Peter Mandelson – Something In The Genes?

Speaking at the launch of his memoir The Third Man, Life at The Heart of New Labour, which he only finished writing two weeks earlier, Peter Mandelson said, ‘It was a high wire act. Now I’m used to living dangerously, flying too close to the sun, but even for me it was a bit of a daredevil project.’ Indeed. But how did the high wire act begin? Perhaps something runs in the family?

Born in 1953, Mendelson entered a world still shaped by the shadow of post-war austerity. The National Health Service had just been founded. The railways had been nationalised. Rationing was finaly coming to an end. Churchill was serving as Prime Minister for a second time, following Clement Attlee’s premiership. Britain had become a nuclear power in 1952.

Peter’s mother was Mary (née Morrison), the daughter of Herbert Morrison — Labour Party royalty — who, in the decade before Peter’s birth, served as Home Secretary from 1940 to May 1945 in the wartime coalition government. A Londoner and the son of a police constable, Herbert Morrison would precede his grandson into the House of Lords, becoming Lord Morrison of Lambeth, as well as a Companion of Honour and Privy Councillor.

The other side of the family was also well-connected and, some say, true royalty. Father George Norman ‘Tony’ Mandelson, in another taste of what might be passed on by a gene, was a flamboyant advertising executive. After serving in the Royal Dragoons in the war, Tony joined the Jewish Chronicle in 1947 and spent the rest of his working life with the paper.

Jewish but not steeped in Judaism, Tony was an atheist whose father, Norman, was more serious about the faith. Norman, a founding president of Harrow United Synagogue, was also of the Jewish Chronicle, where he was a financial journalist. Growing up on Bigwood Road in North London, Peter attended the Garden Suburb School in leafy Barnet. A grammar school boy, he went on to Hendon County Grammar School, where he became involved in the local theatrical society.

He played the lead in The Winslow Boy, Rattigan’s take on a young boy accused of theft and the complex legal manoeuvrings required to uncover the truth. Interesting. From grammar school to Oxford, where the recently de-frocked Ambassador to the United States studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Also during his teenage years, Peter joined the Young Communist League and sold copies of the Morning Star outside Kilburn tube station.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mandelson claimed he attended meetings of the League when an 18-year-old sixth form pupil in 1971/2. ‘I went into it for social reasons,’ he told an Institute of Public Policy Research meeting. ‘I followed someone in – I just thought love would blossom.’ At the time of The Guardian interview, Mandelson, then a minister without portfolio in Tony Blair’s government, said, “I was never a member of the Communist Party. That is a pure smear.”

Recollections vary. MI5 whistleblower David Shayler was to state that not only was Mr Mandelson a full member of the Communist Party, but that he, Mr Shayler, had seen his membership card.

By age 22, Mandelson was himself troubling the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, penning an article after spending ten days in Israel at the end of an Arab League-sponsored tour of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordon.

In 1979, aged 26, Mandelson was elected as a Labour councillor in Lambeth, the borough’s leader at the time being the uncompromising ‘Red’ Ted Knight. Interestingly, both Morgan McSweeny (Starmer’s present controversial chief of staff) and the current Environment Secretary, Steve Reed, also cut their teeth on Lambeth Council. Mandelson stood down in 1982, disillusioned with the state of Labour politics and the far left council.

Three years later, Labour leader Neil Kinnock appointed him as the party’s director of communications. In 1987, Labour lost the election to Margaret Thatcher’s Tories, but picked up a number of seats through a slick media operation, which included a party political broadcast directed by Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire).

In 1990, Mandelson was selected as the Labour parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool and, despite confusing a local chip shop’s mushy peas for guacamole, won the safe seat at the general election two years later. In opposition, Mandelson grew close to two then shadow cabinet ministers – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and after the sudden death of John Smith in 1994, backed Blair over Brown to become the New Labour leader.

