He was right, I said. ‘You saw everything we did through the prism of “We want to destroy you.” We saw everything you did through the prism of “You want to get Tony out.” It was a sort of mutually assured destruction.’
For my part, I couldn’t help but reflect on how different, and how much more fulfilling, my life had become since I had left front-line British politics. For a long time after my second defenestration, I had felt angry and resentful. Before I finally accepted that a third return to government was impossible, I had been fixated on finding a way back. I felt unfairly exiled. I felt incomplete without a seat at the cabinet table. That was no longer true. The new job had transformed me. On an unfamiliar and much wider stage, I had found myself bartering, bargaining and seeking common cause across over two dozen European states, and, in my role in the world trade talks, across the globe. I was still doing politics, but not politics as I’d known it. In the formative years of New Labour, ‘concession’ and ‘compromise’ had been almost dirty words. Rather than shying away from confrontation, we had sought it out, even orchestrated it. We were convinced that head-on battle was the only way the Labour Party would really change – and be seen to have changed. Our time in government should have altered that. In some ways, it did. Yet almost everything we accomplished in government, and the great deal we failed to achieve, was forged in combat – this time, between Gordon and Tony. My job in Brussels, in contrast, revolved around building relationships, alliances, coalitions. That was what had made it initially so challenging, and now so satisfying.
But the main reason I had come to enjoy my European ‘exile’ was personal. For the first time I could remember, I was out of the Westminster spotlight. For the best part of two decades, I had been defined by an increasingly malign media image. I was Machiavelli with a red rose. The Prince of Darkness. I had managed over time to come to terms with Mandelson the Media Caricature. I also realised that I had played a part in its creation. What had hurt most was the unbridled aggression with which the media sought out ‘stories’ to burnish the caricature, and to propel their narrative of what kind of politician and person I was. This had had a real and damaging effect on my career. It was certainly a central factor in my second resignation. Still, the media storm that had hastened my departure, however inaccurate or misleading, could at least have been seen as the press doing its job. The reporters and headline-writers were sinking their teeth into an issue relating to a public figure performing public duties. That was not the case with intrusion into my personal life, or the licence that reporters and photographers felt they had to stalk my every step, pick away at my every social engagement, home in on my every friendship and – as I could hardly help but recall on Capri – every holiday. I reflected, with a relief that would have been unimaginable in my higher-octane years in Westminster, that I was no longer news.
For equally unimaginable reasons, by the time my holiday was over, that assumption would turn out to be wrong. Three days remained before I was due back in Brussels. On the way, I was making a stopover on the Greek island of Corfu. Two months earlier I had received a phone call from Matthew Freud, the PR supremo married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth. Matthew had been one of the key advisers during my challenging stewardship of the Millennium Dome, and had become a good friend. I had also got to know Elisabeth well. Matthew was calling because he wanted me to come to Corfu for Elisabeth’s fortieth birthday party, which was being organised at the house there of my friends Jacob and Serena Rothschild. I imagined that it would be fun, and looked forward to spending a few days on the waterside estate, which I recalled with fondness and gratitude from the time I had spent there with Jacob and Serena after my first ejection from government. I looked forward too to seeing their son Nat, with whom I had also become close.
By the time I arrived it was Friday evening, just before the party was due to begin. The other guests – an array of yacht-borne Murdochs, and friends of both generations of Rothschilds – were already there. There was not a bed to sleep in at the Rothschild home. In part, as Nat explained to me with a smile, this was because one of his old Oxford friends was staying there: George Osborne, David Cameron’s closest political ally and Shadow Chancellor. Nat arranged for me to be billeted on a yacht belonging to another of his friends, the Russian industrialist Oleg Deripaska. I also knew Oleg, though not well, having met him previously through Nat. I was intrigued by his rags-to-riches story. Having begun life in a poor corner of rural Russia, he trained as a physicist, and had become a major businessman during the entrepreneurial free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only had he become wealthy, he was also well-read, and voraciously interested in a constellation of social and economic ideas, as well as Russia’s future, which dominated his conversation. Despite later media suggestions that I had gone to Corfu to join Oleg for a holiday on his yacht, I barely saw him, except for an amusing episode in which, during an early-morning wander around his boat, I stumbled across a yoga session he and his wife were taking, and I happily joined in under the instruction of their teacher.
I knew George Osborne, too. We had never exchanged much beyond social pleasantries and that is all we did at the birthday party. It was not until the following evening, with repercussions that would emerge only later, that this changed. The remaining guests, about thirty of us in all, had arranged to assemble at a seaside taverna down the road from the Rothschilds’ house. I had fallen asleep in the evening sun, and arrived late. When I showed up, there were two vacant seats, one at each end of the table, and two simultaneous shouts of welcome. One was from Rebekah Wade, then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. The other was from George. I planted myself next to him, as he’d seemed the more insistent. For the next fifty minutes or so, we talked. By the time our remarks, or a skewed version of them, surfaced in the press a couple of months later, a central point would be lost.
Yes, we talked frankly, on both sides. But it was the kind of conversation political colleagues on opposite sides of the party fence have far more often than is sometimes realised. I had been one of the creators of New Labour, and the repositioning David Cameron and George were attempting with the Conservatives was in many ways being modelled on that. I was sceptical that they had learned the real lesson of New Labour: that it was not just about creating a new image, but required making tough policy changes and bringing the party behind them. But it was a fascinating and not unenjoyable chat, a bit like two golf pros comparing their swings. In fact, George did most of the talking. He spoke animatedly, initially about the Prime Minister. It was not just that he disliked Gordon Brown; he seemed consumed by his interest in what the Observer had once famously called Gordon’s ‘psychological flaws’. George recited a litany of slights he said he had suffered at Gordon’s hands in the months while he was shadowing him as Chancellor: Gordon had blanked him whenever they met; he had denied him the courtesy of advance copies of Treasury statements; on one occasion, George had phoned him only for Gordon to put the receiver down, or so he said. He was especially fascinated by the tensions between Gordon and Tony, saying that the ‘TB-GBs’ had made both him and David Cameron aware of the importance of sustaining their own relationship.
I listened. On occasion, I nodded. And yes, I added a brush-stroke or two to the psychological portrait George had obviously spent many months assembling. But I said nothing I hadn’t said to others at one time or another before. Nothing, in fact, I hadn’t said to Gordon. So it was difficult not to smile when, in George’s leaked version of our discussion which subsequently appeared in the press, I was said to have poured ‘pure poison’ about Gordon into his ear.
If anyone’s ear was scorched that evening, it was mine, as George expounded on what he saw as his and Cameron’s Conservative equivalent of our New Labour project. They had drained the Thatcherera ideology from the Tories, detoxified the party, he said, to make it electable. I said it had always been my understanding that the rising generation of Tory MPs and the current activists had grown up under Thatcher, and their thinking had been formed under her leadership. George said this was true only up to a point. The party was mainly made up of old people, not young people, most of whom were involved more for social than political reasons. In his own constituency, there were lots of divorcees, widows and widowers whose interest in the party was as a place to find companionship, or a partner. ‘They’re not interested in ideology,’ George said. ‘They’re interested in a Conservative Party that wins.’ His, and David Cameron’s, interest