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.
The fates of Portillo and Mandelson, both aged 45, bear striking similarities. Both were hit by events that, while unpredictable, were a kind of nemesis. Mandelson was punished for trying to live a rich man’s life on the relatively modest means of a cabinet minister. Portillo paid the price for becoming a parody of Thatcherism. Mandelson symbolises the ruthless modernising of new Labour, Portillo stands with equal clarity for tough individualism and undiluted Euroscepticism. Both are elegant and proud and prone to haughtiness. Both are discovering that the way back is more arduous than their initial steady progression to the top. Exile has forced them to cultivate an unfamiliar virtue in politics: humility.
How well are their respective comeback attempts faring? Portillo has the advantage of a good year-and-a-half’s start. Indeed, his path back began the moment the returning officer announced that a thunderbolt had hit Enfield Southgate and delivered election victory to Stephen Twigg. Prepared for the result a few hours in advance by Tory canvassing returns, Portillo gave what he calls “the performance of a lifetime”, teasing a still uncertain Twigg on the way into the count by mouthing at him “never mind” and bearing the announcement of his immolation with a sad, steady smile.
For many Labour supporters, the rout was the moment they finally knew they had made it. (Were You Still Up For Portillo? was the title of Brian Cathcart’s Penguin special about election night.) But the triumphalism has waned. The enmities of politics are really a form of intimacy. Today, new Labour seems rather to miss Portillo. His ghost is summoned up rather frequently. Even Tony Blair has taken to damning opponents of the single currency as belonging to a “Thatcher-Portillo-Benn axis”.
Outside parliament, Portillo has been able to recast his conservatism as a less strident, more tolerant creed – witness his defence of single parents and homosexuals at the 1997 party conference. His biographer, Michael Gove, says: “Michael realised that he had allowed himself to become identified too much as the iron laddie of the right. In order to please that constituency, he downplayed his social liberalism. Now he is letting it bloom.” Portillo is still close to an elect circle of Tory journalists and to the right-wing MPs Nicholas Soames, Bernard Jenkin, John Whittingdale and Nigel Evans. In a bizarre rapprochement, he mended fences at Christmas with the godfather of Tory Europhiles, Michael Heseltine, who admires Portillo’s flair, if not his views.
The solitude of political exile has proved more palatable for him than for Mandelson. Portillo has a part-time consultancy and he is happy reading and reviewing books and making forays into television. The income of his wife Carolyn, a City headhunter, means that domestic finances are not a problem. Mandelson is less self-sufficient than his rival and has sought comfort in sociability. “Come round to the house of death,” was his lugubrious invitation to a small group of friends asked over for a Saturday night of home-cooked cottage pie and wine. Stripped of his ministerial rank, his kitchen cabinet takes place literally in the kitchen of the Notting Hill house bought with the most expensive home loan in political history. It is still awaiting a buyer.
He enjoys the support of an informal “Way Back” group, a select band of young new Labourites who want to see him return to the top of British politics. Among the company at dinner were Tim Allan, a former spin-doctor to Tony Blair who now works for Elisabeth Murdoch, Matthew Taylor, a key Millbank figure in the election who now runs the Institute for Public Policy Research, and James Parnell of the No 10 Policy Unit.
On one thing Peter’s friends are agreed: no rehabilitation is possible until he pays off the loan in full. “It’s his penance,” says one. The Way Back team has advised him to keep as low a profile as possible: to reacquaint himself with the Commons tea-room, to speak in debates and be nice to his fellow backbenchers. For a man who blossomed in ministerial office and relished his position at the hub of government and London’s gilded inner social circle, life as a backbencher must be the professional equivalent of a slow train journey across the Russian steppe.
A false start deflated his hopes of an early return. When ministers and backbenchers learnt that he was representing the government in bilateral talks with Germany, they complained that his resurrection was too quick for their comfort. Their reaction was the same to the proposal, backed by Robin Cook, that he should be an unofficial envoy to Europe. The usually calm Joyce Quin, a fellow north-east MP and long-standing Europhile, led the resistance, believing that Mandelson had blocked her becoming minister for Europe after the 1997 election. Other mainstream pro-EMU opinion in the party was worried that such a controversial figure would be bad for the campaign. No 10 reluctantly agreed.
