Lord Mandelson - Former Labour Government Minister, UK HARDtalk

Jeremy Corbyn is the most unlikely leader of one of Britain's big two

He was elected Labour leader by a party electorate swollen

by an army of new, mostly young, radical members.

Anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti just about everything

My guest is Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, one of the architects

What does Jeremy Corbyn mean for Labour and for Britain?

Peter Mandelson, welcome to HARDtalk.

Do you now feel like a stranger in your own political house?

I don't feel like a stranger, but I do feel very worried indeed

Look, the hard but simple truth is that a far-left figure, a far-left

leader like Jeremy Corbyn, with his views on the economy and public

spending, on national security, defence, his anti-Americanism and

all the rest, with those views, we are not going to be able to

construct an election-winning coalition at the next election.

And it grieves me to say it because I love my party much more

But we are, I'm afraid, in danger of being written off

The man has been in charge of the party for less than two months and

you've decided that he has no hope of ever winning a general election.

Well, my fear is that Labour supporters, Labour voters, let alone

the rest of the country, are being disenfranchised by his leadership.

I mean, they are people who have voted

Labour, want to vote Labour again, but can't vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

47% of people who voted Labour in the general election this year

say they do not see Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Ministerial material

Now, at 47% of Labour voters, I emphasise, that is a very,

very worrying, life-threatening reality that we have to face.

We'll talk about his policy propositions in a minute,

but you just seem to have missed out one rather important element of the

Corbyn story, which is that he won a stonking 60% of the vote in the

He drew in hundreds of thousands of new members to the party.

This is a man who has a mandate of extraordinary power

I do not deny for one moment that he speaks to a real chunk

of left-leaning, left-thinking people in this country.

But it's your party and your party declared that it wanted

But my party also wants to be elected to government

Yes, he speaks to that chunk of left-wing opinion

in the country, but that's only 5-10% of the electorate as a whole.

If we want to be elected again as the government of this country,

we have to get 30%, 35% of the country, not 5-10%.

Now, that is the reality that we've got to face up to.

Just on one point of detail about that election.

I don't want to spend too long on it, but there were a lot of rumours

that you tried very hard to find a way of stopping the Corbyn express

train, including at one point telling the other three candidates

in that election that they must pool their resources,

At one point, even saying to them, all of you pull out

because that will render the election null and void.

You read it on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

I'm just asking if there's any truth in it?

Would it have been better if that election had been stopped?

I don't think it was possible to do that

because the election had begun with the acting leader, Harriet Harman,

sort of throwing open the windows and doors of our house and saying,

We don't care who you are, where you come from,

or how you voted in the past, we want you to vote for our leader.

Now, of course, she changed her views as the

Let's look at one or two facts about this too.

Jeremy Corbyn fought rather a good campaign.

I mean, he caught a popular mood, a sort of antiestablishment,

sort of anti-elite sentiment or mood that's present not just

He was faced with alternative candidates who were, let's face it,

a bit sort of business-as-usual, a bit sort of buttoned up

But also, and I say this with an element of self-criticism,

the modernisers in the Labour Party had failed to modernise themselves.

We had failed to renew our own offer to our own party.

So, you know, we are all at fault in a sense.

He did seem to offer a rather exciting alternative,

even though it wasn't an election-winning alternative,

Although - just bear this in mind, if you will, Stephen - I mean, the

votes of the actual party members, as opposed to the sort of ?3 people

who signed up and the affiliates who were sort of harvested by our big

super-union, the number of votes that he got

in the actual party were fewer than the total votes that the other

When you say things like that, Diane Abbott and other allies of Corbyn

say, this is a man - Peter Mandelson - who is sort of in denial.

You cannot accept what your own party has done

I've heard her say this and, yes, they did elect Jeremy Corbyn

and we have to face up to the consequences of that.

But it was not quite the stonking great mandate that you

have characterised it as and we have to...

What we have to do in the party is go back to our party membership and

engage them in a very serious debate about how we are going to become,

or remain, a genuine party of government, rather than be relegated

What you seem to be engaged in right now is planning, developing strategy

I mean, this is a leaked memo that the New Statesman

got hold of, purportedly from you, which says, "Nobody can replace him

- Corbyn - until he demonstrates his unelectability at the polls.

It would be wrong to force the issue before the public have

issued a verdict, but we must be ready when that happens."

and he judges that really, he is not the election-winning leader that he

has presented himself as and he chooses to take himself off,

And what we have to be ready with more than anything else is serious,

new, fresh policy ideas to win support for in the party

We haven't done enough of that for a very long time.

So you're saying with, what, London mayoral elections coming up, with

Scottish elections coming up, both of them significant tests of where

Labour stands next year, you're saying that right now, Labour people

should be developing plans on the premise that Labour will do

very badly and thinking about how a new leader can be

What I'm saying is that people in the party should judge him by what

He said he was going to be a guy who believed greatly in equality,

for example, and then appointed the top four posts in his Shadow

He said he was all for open debate and yet

when he faced defeat on the issue of Trident at our party conference,

he promptly closed down the debate and transferred it to Scotland.

