticisms of the work is that there is too much focus on the “pathetic personality clash” between the Brown and Blair camps.
Mr Mandelson does not give Mr Blair much quarter where the Iraq war is concerned either; he accused the former prime minister of becoming “simplistic” in his thinking as the war took its toll, and of developing a kind of “tunnel vision.” When he asked Blair about post-invasion arrangements, the prime minister is alleged to have replied, “That’s the Americans’ responsibility. It’s down to the Americans.”
In a general sense the public already knew about the clashes between Brown and Blair and their various supporters, but the details of what everyone said about whom is something that under normal circumstances might not even have reached the public domain – at least, certainly not so soon after events. What is most unusual, is the account of the coalition negotiations, because they are of such recent vintage. Nick Clegg is reported as demanding Brown’s resignation in return for a deal, while Mandelson’s own comment on the leader of the Liberal Democrats in an interview is that in the coalition with the Tories, Clegg is subordinate and lacks the “weight and machinery to assert his point of view.” He sees this as a possible source of dissension further down the line.
While everyone agrees that Mandelson wants to make money and has an outsize ego, there are those who believe he is still playing political games. Peter Osborne in the Daily Mail, for example, thought the book was trying to ensure that Brown got all the blame for what went wrong during the Labour years, so that Mandelson could ensure “the future of Labour belongs to Tony Blair and his disciples…”
It was a leader in the Times, however, which put some perspective on the book from the public’s point of view, specifically in relation to the coalition negotiations. The paper saw virtue in the disclosures so the electorate could see the inherently undemocratic horse-trading which goes on behind closed doors – in the case of the ultimately unsuccessful coalition talks with Labour, in defiance of the will of the people which had been so recently expressed. The editorial also asked how it was that the leader of the party which won the third largest number of seats could dictate to the party in second place who their leader should be. Yet this is the system (a form of PR), it continued, that the Liberal Democrats would wish to ‘inflict’ upon Britain.
It appears that Blair’s memoirs are to be published in the near future; nothing has been heard from Brown, although it is likely that his potentially (assuming he is completely open) could be the most interesting of all.
As for Guyana, citizens are unlikely to read the memoirs of anyone who played a central political role in events any time soon, if ever. And if perchance someone with inside knowledge were to do so, would we ever get anything as direct and unvarnished as Mandelson’s reminiscences? Almost certainly not. The smoke and mirrors political culture which is so entrenched here, in addition to local politicians’ distaste for committing themselves to paper would militate against any exposés. One can only hope that those outside the inner circle who have intersected with the political czars and their associates at different points, will record their encounters in a diary or some such, so that in due course the public, or at least posterity, will be able to get glimpses of our behind-the-scenes happenings.
