Mandelson: RIP New Labour
By politics.co.uk staff
Peter Mandelson, one of New Labour’s principle architects, has admitted his project has dead as he prepares to publish his memoirs.
The former business secretary, who with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair created the political momentum which won Labour huge landslides in the 1997 and 2001 general elections, said he expected his party’s politicians would cease openly referring to New Labour.
“I am not arguing for the New Labour of Blair, Brown and Mandelson to be preserved in aspic – that would be the opposite of the revisionist instincts that lay at the root of our project,” he wrote in an article for the Times newspaper.
“This phase of new Labour is now over and died on May 6th 2010. But the cast of mind that new Labour represents – aspirational, reforming, in touch and that faces up to the choices power demands – must not die with it if our party is to be a serious party of government again.”
Lord Mandelson’s memoirs are set to be published by HarperCollins later this summer.
The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour will outline the “soap opera” of the Blair-Brown years. Its author has promised it will “ruffle some feathers”.
