FOR ONE irreverent audience member, the stage set in the National Concert Hall, featuring shocking pink chairs and a matching artfully droopy flower arrangement, could have doubled for Michael Jackson’s funeral.
Since it was the big Halloween night outside, this might not have been inappropriate. But undoubtedly, David McWilliams’s Leviathan debate was beyond its customary clubby, cabaret-style comfort zone. Then again, McWilliams had conjured up a proper Prince of Darkness, Lord (Peter) Mandelson.
As the clock ticked away towards 7.30 and show-time, the affable young British ambassador to Ireland, Julian King and his wife Lotte were on standby in the lobby, while the man who “turned British politics around by turning Labour around” – in McWilliams’s words – sat nearby for a book signing, looking disappointingly benign in a blue open-neck shirt and jacket. The devil alone knows what he was thinking as a lamentably light trickle of people approached. How were Leinster doing against Edinburgh at the RDS, maybe? How many fancy-dress party-goers were channelling evil bankers? What infernal demon had moved him to attend that Abbey matinee about the jailed bank manager obsessed with retrieving his power and influence?
By the time the conversation between himself RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan kicked off, the auditorium probably held around 300 to 400. O’Callaghan kept the tone light but there was enough roughage to keep the political junkies alert.
His intervention in the Miliband leadership contest had been a “mistake”, he said humbly – while leaving zero doubt about his view of the party rules that enabled “a tiny fraction of voters” to elect that other Miliband.
“Mmmh. We should have looked at the rules more closely”, he said darkly.
His arch bafflement schtick makes for high entertainment. Why would ANYONE think he disliked Mo Mowlam? Hadn’t she helped him get elected? Her anger was not about being replaced in the North (by him) but that she wasn’t going to the job she coveted. After much hesitation, including a sweet plea to the British ambassador for guidance, he conceded it was the job of foreign secretary. “She thought she had the diplomatic skills and the personality . . . Obviously, the prime minister didn’t see it the same way”, he said smoothly.
He was never seriously challenged on the dark talent that came to define him – spinning. He batted away any intimations of manipulativeness by reference to the three elements that must be in perfect alignment for electoral success: instincts, politics and – of course – presentation. “We’re not amateurs.
“Of course it’s about getting your presentation right. Otherwise they’ll sniff you out. If you get your communications wrong, they’ll say ‘I don’t understand you’. It’s politics in the internet age.”
Naturally, he denied any skulduggery against Gordon Brown in the leadership race following John Smith’s death. Was it his fault that the public, the television and the media had all plumped for Tony Blair? But he spoke quite movingly about Gordon Brown’s political courage in the last years – “I felt sorry for him because later he didn’t get the political reward . . . In fact, he’s a heck of a big guy who gets the big picture.
“But he got tripped up on the smaller political things – how you explain things to people, how you carry people with you . . . He didn’t quite get how worried people were . . . After dealing with the [economic] war, he needed to be as good for the peace”.
And by contrast, of course, Tony Blair was a “communications genius”. Perhaps more of an actor, suggested O’Callaghan? Mandelson did his arch bafflement thing. “I’m really quite shocked, Miriam. Actor? TONY BLAIR? Actorish?”, he exclaimed to general hilarity.
Yet there were intimations that he felt he had not been altogether true to himself in the past. Would he have done anything differently at all, asked an audience member?
“In the early years”, he said after a long pause, “I had an unerring habit of not just defeating people in argument, but killing them . . . Not literally of course. But I went out of my way to be even more unpopular than I needed to.”
Oddly enough, it was Brussels that calmed him. While there, he became a “different, more real person, I became more aware of how people were seeing me”. Thus armed, once called back to government – “a washed-up, ex-spin doctor, peer of the realm” – he found himself acting with more “candour”. But he loved Brussels . “I even loved the Irish farmers . . . What I felt was that they had a good case for Irish beef but they didn’t have to be so defensive about it. If you were afraid of Brazil , the only way to go was up – become better, more high quality, more specialised, create a niche . . .
“For me, it seemed much more important to do that than to try and stop the world to get off.” And how did he find Mary Coughlan? “She’s eh, quite feisty.” And he had got a nice message from her about a speech he’d made.
By the time he put his whiskey down after a good-value, entertaining 80 minutes, a respectable queue was forming for more book-signing. So had they intended to buy the book to begin with, this reporter asked innocently.
No, declared a woman accusingly, she was buying it because after that performance, she now saw how dreadfully misrepresented Mandelson had been in the media. (And to be fair, it helped that a paperback edition was for sale in the lobby, half the price of the hardback but unavailable in the shops).
As Lord Mandelson headed off for dinner in Chapter One, McWilliams was back on stage introducing Minister Eamon Ryan, John McGuinness TD (whose new book with Naoise Nunn is due out this week), Senator Paschal Donohoe, Dr Elaine Byrne and Andrea Pappin, for a discussion on whether Ireland really wants new politics.
Byrne asked why McWilliams himself wouldn’t found a new party. He asked the audience, which was supremely indifferent. Anyway, McWilliams said he wouldn’t do it because “you get involved in all sorts of battles that would grind you down and down, so people are getting crushed and crushed and crushed. “Do you believe in your country,” demanded Byrne? “Do we love our country enough to be politicians?”, countered McWilliams.
By the time it all wound up near 11pm, politicians were in danger of looking like sainted martyrs, which probably wasn’t the idea to begin with at all.