4 hours ago
Peter Mandelson warned Tony Blair not to allow Gordon Brown’s supporters to wreck Labour’s 2005 general election campaign from within, according to newly released government files.
Relations between Blair and his chancellor were strained in the autumn of 2004 as Labour prepared to try for a third successive election victory. Brown and his allies believed the prime minister had reneged on a promise to step down towards the end of Labour’s second term to allow him to take over.
In one file released to the Archives in Kew, west London, the now Lord Mandelson warned Blair that such tensions would need to be carefully managed during the election campaign.
Before leaving for Brussels to take up the post of Britain’s EU commissioner, the former cabinet minister said one of the challenges would be “agreeing where GB’s people can be included without giving them a veto or scope for insider demolition”.
While Brown would want to inherit a healthy Commons majority when he did eventually take over, he would not want Blair to get the credit, he wrote. “A big issue will be you personally. The media will want to bring pressure on you to a new level of intensity. Next door [Brown] will want a good majority but will not want you to do well.”
In the event, the two men were able to patch up their differences sufficiently to campaign together, although the tensions quickly re-emerged once Labour was back in office.
Mandelson also stressed the need to woo “what passes for the ‘left’ media” after the bitterness over Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Alastair Campbell, who had stepped down as No 10 communications chief amid controversy over the government’s infamous dossier on weapons of mass destruction, should be kept in the background, he advised.
“You must be conscious of the need to create reasons for them to come back on side. Avoid things that will antagonise them (therefore be careful about AC – he is indispensable but must be equally invisible),” Mandelson said.
