Mendacious Mandy: Take Everything With A Pinch Of Salt

Mandelson: having this dishonest man
in government despoils public life

Let us start where we must - with the basic character (or is that base character?) of one Peter Mandelson who, by one of the more curious acts of turning things on their head, has recently been ennobled and reinstalled at the heart of Her Majesty's Government. Noble he is not but a crook he undoubtedly is.

One can say this with some certainty.

The facts which lead to this conclusion, facts which have never been contested or in any way gainsaid by this individual, are that in 1996 Mandelson purchased a property in Notting Hill, London. In so doing he applied to the Brittania Building Society for a mortgage. Now one matter that building societies look at as being highly material to their decision whether to grant the mortgage or not (or did once upon a time - more recently mortgage lenders seem only to have looked at the bottom of a teacup for inspiration in such matters) is how the purchase price is to be financed as a whole. In making his application Mandelson failed to declare that of the purchase price some £373,000 originated not from his own pocket but by way of a loan from a fellow MP, Geoffrey Robinson. This fact is one which is highly material to any mortgage application since it impinges directly on the ability of the mortgagor to repay the loan if he also has a liability to repay a vast sum of money as repayment of a debt.

In the event the Brittania decided not to make a fuss about Mr. Mandelson's lie, as well it might if it wished to take a pragmatic view of the world: prosecuting would have upset the Blairite wing of the Labour Party (then in the ascendant and likely to be running the country for a longish period of time) and doubtless the Brittania decided that to make an enemy of such people was not a good thing especially if there ever were to come a time when they needed (as recent events has shown us) help.

Yet had they decided to shop Mandelson to the Police, he would, I suggest, have had absolutely no defence whatsoever to a Bill of Indictment charging him with an offence contrary to Section 20(2) of the Theft Act 1968 (applicable to the time, now repealed and replaced by other legislation), namely of dishonestly obtaining the execution of a valuable security, to wit a mortgage deed, by deception, an offence which carried a maximum of seven years imprisonment. I do not recall any explanation ever being advanced by any of the actors, least of all Mandelson himself, which was either consistent with innocence or which any reasonable Jury would have accepted for a nanosecond. I can imagine some defences that might have been advanced, which might have been credible if the accused were a pensioner suffering from Alzheimer's but would be laughable in someone who was, at the time of discovery of these unsavoury facts, a Minister of the Crown. In short Mandelson was guilty of an offence for which people are routinely sent to prison up and down the land, day in, day out. Nor is it a footling offence. Unless he was lucky enough to come up in front of a veritable milquetoast of a Circuit Judge, an immediate sentence of imprisonment would have been inevitable given the sums involved and the blatant nature of the offence.

I set this out not for the fun of so doing but to remind us all of just how base is the character of this creature who has now been readmitted to Government notwithstanding his dishonest and disgraceful conduct for which, once upon a time, he would have had his career ended once and for all. No, I set it out because we must, when considering the facts relating to his conduct as EU Trade Commissioner, consider all his explanations through the prism of his being a dishonest crook. In those circumstances we should proceed, I submit, on the basis that whatever he has to say on the matter should be treated with the utmost circumspection unless it is corroborated by the evidence of others upon whom it would be reasonable to rely.

That is before we even begin to contemplate how we might view the character of this individual, who permanently carries with him the foetor of the dung heap. Let us face it, there was a time when having Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell (the most interesting Propaganda Chief since April 1945) at the heart of our national life was the political equivalent of every home in the land having a toxic & nuclear waste plant, a landfill site and open mains sewer at the bottom of the garden, so much did they poison the well of political discourse and activity in this country. This troika must bear the greater part of the burden of blame for devaluing the reputation of politicians and politics in the last fifteen years or so. It will take many years before that reputation can be restored, if ever. Throw in the second resignation and you may now begin to look at Mandelson's explanations of his relationship with Mr. Deripaska with your feet firmly on the ground.

