The man sparring with the German ambassador at a debate about economic and monetary union is unmistakably Michael Portillo. But something has changed. Could it be the famous quiff, shorn into a modest version of its former luxurious self? Or the ready smile and unforced joviality? Or perhaps it is the speaking, rather than the speaker. Gone is the visionary crowd-pleaser. His manner is quietly persuasive. He leans towards the audience, opens his hands and begins a sentence with casual intimacy: “Y’see . . . ” This man has been watching his Tony Blair videos. We are a long way from the 1996 Tory party conference and the “who dares wins” outburst, which appeared to threaten the European Union with the SAS if it got too big for its boots. New Portillo is plus europeen que les Europhiles: “My father fought in the Spanish civil war. A real salad bowl of European integration, I am.” Gone is the old Eurosceptic obsession with parliamentary sovereignty. He concentrates on the economic case against the euro, laced with concern for democracy and accountability. Afterwards, sipping red wine in the middle of a small crowd, he agrees with the seventh person to say that the Tories deserved to lose in 1997: “You’re telling me.”
For the other exiled son of British politics, no such grandstanding is allowed. Peter Mandelson’s road to rehabilitation is far more difficult than Portillo’s nifty self- reinvention. He is doing what comes least naturally to him – keeping a low profile. You will not find the former vice-president of the European Movement putting his pro-euro case (which is just as passionate as Portillo’s anti case) in public; you are more likely to see him doing some quiet good works, helping modernise the image of Voluntary Service Overseas. Mandelson’s speaking engagements are restricted to Labour membership drives for the millennium, mainly on wet Wednesdays outside the M25. Strictly no press. When he did venture to speak at a recent international conference in Belarrio on Lake Como about the Third Way, his comments were blamelessly moderate. He got there and back without anyone reporting what he said, a minor miracle given his tendency to attract attention.
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