Back to HOMEPAGE Coup against Brown was 'two-hour wonder'
says Mandelson
Ann Treneman
Parliamentary Sketch, The Times
Filed 09Jan10
©Ann Treneman
This article was originally published in The Times on 8th January 2010.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of its author and of the newspaper.
Failed coup, day two. Or, as they say: coup d’état, coup day two. The Prime Minister didn’t emerge from his bunker until 3pm, his car drawing up to the glass-enclosed foyer of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, where Peter Mandelson was waiting, gnawing on an apple. They headed down to a makeshift press conference called Going for Growth. It’s the kind of event Gordon loves.
The man often compared to Machiavelli has many roles in this Government and yesterday he had a new one: Mandy, Human Shield. I mean it. For the next hour, Mandy threw himself in front of the PM, taking the bullet and the bull. The PM, not unlike a poodle at Crufts, only had to do exactly as he was told. And he did.
“So much for the distractions,” said Mandy, batting away the coup attempt as if it were a pesky gnat. Gordon shot him one of his strange smiles. Mandy did not smile back.
That was the only reference to you-know-what until Gordon stood up behind his special prime ministerial lectern (it has a crest), which had been brought over especially from No 10 for this event. “Yesterday I didn’t think I’d be here today,” said Gordon. Total silence. No pin dropped. I would have heard it. “We were due to have launched this in Southampton.” The room exhaled in laughter. Gordo now added gaily: “But the weather stopped us.”
The PM then ploughed into a speech on growth, industrial activism and infrastructure. He talks only in trillions now. He called Mandy a “genius”. I noticed that Mandy did not demur.
Just as soon as he could, Mandy shooed Gordo out of the room. “The Prime Minister has limited time,” explained Mandy, not entirely helpfully given what had happened the day before. And then, in a second, the PM had escaped through a side door.
The only person left behind was Mandy, dapper in a well-cut blue suit. He’s allowing a little more grey in his mahogany hair these days. He never looks more real than when he is on television and now, with the cameras rolling, he began to glow.
He was asked about the coup attempt. “I wouldn’t describe it as that,” he said, his voice like butter. “It was a two-hour wonder that fizzled out. It was a small day of minor madness. Today we are getting on with our day jobs.”
It was Mandy’s fiction, as carefully spun as a giant cone of candy floss, that everyone in Government yesterday was concerned only with their jobs. Work, work, work. This is what Ed Miliband, the Climate Secretary, said when he was asked about the “prime ministerial scrappage scheme”. This is what Harriet Harman, nursing a cold and blowing her nose into an alarmingly large teal-coloured hankie, said when asked in the Commons.
But back to Mandy. Why did it take so long for some Cabinet Ministers to back Gordon? “What members of the Cabinet did was to follow the advice that I gave,” he said, as if it were just so obvious, “which was to get on with our jobs, keep in our offices, not run into the streets and the television studios fanning excitement about something which we all knew was going to fizzle out in a matter of hours.”
The magic of Mandy is that, when he says it, he actually seems to believe it. What is certainly true is that, after yesterday, the Prime Minister is very much in his debt.
©Ann Treneman
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