Having played a prominant role in the future Prime Minister’s campaign, he became director of campaigns and helped to secure the party’s election landslide in 1997. A key part of New Labour, alongside Blair and Brown – the ‘Third Man’ of his memoir’s title – the rest, as they say, is history. Albeit a history of scandals and controversy. To understand the enigmatic and complex Lord Peter Madelson of Foy, should we delve further into the history books? I think we should.

A somewhat breathless 2008 Daily Mail feature traces the patrilineal line to Polish Jewry via the Rothschilds. Peter’s great-great-great-grandfather, Naphtali Felthousen, was a Polish army colonel when that territory was part of the Russian Empire. He won battles and was awarded his own coat of arms. The family plotted against the Tsar and was forced to flee the Empire. Peter, the piece suggests, has a legitimate claim to be King of Poland. Or not.

Towards the end of the article, the Mail rather sheepishly concedes the fragility of such grand claims: “Extensive searches of records in both Poland and Russia unearthed no trace…” before adding, to the disappointment of crestfallen readers, “…with records largely destroyed during the Second World War…”

Beyond exaggerated family lore and overexcited tabloid journalism, what we do know is that Colonel Felthousen’s son, Nathan — Peter Mandelson’s great-great-grandfather — was born in Warsaw around 1800. Amidst the constant turmoil of Eastern Europe, he made his way to London in 1830, where he worked as a baker. There, he changed the family name from Felthousen to Mandelson — mandel being the German word for almond, a key ingredient in baking.

In England, he married Phoebe Cohen. One of the Leicestershire Cohens, Phoebe’s father was a wealthy businessman and, by an indirect route, related to Nathan Meyer, the founder of the Rothschild banking empire, and the first Lord Rothschild. In 1833, the Mandelsons embarked for Australia with Peter’s great-grandfather, Levy, being born at sea en route. In the antipodes, the extended family flourished.

Settling in Goulboun in rural New South Wales, Levy became a storekeeper, merchant, and general wheeler-dealer in the booming gem and gold fields nearby. In 1846, the family had purchased two adjacent blocks in the middle of Goulburn on which they built the opulent Mandelson’s Hotel. Sitting opposite the railway station, this still stands today and still operates as a hotel under the same name. Our friends at Cemetery Scribes inform us;

In the two decades that followed, [Levy] operated as a storekeeper, gold buyer and gem dealer in Tumut. He was a prominent figure in the town and took the lead in many social events and civic organisations. He served as a Justice of the Peace and Magistrate and was the president of the local literary society. The town was surrounded by goldfields, and as Tumut prospered, so too did its storekeepers. He decided to retire in the 1870s and he and his family moved to Sydney.

Levy also married well. Wife Sarah was born in Australia, but her father, Samuel, was a New South Wales politician, landowner, businessman and owner of stores from London’s Lambeth. After emigrating in 1834, he became the co-founder of a merchant company alongside his brother. In 1877, Levy, Sarah, their eight children and a servant left Sydney and sailed to the mother country to begin a new life.

In the census of 1881, and described as a retired merchant, we find Levy and family living at 49 Clanricarde Gardens, Kensington, in an end terrace house (not the kind of end terrace that Angela Rayner might live in!), a spit away from Kensington Palace. Besides Levy, Sarah and their eight children (number seven and number eight are listed with the middle names Septimus and Octavia) two more children have been born in England. The residence also includes five live-in servants.

The eldest son is Nathan, later known as Norman, who is Peter Madelson’s grandfather – the financial journalist with the Jewish Chronicle. The mini-war-time census of 1939 finds middle-aged Norman living in suburban Harrow, close to where his son Tony and grandson Peter would reside.

Given the lineage — the genes, the wheeling and dealing, the transnational family ties, and the connection to European Jewry — perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the Prince of Darkness’s shifting allegiances. His links to Indian billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and, more recently, the career-ending revelations of a fatal attraction to Jeffrey Epstein, appear to be almost written into the DNA.
 

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