He said he wasn't going to be a sectarian leader

and yet the appointments he's made to his own top staff are people who

have the barest connection with mainstream Labour Party thinking.

One of whom, the head of policy, has described hard-working

Labour MPs as 'Tories' and urged people to vote for their opponents.

Now, this is not quite what people thought they were getting

And therefore, he has to be judged as much as anything, Stephen, on his

competence and his professionalism and how consistent he is being with

what he first advertised himself as during the campaign.

Understood, and I think it's pretty plain where your judgment lies.

But I'm keen to ask you again about this notion of preparing - both in

terms of personnel and policy - for post-Corbyn Labour, which you say

could be as early as next year because if the results

go against him next year, you think that will be the end of him.

I haven't actually put a time limit on it, but we do have to prepare...

No, chiefly, we have to prepare by thinking through our policies.

We are not going to win re-election as a party in this country

We've tried that, it didn't succeed the first time,

We had to undertake the sort of renewal of our policies, our outlook

We have to do that now, just as we did in the 1990s

Now, I'm not saying that we should go back to the same policies

I'm not saying that we need the same team or the same apparatus as we had

in the 1990s, but we do need something as strong and potent and

appealing to the country as a whole if we're going to succeed in winning

Do you see anybody active in the party today who,

in your words, will be 'ready, should the eventuality arise'?

Stephen, it's not a matter of individuals.

We all have to play our part in working out our new policies,

reconnecting ourselves with the electorate in this country,

demonstrating convincingly that we remain a serious party of

government, and organising - both amongst our own grassroots as a

party, but also, in those communities and neighbourhoods

And everyone in the party has a responsibility to

Just one element of policy, arguably the most important for any party,

I mean, the polls showed that Ed Miliband

lost primarily because people didn't trust him and the Labour

Party with managing the economy.

Now, Jeremy Corbyn's taken the party in a different economic

He's got very strong, clear policies.

People's quantitative easing, nationalisation.

And he talks about nationalisation of the banks, of the railways,

and changing the whole sort of energy economy in this country.

And he's not very keen on markets and he's not keen

on private business, and therefore, he's not keen on

the overwhelming source of jobs that people undertake in this country...

If you were asked today, who do you trust more to manage

the British economy - George Osborne and the Tories or

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and Labour - what would you say?

I would say that it is a very, very bad and sad day for this country...

No, that's not answering the question.

..when we do not have a serious

opposition, a serious alternative to

It's not just a problem for Labour, the fact that we're looking future

defeat in the eyes, it's a problem for the country as a whole.

This country and its democracy needs a credible, effective opposition, an

alternative government, and we are not offering that at the moment.

So if I pursue the logic of what you are saying,

you are saying that right now, with Labour in the state it's in,

offering the policy propositions it is offering, you would rather have

the Tories in power than Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell?

No, I'm saying I want a Labour government.

I want it elected at the next election and the only

possibility of that happening is if we get credible, serious

policies which mainstream people in this country can vote for.

Does it ever strike you that Jeremy Corbyn has achieved something

that, certainly in the latter years of New Labour, you,

He's energised a whole group of new people into politics.

I'm just looking at one recent Ipsos Mori poll.

Overall, it wasn't very good for Jeremy Corbyn, but it did show

that while only 20% of over-55s approve of the way Corbyn started

his job, 57% of 18-34s thought he was doing an OK job.

He is attracting young people, and also,

people who had felt disenfranchised from politics altogether.

And you and your politics failed to do that.

I think that's a really, really good point.

We looked like more of the same towards the end

We also had a tendency - and I'll be frank about this -

to come across to many people as sort of valueless pragmatists,

rather than idealists, people who were really working for change.

Partly, it's being in government for so long.

Secondly, when Blair left Downing Street in 2007, he sort

He was succeeded first of all by a leader in Gordon Brown who

chose not to emphasise New Labour or the achievements of the government

But also, didn't generate the new policy ideas with

He was then, in turn, succeeded by another leader,

Ed Miliband, who spent a lot of his time telling people what a terrible

disappointment - almost a betrayal - the New Labour government had been.

But whilst he was busy burying us, he didn't generate or produce any

alternative or new policies of his own.

And I think people just looked at this and said - where are they

They're not New Labour, but what are they?

Yeah, I mean, that answer rather delicately poured a lot of the blame

onto Gordon Brown, but people who used to be close to you like Matthew

Taylor, Geoff Mulgan, they've thought about this very hard and

they say one of the big problems that Mandelson, Blair and others

have to own up to is that your style of politics was top-down,

centralising, secretive, not transparent, and that the British

public and indeed the Labour Party became absolutely sick

Well, I don't accept that and there's no evidence amongst

I don't believe that the public tired of or rejected what the

If they felt as strongly as you characterised the voters then

as feeling, they would have elected a Conservative majority government.

