THE STRANGE CASE OF PETER MANDELSON

In London, all anyone is talking about is the fate of Peter Mandelson, gay centrist ally of Tony Blair. Mandelson, former Northern Ireland secretary, was a key player in reorienting the old Labour Party to embrace conservative economics, while still sticking to support for the creaking British welfare state. He was just forced to resign over a small piece of corruption – the kind of thing Bill Clinton would do before breakfast each morning. He allegedly made a call to help a wealthy Indian businessman get a UK passport after the said businessman coughed up some cash for the hideous Millennium Dome. After denying, then admitting, then denying the charge, last week, Mandelson endeared himself even more to the Labour leadership by campaigning for his innocence in a series of visits to Tory newspaper offices – just while Blair was unveiling an agenda for a second Labour term. Today’s papers reveal the Labour boot going right into his privates, as they say over here. “I hope he goes away and has a wonderful time with Reinaldo,” one senior Labour party official told the press. Reinaldo is Mandelson’s Brazilian lover. It wasn’t exactly an “outing” since Mandelson is one of those weird characters who is known to be gay, won’t deny it, but won’t say it either. But it was a classic piece of homophobic vitriol that the Left still knows how to deliver when it needs to. The Right is worse, of course. The Tory press here still routinely refers to buggers, poofters, benders, and so on. But it seems clear to me that those gay men and women in public life who don’t simply come out and say it, and then move on, are always going to be vulnerable to this kind of attack. The answer – for pols on right and left – is unashamed candor and then a matter-of-fact transition to other issues as a public person. It’s the strongest defense. Honesty, in my experience, almost always is.