Not him again! Mandelson says he’d love to be in a Starmer Cabinet
LoRD Mandelson has said he would love to serve under Sir Keir Starmer.
‘There’s not a day that passes without my missing being in government, the Labour former Cabinet minister said.
‘The likelihood of my going back to government, I think, is fairly small, but it doesn’t stop you dreaming.’
He also urged Labour leader Sir Keir to project his personality more.
‘He’s the opposite of Boris Johnson. I mean, Boris Johnson has a strong personality, but a poor character,’ he claimed. ‘Keir Starmer is different. He’s got a very good and very strong character, but he doesn’t project his personality enough.
‘It’s challenging for a leader of a political party because the leader, more than anyone else, embodies what the party is about and its vision and what it wants to do for the country. He’s the chief message carrier for the public from the party and he has to set out his stall and make an impact.’ Lord Mandelson said having the ‘best ideas in the world’ was not enough ‘if you don’t sell them properly, if you don’t make an impact’.
He told the Daily Telegraph’s
Chopper’s Politics podcast: ‘Every day, you’ve got to get up and think: “How am I going to make more people understand better what I and the party are about today?”’
Lord Mandelson became known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ for his ruthlessness modernising of the party which helped to secure Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
He was rewarded with key roles in government – serving as secretary of state for Northern Ireland, for trade and for business.
The former MP for Hartlepool left the Commons in 2004 to become an EU trade commissioner, a role he held for four years before joining the House of Lords in 2008.
As a peer he served as first secretary of state in the final year of Gordon Brown’s premiership.
Lord Mandelson was a vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party, previously saying he worked ‘every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office’.
And he suggested Sir Keir should separate himself from Mr Corbyn’s politics. ‘The Labour Party is not going to make itself fit to fight the next election unless it makes a very clean break with the last ten years of failure and successive defeats.’
Lord Mandelson resigned as trade and industry secretary in 1998 after it emerged that he had accepted a secret loan of £373,000 from Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson to buy a £475,000 house in Notting Hill.
He was forced out because he failed to declare details of the loan to either the Commons register of members’ interests or to the lender.
He also resigned over his involvement in a passport application for an Indian billionaire.