The oily bastard speaks

Peter Mandelson

I had my head shot off by all sides when, in the leadership election, I expressed a view on Labour's direction. Plus ça change. But the leadership has been decided and Ed Miliband should be given space to lead the party alongside the new generation of Labour politicians. I want them to succeed.

If they are wise, that generation will learn from the past. Before this year's election we lost touch with the electorate. The world had moved on from the mid-90s New Labour mantras. But also we lost New Labour's ability to speak the language of fairness to a squeezed "middle Britain". The public found it harder to understand what a vote for New Labour meant any more.

But it is not New Labour's successes and failures in government that currently concern me: it is what happens to it as a political force. We who created New Labour need to be far more self-critical. We did not do enough when we had the chance to put down strong enough New Labour roots.

Tony Blair's successor as Sedgefield MP, Phil Wilson, has lamented that we were elected on 1 May 1997 and serious attempts at party reform stopped on 2 May. He is right. We went off to government and only returned to the party when it came to election time, and then fleetingly. We lost sight of one of the bitter lessons we had learnt in those wilderness years in opposition: a party that loses the willingness constantly to reform itself loses the capacity to renew itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/08/new-labour-generation-ed-miliband

Isn't there a merchant bank you could be running into the ground somewhere?

The Skin

He bemoans the fact that Labour badly neglected it's grassroots support for 13 years (something he personally bears a large part of blame for) but his big idea seems to be making the Labour party less democratic by stopping elections for the shadow cabinet.

You can't have it both ways Mandelson.