Nick Clegg 'propped up' Gordon Brown to seal Tory deal: Insider reveals Lib Dems never wanted Labor

[Jan Klimkowski]

Tangential to the thread but....

Peter Mandelson responded to Mr Laws’s support for a mansion tax on £2 million-plus houses by *protesting: ‘Surely the rich have suffered enough?’

From the same self-styled Prince of Darkness who declared: "We (Labour) are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich".

Mandelson and a Rothschild recently collaborated on a supposedly "fly on the wall" documentary which was, of course, nothing of the sort:

Mandelson – The Real PM? keeps the prince in the darkness

Hannah Rothschild's portrait of Peter Mandelson leaves our perceptions of the master manipulator intact. Has she failed?

For their surprise screening, the Sheffield documentary festival programmers made an astute choice. Doc-makers like to believe their craft can lay bare truths beyond the reach of other disciplines. What, though, when the camera's turned upon a past master of media manipulation? Will its gaze penetrate the firewall that its subject is bound to throw up? Or will he succeed in demonstrating that this genre too can be spun?

Such was the challenge that Hannah Rothschild took on when she asked Lord Mandelson to let her be a fly on his wall during the slow expiration of the last government. For this joust, she was no mean contender: she has 20 years' experience of construing people both on screen and in print. The terms of engagement weren't bad. She'd have to lay off Mandy's private life (supposedly out of consideration for his partner, Reinaldo), but as much of his political life as lay under his own control would be thrown open to the camera.

Over the eight months up until last June, Rothschild shot 250 hours of footage. From this she constructed Mandelson - The Real PM? The title is deliberately ambiguous. Rothschild calls Mandelson "PM" throughout the film, and wanted to explore both the extent of the Dark Lord's power and the makeup of his soul. He, as she acknowledges, wanted to get her to paint a portrait of himself as he wants the world to see him.

The character who emerges on screen is entirely extraordinary. Mandelson ignores the code of polite fiction behind which other politicians hide. He openly revels in the power he wields, likening himself as a grant-awarding business secretary to a Bourbon prince dispensing bounty. He's convinced of his own superiority to everyone else in sight, and makes no attempt to hide it. Poor Gordon Brown, who out of desperation had begged his long-standing foe to rescue him, is treated like an unruly child. Mandelson has given up on the hair; "I just wonder why he can't tie a tie." This Mandelson is ferociously controlling, permanently disdainful, sinisterly meticulous and merciless to everyone, from dim reporters to his own spin team.

The trouble is that none of this is news. This is Mandelson as we thought he was, and the reason we thought he was like that is that he's always been out to convince us that this is what he is like. When he realised that the world viewed him as a pantomime villain, he decided that this image would do him good and set about burnishing it. His frankness to Rothschild is untypical of politicians in general, but not of him. In the run-up to the election, he was knifing his prime ministerial protegé and bugbear as elegantly in public as he was to Rothschild's camera.

At one point in the film David Cameron is referred to as "a mummy's boy". Rothschild asks Mandelson if he'd rather be thought of as a mummy's boy or a prince of darkness. His reply, "Oh definitely, a prince of darkness!" hardly comes as a surprise. Throughout the doc's 75 minutes (and presumably his 250 hours in the eye of the camera) there's hardly a moment in which its protagonist doesn't seem to be framing not just his utterances but his gestures, mannerisms and facial expressions for the benefit of the omnipresent lens.

After the screening, Rothschild said she'd known Mandelson would be camera-savvy, but she'd hoped that because she'd be around for eight months, he'd forget that she was there and she would "pick up bits". So what bits did she think that she'd picked up? She offered me two examples. One came when Mandy tosses an empty yoghurt pot to an aide. This, according to Rothschild, demonstrates his "imperiousness". The other came when he's hanging up a shirt. This, she said, shows his "absolute attention to minute detail". Neither of these qualities is a revelation. Nor does it seem likely that Mandelson would have been discomfited by the disclosure of either incident.

We don't learn whether Mandy was pulling the strings of government, because we only see his side of the phone calls. Rothschild says she thinks he wasn't, but I needed to ask her to find that out. As for discovering what the real Mandelson is like, all we have to go on is the Mandelson that Mandelson himself presents with so much care. Does this mean that the film fails to uncover the man behind the mask? When I put this to Rothschild, she came back with a thought-provoking answer.

It's that there isn't anything behind the mask. Does Mandelson lie awake at night racked by self-doubt? Does he fear that his compulsive preening damaged the party he says he loves? Is he soaked in remorse for wrecking our politics by installing the culture of spin? Does he resent having been forced to deploy his genius on behalf of masters less deserving than himself? Does he puzzle over what it all meant? Rothschild reckons not. "I don't think he's a multi-layered, philosophical human being," she says. "What you see on that screen is who he is."

She may be right. Unfortunately, we shall never know. The camera shows what the camera can. Sheffield's opening film, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work gave the impression that it had got to the heart of its subject. Yet this was only because its subject seemed to want it to. In the end, documentary-makers can reveal only what those who grant them access choose to let them observe. That may or may not be all there is to see.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/...rothschild

And there there's "Mandelson's Rothschild and Russian pals":

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=3910