I mean, they didn't re-elect us, that's true, but they didn't give

David Cameron and the Conservative Party a majority either.

I think they were sort of left somewhat in suspension between

a Labour Party that had become a Labour government that, to them,

had become less exciting than it had been when it started, a Labour

government which they weren't absolutely sure

what it stood for any more under Gordon Brown, and a Tory party and

a leadership who they didn't really like and didn't want to see becoming

And that's why you got the result that you did in 2010.

Let's come back to 2015 and the future.

And the result was a massive defeat for us in 2010.

And as you've characterised it, a leadership now which is taking

I will leave the Labour Party when I am taken off this Earth in my

Well, there is another option, actually.

I was thinking of the Labour Party divorcing itself from you.

I mean, Michael Meacher, the late Michael Meacher,

said after one of your explosions of anger at Jeremy Corbyn, he said that

your words were 'close to treachery'.

"Many think Mandelson is bringing the party into disrepute and

on those grounds, he could be expelled".

And he was then immediately repudiated in saying that, both by

But my point is that there are people...

Well, there are people inside Labour who

disagree with my politics, who don't like New Labour, you know, who don't

There are plenty of people in all sorts of parties who disagree

I mean, do you ever think - I've become toxic to my own party?

But the point I'm making to them is very, very simple.

You know, we have to decide whether we are

going to be a party of government again or whether we're simply going

And if you want to become a party of government, then you've got to

People may not like it, but I'm afraid it's reality.

But if they indicate they want to be a party of protest, then don't

you owe it to yourself, to the country,

to create a new left-of-centre alignment or join the Lib Dems, or

People like me in the Labour Party - and there are very many people who

think like me, who want the party to be re-elected to government in this

country - have got to go out and re-persuade, re-convince people in

the Labour Party that if we want to be re-elected,

Let me, if I may, end by turning to one specific policy area which you

are very involved in at the moment and the Labour Party is navel-gazing

You are one of the leaders of the Stay-In campaign

when it comes to the future British referendum on the European Union.

Do you worry that such is the volatility of the electorate at

the moment and it seems the sort of frustration with politics as usual,

that this is a time when the public could be persuaded to take the risk,

if you see it that way, and leave the European Union?

Not just in our country, but in many others across Europe.

There is the volatility that you describe and it's true, there is a

great risk that when the referendum comes, people determine their vote

not on the basis of whether we should stay in the European Union or

not, but how happy they are with the government or the Prime Minister, or

what they don't like about a host of other policies that they want to

protest against, and use the referendum as an opportunity to do

so. So it's a very big problem for us. It is.

The message you represent, if I may say so, is the message

of defending the status quo and a sort of negativity.

Saying, you know what, you may not like the European Union

very much, but it's better than the alternative, going it alone.

The message is certainly that the benefits that the European Union

gives us - greater prosperity, greater safety, greater influence

in the world - all those are true, the benefits outweigh the cost.

Of course we don't think the European Union is perfect

And the Prime Minister is right to argue and work for reform.

But in the meantime, the benefits of our staying in

and that's why we should remain in the European Union.

The problem for you is that inside your own party, the one that you're

insistent you're going to stay in, the message is that the reform

Europe needs is to be a much more social Europe, a Europe with more

regulation in many areas, when Cameron's going to Europe

and saying, we need less regulation, we need to be more open.

I'm sorry, I don't think it is as simple as that.

The Labour Party does have a pro-European view and Jeremy

Corbyn has had to accept that if he were to move against Britain's

continued membership, there would be a heck of a ruckus, there would be

He knows it, which is why he's shying away from it now.

When you look at the dynamic, and the polls suggest it's going to

be very close, what do you believe Cameron needs to bring back from

this so-called renegotiation process with European leaders to convince

the public that he's got enough to vote Yes to stay in?

I think he has to satisfy British public opinion that Europe is not

on some inexorable course to ever-closer union,

to sort of creating some sort of United States of Europe.

I don't happen to think for one moment that people

But he's got to satisfy the British public that that is not the case.

Secondly, he's got to do something on the pool that we have

in this country through the working of our welfare system for many EU

Incidentally, the same number of British people go

out to other member states of Europe to work there.

But the last thing he has to do and this is very, very important indeed.

He has to get a satisfactory way of conducting a relationship as a

country which is outside the euro, that doesn't use that currency,

We must not have our interests and our rights and prerogatives

within the single market compromised by people who are taking decisions

against those interests within the Eurozone, that's very important.

Are you absolutely convinced you're going to win?

I think on balance, we will win because we have stronger arguments.

I think that is showing every day of the campaign so far.

But it is going to be a huge battle and one which all those who

care about our future prosperity and security in this country, have

Lord Mandelson, thank you very much for coming on HARDtalk.