The failed schemer

In the film noir starring Orson Welles from which the title of this book is stolen, the action takes place in Vienna and The Third Man is a criminal schemer who betrays his friends and operates in the sewers before coming to a deservedly bad end. By choosing this title, the publishers have tricked the author and are trying to dupe the public by suggesting that Peter Mandelson is just the same as Harry Lime. This book is not set in Vienna.

Many fabrications have been spun around him over the years — myths that were created by both journalists and himself. The most fabulously overblown was his reputation as a brilliant sorcerer, "the Prince of Darkness", that soubriquet he once claimed to loathe but then embraced as a tribute to his skill with the dark arts. For sure, he tried to manipulate. His opening line is a sort of boast that he "once embodied New Labour's reputation for spin and control freakery". He was a plotter but a rather useless one. This Machiavelli usually succeeded only at doing in himself. Without quite being conscious of it, this book depicts a great schemer for whom nothing went to plan.

Born into the party

The original goal, one seeded in childhood, was to be a respected politician of the first rank. The most authentic section of an often untrustworthy book is the second chapter. It tells the story of his upbringing in Hampstead Garden Suburb in the presence of great men.

Tony Blair once said he was not born into the Labour party; he chose it. With Mandelson, it was the other way round. He was not only born into the tribe, his veins ran with the blood of Labour royalty.

His mother's father was Herbert Morrison, who was home secretary in Churchill's wartime Cabinet and later deputy prime minister and foreign secretary in the postwar Labour government. Harold and Mary Wilson were near neighbours. When the Wilsons reach Downing Street, they invite the Mandelsons to No 10. The 12-year-old Peter is "dazzled" and "conscious of feeling somehow special" when he is taken into the Cabinet Room and allowed to sit in the prime minister's chair.

It is the ghost of Morrison that haunts Mandelson. What he yearned to be was his generation's Morrison. And he failed. He reached the Cabinet but his career at the top table was short and fragmented, terminated twice by scandal and a third time by election defeat.

A very brief stint holding the, now defunct, title of trade and industry secretary ended in the disgrace of the home loan scandal. He was brought back as Northern Ireland secretary only to be defenestrated again. His Cabinet career under Blair amounted to a span of just 19 months.

He then went to Brussels where he became one of the more effective and more disliked commissioners. As a result, he was a semi-exiled figure for long stretches of New Labour's period in power. If you want proper accounts of what really happened over the Iraq war and many other crucial episodes, you won't find them here.

Having failed to emulate the grandfather by achieving the status of "great man", what did become of him? His friend, Charles Clarke, once said to me: "Peter is the ultimate courtier." His influence flowed from making himself very useful to whoever was the most important figure in the Labour Party of the day.

First, it was Neil Kinnock, whom he helped to rescue Labour from the pit into which it had descended in the early 1980s. Then, he was consigliere to Tony Blair, whom he assisted with the creation of New Labour. These were both significant contributions to political history. He relished the power and notoriety but there is also a hint of self-loathing just below the surface of the text. He is not happy that "through much of our time in government, my influence was exercised largely behind the scenes". He wanted to be the star but wound up as the stage manager. Instead of establishing himself as a big politician in his own right, he was — and is — defined by his tormented relationships with Gordon Brown, the former friend who spent a decade trying to destroy him, and Tony Blair, the supposed continuing friend who sacked him twice.

An accurate description

The soap-operatic relationships at the core of New Labour are traced with reasonable accuracy. An embittered Brown was driven deranged because someone other than himself was prime minister and he ran an "insurgency" to force his way into No 10. Blair enfeebled himself by being too weak to stand up to a chancellor who sabotaged his premiership.

In Mandelson's words, or phrases that he puts into the mouth of Blair, Brown is "hair-raisingly difficult to work with", "impossible" to advise, "mad", "bad", "dangerous" and "beyond redemption".

This is the censored version. Those who have heard the private conversation of Mandelson on the subject of Brown know it to be a highly sanitised account. Yet he answers the call when Brown, in a desperate attempt to save his premiership, recalls him from Brussels to the Cabinet. "I felt that I had finally become a frontline politician in my own right."

As business secretary, he did develop some interesting, but never-implemented, ideas about industrial activism. In those final 18 months, he was encrusted with vanity-satisfying titles such as the Ruritarian appellation of "First Secretary". He had finally achieved the pomp and status he craved but too late: Twilight was falling on New Labour.

The concluding chapters depict a Cabinet enveloped in despondency that Brown is leading to an awful defeat. Mandelson admits he was too scared to confront Brown with the truth about his flaws as a leader and was unwilling to mobilise the Cabinet to do anything about it. He was still the courtier, just a more grandly titled one.

Does he make sense of it all? Not really. He doesn't even explain himself properly. Having spent more than 500 pages in his slippery company, the reader doesn't feel that he has met the real Peter Benjamin Mandelson. "The Prince of Darkness" remains a fugitive figure, trapped in his own shadows.

Andrew Rawnsley is the author of The End of the Party.

The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour By Peter Mandelson, HarperPress, 512 pages, £25