To gain and hold power politicians must practise, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, an economy of truth. But absolute mendacity corrupts absolutely. If you want to know what that rot is like, look at Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, men who once shone in the firmament of western democracy but who, long before they go to their graves, have become walking embodiments of political putrefaction.
Blair and Mandelson were two parts of the triumvirate that created the triumphant New Labour project in the late 1990s. The third member was Gordon Brown – a man who reminds us that morality and power are not mutually exclusive. Brown used his power as chancellor (and then as prime minister) to effectively end child poverty in Britain – a moral cause for which he keeps fighting.
Brown has shown no interest in self-enrichment. He renounced his prime ministerial pension. When he gives paid speeches and appearances, the money goes to a foundation that has to date raised more than £5 million (€5.8 million) for initiatives supporting access to education for children worldwide and neonatal healthcare.
That it is so evidently possible to behave with decency and dignity in public life makes the conduct of Brown’s former political partners all the more revolting. If we want to understand why democracy is in such trouble, the careers of Blair and Mandelson are exemplary: greed and cynicism feeding off each other.
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Blair’s landslide victory in the UK’s general election in 1997 was a moment of genuine hope. Without being naively starry-eyed, it was something of a wonder to see the emergence of a politician of such outstanding ability. Blair, like Bill Clinton who emerged at the same time, was brilliantly gifted: fluently articulate, graceful under pressure, relentlessly focused, able to look the electorate in the eye and convey both seriousness and idealism.
Those qualities mattered hugely to us in Ireland. The peace process was not Blair’s invention but his energy, charm and persuasiveness were critical to the making of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. That agreement in turn wasn’t just an Irish thing: it held out a promise for the world that democratic politics really could work, that the optimism that flowed from the end of the cold war could be translated into real and lasting achievements. It is hard to remember now, but Blair was helping to give politics a good name.
To mark the extent of his descent, just listen to a silence. Donald Trump claimed that Nato troops, including the British, “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines” during the US-led war in Afghanistan. Blair sent those troops out to fight for and with the Americans: 457 of them died and more than 2,000 were wounded. What did Blair say when Trump insulted them? Nothing.
He kept shtum because he has become a professional sycophant, a courtier-for-hire. In 2024, he told the Sunday Times that autocracies are “fine if you happen to have really smart people running them”. He has placed his generational political talent at the service of grisly killers such as Kazakhstan’s former ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman – all while making himself very rich indeed.
Had Blair spoken up in defence of his own soldiers, he might have upset Trump – and thus lost his place on the founding executive of the Board of Peace, a crackpot alternative to the United Nations on which Trump will serve as chairman-for-life. Blair is not stupid – he knows this is a grotesque vanity project and an assault on what remains of the postwar international order. But: whatever it takes to remain within the charmed circle where money mates with power.
We also learned more last week about Mandelson’s nauseating relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Bank statements released by the US department of justice seem to show Epstein making payments totalling $75,000 (€63,000) to accounts related to Mandelson in 2003 and 2004. Epstein also paid £10,000 (€11,500) for an osteopathy course for Mandelson’s partner in 2009 – after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.
How on earth did such stellar figures in democratic politics – men who could get millions of people to believe, in the words of their theme songs, that things could only get better – slide into this morass of amorality?
Part of the answer is ideological. The New Labour project involved being, as Mandelson put it, “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”. The centre left would no longer worry about how money is made – so long as it got to cream enough off the top to pay for better public services. Somewhere in the small print of that Faustian bargain was the implication that it would be okay for the architects of this deal to get filthy rich themselves.
But the momentous fall from grace was Blair’s backing for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It necessitated the concoction of an imminent threat by Saddam Hussein to unleash weapons of mass destruction on the UK. No objective analyst believed this to be true. It was always the pretext for the plans of George W Bush and his vice-president Dick Cheney – and for Blair’s desperate need to suck up to them and stay in with the big boys.
The damage this betrayal did to the whole New Labour project was obviously immense. And precisely because Blair had seemed to embody a reinvigorated post-cold war democratic politics, the harm was not confined to Britain. Trust – the subsoil of democracy – was blighted by toxic suspicion.
What we’re seeing now is the private cost. Cynicism corrodes the inner core of a personality. Something breaks when a politician stops practising an economy of truth and instead devalues the whole currency of veracity. Self-worth is replaced by the pursuit of high net worth.
And for what? To be remembered as grasping minions of autocrats and abusers? Blair and Mandelson will go down in history as crawlers and creeps. They should ask Brown to remind them what self-respect feels like.
