Wes Streeting's Mariah Carey method

Just how stupid does the cabinet minister think we are as he denies the extent of his relationship with Peter Mandelson? Very.

Previously: Shock! as ‘Prince of Darkness’ revealed to be a dodgy, duplicitous wrong ‘un

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“I don’t know her.” Mariah Carey made an unconvincing denial into an iconic line when she pretended to have never heard of Jennifer Lopez. Wes Streeting has no such skill. For The Guardian, he’s written an opinion piece claiming he was never good friends with Peter Mandelson. It’s a suggestion that defies the evidence of our ears, eyes, social media archives, and the very text messages with Mandelson that Streeting has released to prove he wasn’t big pals with “Petey”.

In today’s edition, I want to break down Streeting’s article (Ignore the smears: I was never a close friend of Peter Mandelson. And I fully understand the lessons we must learn) to analyse it as a piece of political communication and ultimately of total contempt for the public. Let’s, to rip off Dylan Thomas, begin at the beginning.

Streeting opens with big statements, throwing around lumps of rhetoric to sound very serious:

Politics has a problem with sexism and misogyny. We need to be clear what it is and why. With every scandal there is a call to clean up the system, to reform vetting procedures and the laws governing the release of sensitive information. Those are serious issues, but we will not fix the problem by starting there because the problem is not procedural. It is about culture and behaviour.

In the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment to be the British ambassador to the United States, of course we need to establish the timeline of who said what, to whom and when. Gordon Brown is right to insist on a more rigorous process and a renewed commitment to the redistribution of power. But if we focus solely on what happened we will miss the important question of why it happened.

That has the tone of a commentator observing events from outside rather than of a minister working within a government. Streeting wants to create the impression that he is somehow above it all, untainted by the “culture and behaviour” he’s attempting to critique. It’s like a fish suddenly railing against the very water it’s swimming in.

Of course, Streeting, who was so chummy with Madelson that he tweeted pictures of his mother embracing the poisonous peer, wants to focus on “culture and moral character” over “the flaws of individuals and the flaws of the system”, because he is one of those flawed individuals within the flawed system. He’s written a mea culpa which quickly turns into a not-mea guv attempt at self-exoneration:

…we need to think too about the silence of those who stood by, who knew enough to feel uneasy and yet did not speak loudly enough to influence the decision.

This is a group I include myself in. Contrary to what has been widely reported, I was not a close friend of Peter Mandelson, but I am not going to wash my hands of my actual association with him either.

He’s not going to wash his hands of the association, but he is going to spray around so much water that everyone else is drenched.

The key section of Streeting’s piece is this one:

After a weekend of smear and innuendo that I have something to hide, I have decided to publish my messages with Mandelson. From these messages, people will see that the main issue I have had with their publication is that I will put some of my colleagues in a difficult position because of what I said about the Israeli government ahead of the recognition of the state of Palestine. Mandelson and I saw each other for dinner on average once a year, in a group setting. He offered advice.

My partner worked for him 25 years ago, and I therefore got to know him better than others of that generation in politics, a generation I have always admired since I joined the Labour Party as a 15-year-old in 1998. I wasn’t involved in his appointment, but like many other people I thought it was a good move at the time.

The painful truth I have spent the past few days wrestling with is that, like many others in Westminster, I just didn’t think enough about the appointment or the past that was known. Also, like many others in Westminster, I filtered the news of it entirely through the lens of whether it seemed a sensible way to help our relationship with a critical ally at a crucial moment.

Strip that back to its bones, and what it boils down to is that Streeting’s relationship with Mandelson is no longer politically useful to him, so he’s pretending that it barely existed at all. The WhatsApp messages he’s released are chummy and show him repeatedly sucking up, and his regular place at the supper club run by Labour peer, Roger Liddle, and patronised by Mandelson has been frequently documented, most recently in a Guardian long read.

In that Guardian article from late-January, Streeting is reported to have “joked that a blue plaque might be put up outside Liddle’s home given its role in the reinvention of Labour”. But these dinners weren’t frequent or important, and you’d be a wild conspiracy theorist to suggest otherwise, right?

When Streeting writes that his response to Mandelson’s appointment as the British ambassador in Washington was to see it “entirely through the lens of whether it seemed a sensible way to help our relationship with a critical ally at a crucial moment,” it’s a rare admission of what a cynical operator he is and how truly transactional the Labour right are. This wasn’t a mistake but a reflection of their entire worldview — power for power’s sake.

Streeting continues:

People join the Labour Party because of a belief in equality and social justice. Yet that very motivation conceals a danger. As George Orwell warned, belief in a righteous cause can easily become a licence for cruelty, deception and moral indifference. If you believe you are on the right side it is easy to turn a blind eye.

Where he chooses to paraphrase Orwell, I’m going to quote a line directly from Politics and the English Language, as it so accurately describes the experience of reading Streeting or watching him speak:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases… one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.

Having experienced a Damascene conversion, now Mandelson’s malevolence has gone from being a bit of camp 90s Blairite nostalgia to an actual political problem, Streeting hopes we’re stupid enough to mistake his cant for real moral purpose:

“The standard you walk by is the standard you accept,” as the saying goes. That is why diversity in leadership is so important and why we need to push back hard at those who think that equality, diversity and inclusion are tick-boxes or fringe issues. Diversity brings different perspectives to every place where power resides. Who is in the room shapes what is said out loud, what is noticed, what is deemed to count, and what is silently laid aside. The absence of women’s voices in moments like this is not incidental; it is part of the explanation. This is a scandal, first and foremost, about the way men treat women and girls – and not just monsters such as Epstein, but through everyday sexism. We cannot allow that terrible truth to disappear.

Streeting’s conviction that we must listen to women more won’t stop him from trying to become Labour leader and Prime Minister. This is a performance masquerading as penance. The same contempt that Peter Mandelson had and has for the public is here too: Streeting really thinks that this could work, that his late-in-the-day denunciation of Mandelson will be enough.

The big, windy, and empty rhetoric that Streeting begins the piece with makes an unwelcome return in the conclusion:

We can’t let this scandal be another that passes by without real change. The rules we live by cannot substitute for behaviour. There is no vetting good enough, no rules tight enough, no system of accountability strong enough if we do not understand this. We have to have the courage to speak up when silence is easier. We have to confront these moral questions. Politics is hard. Most of the choices are hard and some of them are tragic. But we need to accept that some forms of power are not worth the moral price they extract.

The only “real change” Streeting is interested in right now is a change in Downing Street occupancy that benefits him. All his talk of courage and moral seriousness is as mirthlessly funny as whatever Guardian sub chose the link recommendation that appeared right below Streeting’s byline photo:

Streeting wrote off his re-election chances in WhatsApp exchanges with Mandelson

Well, that was, at least, a rare outbreak of honesty on his part.

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