Peter Mandelson was long thought of as a devious and graceless politician. Now he is a celebrity. Shenanigans on the yachts of plutocrats are part of his new status, but the consummation of the love affair with the Labour party has set the seal on it. No Strictly Come Dancing this year, but expect long-lens photos of him in Heat cavorting in swimming shorts on some yacht or private beach next summer, with acute analysis of any flab that is revealed. The Browns could hardly re-stage their wedding day for photographers from Hello!, but Sarah Brown instead gave us all a touching tour of their domestic life for the day's television news. Sarah Brown is a poised and sophisticated woman and she gave a beautifully calculated cameo as a loving suburban-style wife.
Of course this is nothing new. The celebrity culture and its media attendants have for some time been consuming politics, even Labour; remember the dazzling Neil and Glenda election campaign in 1992
What is new is that the Labour Party conference has enthusiastically provided the stage for the two vignettes performed by Peter Mandelson and Sarah Brown. I had very low expectations of this year's conference, in part because it is a pre-election occasion. But I did not expect it to sink so low. This is after all, or it used to be, the single opportunity each year for party and trade union delegates to call party leaders to account and to discuss and shape party policy. It was no business of theirs to approve or disapprove of ‘Gordon's' untidiness around the flat, but rather his untidiness over major issues of policy, social justice and democracy. Yet he was allowed to rummage around among a variety of policy ideas, some bad, some good, some old, some new, some lost and re-found to be lost again.
There are those who will cluck their tongues at this complaint, and who will say (and have said) that the party conference was ever thus. It wasn't. Of course, it was never an open and pluralist assembly capable of deliberative debate. For good or ill, decisions hung on the balance of opinion and power among the big trade unions. But it was often enough an intense political cockpit in which party leaders were obliged to explain and persuade and could go down to defeat. Ordinary party members could organise themselves to have a real influence on policy, and even to write it. To my own knowledge they did so on apartheid in South Africa, social policy and internal party democracy, quite apart from the famous 1960 eruption over the nuclear deterrent. I do not believe that party conference in those days would have swallowed this year's doses of schmaltz.
It was Neil Kinnock and assiduous party officials who decided in the 1980s to emasculate the conference and transform it into a rally. Mandelson was of course part of that process. The aim was to shut the trots up, even though Kinnock himself had shown in a dramatic speech that he had the spirit and arguments to rout them politically. Anyway, they ripped the heart out of conference. So it was that even though a majority of members were against the Iraq war, the issue scarcely troubled party conferences, except for Walter Wolfgang's protest in 2005 made famous by the party's own draconian reaction and his being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
