Politician, born in London, UK, the grandson of Herbert Morrison. He studied at Oxford, became a television producer for Weekend World (19825), and was then appointed Labour Party Director for Campaigns and Communications (198590). Elected as MP for Hartlepool in 1992, he became an Opposition whip (1994), and shadow Civil Service spokesman (1995). In 1996 he worked exclusively on the Labour Party election campaign, and under his guidance, the party took on a more professional media presentation. After Labour's landslide victory in 1997 he became a minister without portfolio - an influential member of the cabinet, responsible for assisting the prime minister in co-ordinating, implementing, and presenting government policy. He was appointed president of the Board of Trade and secretary of state for trade and industry in 1998. He resigned from the government, although remaining an MP, late in 1998 following his failure to declare, in the Member's Register of Interests, a private mortgage loan from his cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson (paymaster general). After 10 months without office, he was appointed Northern Ireland Secretary. He then played a significant part in negotiations that set up the power-sharing executive and the opening of the Northern Ireland Assembly as its governing body in 1999. He was forced to resign again from the cabinet in 2001, following a controversy over the passport application of Indian billionaire Srichand Hinduja, but made a second political comeback in 2004 when he was appointed European Commissioner for trade.
Peter Benjamin Mandelson (born 21 October 1953) is the present Commissioner of the European Union for Trade. He is widely regarded as one of the main architects of the modern Labour Party and its rebranding as "'new Labour".
Early life
Mandelson was born in London in 1953, where his father was the advertising manager at the Jewish Chronicle. In his youth, he briefly rebelled against his family's Labour tradition and in 1971 left the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) to join the Young Communist League, then the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
He worked as a television producer with London Weekend Television on Weekend World, where he formed a durable friendship with John Birt, then LWT's Director of Programmes, before his appointment as the Labour Party's Director of Communications in 1985.
He left the job in 1990, when he was selected as Labour candidate for the safe seat of Hartlepool. Although many commentators regarded the industrial northern town of Hartlepool as an unlikely place for the metropolitan and high-living Mandelson to represent, he came to enjoy his time there and built up a rapport with the town.
A popular urban legend in the Labour Party says that Mandelson, visiting a fish and chip shop in his new constituency, saw the mushy peas and asked the proprietor about the "avocado dip". However, the story has been traced to a question asked by an American trainee at the Knowsley North by-election of 1986, and Neil Kinnock has admitted to being one of the people who applied it to Mandelson as a joke. (The same story has been told about Herbert Hoover asking Andrew Mellon for a nickel and David Lloyd George asking Winston Churchill for sixpence.)
Work with Tony Blair
Disappointingly for Mandelson, he had little influence over John Smith during his leadership of the Labour Party, although he made several notable speeches in which his strong support for the European Union was outlined. After Smith's sudden death in 1994, Mandelson decided to back Blair for the leadership and played a leading but secret role in the leadership campaign. This created lasting antagonism between Mandelson and Brown, who felt he had been betrayed.
Mandelson became a close ally and trusted adviser to Blair. Blair and Mandelson are known to be close friends. His role in organising the many changes in the Labour Party of the time caused him to be disliked by many of his Labour colleagues as well as by political rivals. He was a natural choice to be Labour's election campaign director for the 1997 general election, which Labour won by a landslide.
Cabinet post
In 1998 Mandelson joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. During his few months in the job, he was the centre of a great deal of media attention when Matthew Parris (openly gay former MP and then Parliamentary sketchwriter of The Times) mentioned during a live interview on Newsnight, in the wake of the resignation of Ron Davies, that "Peter Mandelson is certainly gay". Mandelson's homosexuality had been well-known but not widely publicised except on the front pages of the Sunday People, and Mandelson had not wanted it discussed.
Mandelson's reputation may have been harmed rather than helped by the initial decision by its political adviser, Anne Sloman, to ban any mention of his private life on the BBC. and joking that they were forbidden to mention Mandelson's name or wear a pink shirt for the rest of the series.
First resignation
In December 1998 it was revealed that Mandelson had bought a home in Notting Hill in 1996 with the assistance of an interest-free loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire Labour MP who was also in the Government but was subject to an inquiry into his business dealings by Mandelson's department. Given Mandelson's closeness to Tony Blair, this gave the appearance of buying favours. Although Mandelson had deliberately not taken part in any decisions relating to Robinson, he knew he should have declared the loan as an interest, and he was sacked on 23 December 1998. Mandelson had also not declared the loan to his mortgage company, an offence under UK law, although they decided not to take any action.
Mandelson was out of government for only ten months.
Second resignation
In January 2001, it was claimed that Mandelson had phoned Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the "Faith Zone" in the Millennium Dome. On 24 January 2001, Mandelson was sacked from the Government for a second time, insisting he had done nothing wrong. An independent enquiry by Sir Anthony Hammond came to the conclusion that neither Mandelson nor anyone else had acted improperly. Mandelson was challenged by Arthur Scargill of the Socialist Labour Party and by another Left-winger at the 2001 general election, but was re-elected with a large majority. Mandelson was much criticised for this speech which was widely regarded as inappropriate.
After the general election, Mandelson was chair of the Policy Network and the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, a columnist for GQ and president of Hartlepool United FC.
Despite his exoneration by the Hammond Inquiry, Mandelson's reappointment to the Cabinet seemed politically difficult. While some were concerned that the seat would be difficult for the government to retain, Mandelson convinced his colleagues that Labour would perform well.
His appointment was announced in the summer and Mandelson resigned his seat through appointment as Steward of the Manor of Northstead on 8 September 2004.
On 22 November 2004, Mandelson became Britain's European Commissioner for Trade. In April 2005, The Times revealed that Mandelson had spent New Year's Eve 2004 on the yacht of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, which is at the centre of a major EU investigation, although it did not allege impropriety.
Mandelson played an important role in negotiating an end to the dispute between the European Union and the People's Republic of China over textile imports in the summer of 2005, although it should be noted the solution, which involved tariffs and imports quotas, failed within its first two months (where textile retailers, knowing import limits were about to be introduced, had placed such large orders with Chinese producers that the entire annual import quota was exhausted in the first month of its operation and large volumes of orders were being held, indefinitely, in customs) and had to be re-renegotiated.
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