Robert Hutton on Peter Mandelson

I have written a number of articles on my blog about cases When clever people do stupid things and about Why clever people do stupid things.

You will rarely find a more example of a brilliant man who repeatedly does incredibly stupid things than Lord Peter Mandelson.

I suspect future historians will gasp in disbelief at how, between 1997 and 2024, three consecutive Labour Prime Ministers (Blair, Brown and Starmer) appointed Peter Mandelson to some of the most important jobs in their power to bestow, and then kept bringing him back and appointing him to new high offices after he repeatedly crashed and burned in disgrace.

The temptation to appoint him must have arisen because when he was at his most intelligent, Mandelson was one of the most able, effective and persuasive people Labour had.

But it should have been obvious after at most the second time he had to resign in disgrace that when it comes to matters of personal ethics, Mandelson doesn't have the common sense of a deranged wombat and appears to display a serial inability to understand or to learn that yes, the rules do actually apply to him.

Robert Hutton put up a piece on "The Critic" siter yesterday which sums it up.   

  Peter Mandelson must go | Robert Hutton | The Critic Magazine

Here are a few extracts:

"Say what you like about the Right Honourable Peter Mandelson, Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, he still has the capacity to surprise. We knew about the weakness for very rich people. We assumed he was behind plenty of briefing to journalists. But blimey, we didn’t know he was just forwarding the prime minister’s emails to a paedophile financier."

"Monday’s revelations were gobsmacking in every way. Take the way that the then-secretary of state passed the market-sensitive information to the trader. You might have imagined that these transactions involve untraceable accounts or burner phones or pieces of paper stuffed into envelopes and handed over in underground garages. As it turns out, Mandelson was simply pressing “forward” within seconds of the messages arriving on his BlackBerry and winging them on to Jeffrey Epstein’s Gmail account. I guess that was the one thing that GCHQ didn’t expect."

"Naturally, everyone was outraged. Gordon Brown, roused from the cave in Fife where he sleeps until it is time for him to come once again to Britain’s aid, issued a statement demanding an investigation into what had been leaked. The probe might also want to look at who was prime minister when Mandelson was brought back into government, given a peerage, and put in charge of everything."

Robert Hutton tweeted this extract from his article on X:






































You can read the whole article here.

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