As one cabinet minister put it: “I wish he’d go and get himself a heavy interest in community care instead.” The harder he tried, the less he seemed to achieve: when he went to South Africa to advise on the run-up to the May elections, the ANC said it didn’t want him and wondered why he had come. The answer was to stop struggling and do something else.
Portillo found television to be the ideal forum for rehabilitation. A three-part series about his exile and a touching train journey through Spain reminded us that he is flesh and blood. Mandelson, encouraged by this example, is entrusting his first stab at television – a journey round Britain, confronting poverty and social exclusion – to the same production company, Denys Blakeway. He is also trying to repair his relations with the Labour tribe, making fewer appearances at glamorous parties and spending more time in Hartlepool, which he now describes, to the amusement of locals, as his “main home”. Yet he has not entirely lost his desire to tango with influence. A new mentor is Lord Weidenfeld, the publisher and international networker par excellence.
For both men, loyalty to the party leadership is essential to a successful comeback. Mandelson has always been close to Blair, so there is no difficulty for him. But for Portillo, it is the biggest problem of all. He allowed his contempt for John Major to become all too apparent and when the latter gives his side of the civil war that was the last Tory government in a TV programme later this year, he is unlikely to spare the man he counted as one of the prime “bastards” of his cabinet. Portillo is at pains not to make the same mistake with William Hague. Indeed, he emphasises that his fortunes are inseparable from those of the Tory party, a change from the revolutionary defeatism that infected the right before the election. He speaks frequently with Hague and undertakes morale-boosting trips to the constituencies.
Mandelson and Portillo hold each other in high regard. Portillo speaks affectionately of “Peter”. Interviewing him for his television series, Portillo established a warmth and empathy with his political enemy. The mutual admiration was almost unbearable to behold. Yet Portillo’s election defeat created a fresh sense of caution. He steadfastly refuses to entertain the idea of fighting by-elections, despite strong encouragement to go for Newark. He joked that he was Millbank’s preferred candidate. According to friends, he would dearly love to lead the anti-euro campaign. Hague is said to be deeply unkeen on the idea, fearing it might up-stage the Tory party’s anti-euro platform.
But cutting Portillo out of the action completely is also dangerous – it magnifies the man’s image as the king over the water, his appeal to the rank and file rising in proportion to his invisibility.
So Hague may choose to offer his potential rival a lifeline. Westminster gossip has it that he may move the party chairman, Michael Ancram, to the job of shadow foreign secretary, replacing Michael Howard after Howard’s lacklustre performance over Kosovo. Then Portillo would be asked to take the chairmanship, bringing him back into the heart of the Tory tribe in the run-up to the election. For Portillo, this would lack the dramatic appeal of leading the anti-euro jihad, but it would be a generous offer and he could not refuse without appearing disloyal in troubled times.
Mandelson’s comeback route may also demand that he toil for the good of the party by taking a leading role in the next election campaign. So far, he is resistant to the idea. But the scent of polling day is seductive and no one is better at the election business. Derek Draper, Mandelson’s one-time adviser, predicts: “At some point, Tony will find himself in a mess and there’ll be nobody who can help. That’s when he’ll call for Peter, because Peter is the only person who is always there for him unconditionally.”
Mandelson speaks often with the Prime Minister, but he knows better than to risk being seen to enjoy back-door access. Blair has also become less blase about his old friend’s return. Any plans for the future are kept vague. The work for VSO might be seen as a discreet preparation for a move into the international development portfolio after the next general election. From there, the leap to the job he has always wanted, foreign secretary, would not be unfeasibly large.
But these are hopes to be whispered, not shouted about. There is a final, nuclear option for both men – to leave politics altogether. Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, who succeeded Draper as Mandelson’s confidant and accompanied him as special adviser in both ministerial jobs, is said to have advised his old boss to quit, get a stimulating job and enjoy life. Michael Portillo says he thought about this option for “a good five minutes” and never again.
It is unlikely that Peter Mandelson has given it even that much consideration. To both of them, politics is life. That is why they’ll be back.
The writer is associate editor of the “Independent”
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