Looking at what he has had to say on the matter would, I feel, make any Prosecutor (or, I daresay, leading Defamation Silk) positively salivate, nay slobber, at the thought of running Mandy up hill and down dale in the witness box. Almost every statement that he makes on this affair is, when further facts are extracted from him (much as one would remove a tooth from a bronze statue) shown to be a careful evasion, a half-truth or a good old-fashioned downright lie. Very little of what he has had to say has been the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Upon such treacherous sands would be founded a deeply satisfying cross-examination that would render all thoughts of a prolonged career for this malodrous creature quite nugatory.

So pungent has become the rank odour which emanates from the office of Lord Mandelson that even the EU has found itself squirming in embarrassment at his conduct, something which, as an institution which is itself riddled with corruption to which it turns a totally blind pair of eyes, means that he really is in the ordure up to his eyeballs. The EU has now felt itself moved to demand that Mandelson release details of his diary (which, bizarrely, is considered not to be a document for the purposes of rules concerning disclosure of documents but a 'management tool', and thus exempt.

Expect a Nixonian resistance to such disclosure, unless, of course, the diary has either been carefully sanitized or reveals, mirabile dictu, that Mandelson's dealings with Mr. Deripaska are as pure as the driven snow.

But, whatever happens, remember that, unless there credible evidence from an unimpeachable source to support anything Mandelson has to say on the matter, his utterances should be treated with the greatest of care. He has, after all, a track record of dishonesty, dissemblance, disingenuousness and dishonourable conduct that makes Gordon Brown look positively trustworthy.

Lest the Tories thought they were going to get away with it, let us spend a moment or two with George Osborne. He too is a big loser in all this. One thing one expects in a putative Chancellor of the Exchequer is that he should have good judgement. We must now look upon Osborne as utterly lacking in that quality.

Firstly it was a grave misjudgement to tittle-tattle about Mandelson's views on Gordon Brown (which come as no surprise to anyone). To poke a stick into a bee's nest has always been thought unwise: to shove a stake into a hornet's nest is plain stupid.

Secondly it was a grave misjudgement to have anything to do with Mr. Deripaska, let alone have any sort of discussion with him about money. If Osborne had good judgement he would have had the good manners to allow himself to be introduced politely to this man and then move smartly to the other end of the yacht as soon as he decently could. His dalliance with the man was also plain stupid.

As such it suggests that Osborne does not have good judgement and I for one now doubt very much his credentials to be our next Chancellor.

But let us finally return to Gordon's new found chum and pet shyster, Mandy. One must, I think, be moved to recall Sherlock Holmes little aphorism concerning the conduct of the dog in the night and ask why Rothschild was moved to make such a fuss about Osborne's indiscretion. After all the conventional method is such cases is discreetly to trash the malefactor behind his back with all the others in his set so that he finds himself not being invited to any more smart house parties or luxury yachts again. Yet Rothschild chose to go nuclear by writing, frequently, to The Times. Given all we now know about the relationship of Mr. Derispaska to Rothschild and Mandelson and of how things seems to have worked so well in favour of the former's businesses over the course of Mandelson's tenure as EU trade Commissioner, it is a matter of intense curiosity to know why so violent a reaction was provoked.

It couldn't have anything to do with money, could it? Lots of it?

And perhaps we could be forgiven for thinking that the ferocity of the assault on Osborne is no more than the displacement activy of a duck and her brood of ducklings found in a tight spot by a wandering fox, designed to draw our eye away from the real story.

UPDATE: No sooner had the EU thought about lifting up the manhole cover on mandy's sewer than they rapidly dropped the idea - this in the Independent sums it all up:

Officials in Brussels said there were no grounds for an official investigation into Mr Mandelson's behaviour, and insisted they would not make public the list of high-level professional links which would reveal the extent of his relationship with aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.

And although there are strict rules under the Commission's code of conduct about entertainment and the registration of gifts, Commissioners do not have to declare or register what they do or who they spend time with on holiday.

So that's all right then: as far as the EU is concerned you can only be corrupted if you are engaged whilst on official EU business. if, however, you are on holiday, you are deemed to be incorruptible at that time.

So, if, whilst padding round in your hushpuppies on a tycoon's superyacht off the coast of, say, Montenegro, and a Russian Oligarch slips you a large brown envelope with US$ 500,000 to change the tariffs on, say, gobstopper imports, that is nobody's business but your own.

Oh please......

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