Peter Mandelson: Oh to Be in England Now that Thermidor is Here

I remember a joke from the 1990s. It travelled quickly then, because it was economical, and because it did not need explanation.

Q. Why do people hate Peter Mandelson on sight?

A. Because it saves time.

It remains the best summary of the man. He was never likely to be the most loathsome figure in British politics—there is no shortage of serious competition—but he was, and remains, the most conspicuously loathsome. He had the gift of provoking disgust before he had spoken a word, and of confirming it the moment he did. There are men who corrupt quietly, and there are men who make corruption theatrical. Mandelson belonged to the latter class.

His entanglement with the Jeffrey Epstein affair has brought a most gratifying conclusion to a career that should never have begun. This time, it really is final. He may or may not be prosecuted, and he will not be impoverished. Men like Mandelson will never struggle to pay their gas bills. But money was never the main currency he sought. Status mattered more, and respect more still. Both have now been withdrawn, and neither will be returned. He will spend what remains of his life as a frightened and embittered husk, shunned in rooms that once applauded him, tolerated only where his presence cannot be avoided. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting punishment.

He deserves it. Mandelson was one of the principal architects of the late-1990s New Labour revolution, a project that did not abolish democracy but hollowed it out, replacing political choice with managerial despotism. Under his influence, every institution was politicised, every restraint redefined as an obstacle, every sphere of life dragged into what was presented as “progressive” governance but was, in reality, the construction of a leftist deep state. The language was inclusion; the effect was coercion. The promise was modernity; the result was paralysis.

I could at this point digress. I could remark that Jeffrey Epstein almost certainly did not run the only intelligence-linked honey trap in the Western world, and that some political loyalties, otherwise inexplicable, may yet be illuminated by recordings and favours best left unmentioned. I could observe that Britain and Europe have been unusually indulgent of certain foreign interests, and that this indulgence has not always been ideological. But I will resist the temptation. Speculation is unnecessary when the structural explanation suffices.

To understand what is happening now, one must understand how Britain is governed.

Formal politics is theatre. The real authority lies with the monied interest: a financial oligarchy centred on the City of London and its international extensions. This class does not rule by issuing orders. It rules by setting limits. Within those limits, governments may posture and rotate personnel. Outside them, nothing happens. Politicians, senior civil servants, media figures, and academic courtiers form a governing class whose task is to administer the country in ways compatible with the needs of finance. They absorb the agenda by osmosis, not instruction, and mistake this absorption for independent judgement.

For a generation, the short-term strategy was atomisation. Industry was dismantled. Communities were broken. Immigration was used to fragment solidarity. Surveillance expanded. Censorship crept forward under the guise of safety. The country was rendered docile and governable. This strategy worked, and New Labour was its most efficient executor. Mandelson was not an aberration. He was an ideal type.

But the world has changed. China has risen. The Russian war has not gone as planned. The United States has rediscovered industrial policy and economic nationalism. A Britain reduced to service work and internal repression is no longer useful as a serious auxiliary of Western power. A corpse can be managed, but it cannot project force.

This has forced a reconsideration of tactics. Not of ends—those remain unchanged: global rentier capitalism backed by force—but of means. What is now required is not further disintegration, but a limited restoration: enough industry to function, enough cohesion to endure, enough legitimacy to stabilise the system. The French call this moment Thermidor: not a counter-revolution, but a retreat from excess; not liberty, but order; not repentance, but consolidation.

This is where the present crisis fits.

Keir Starmer was never meant to become Prime Minister. The expectation was that the Conservatives would decay slowly, buying time while Labour installed a safe mediocrity to manage decline until a more suitable figure could be prepared. Instead, the Conservative implosion was rapid and complete. Starmer arrived in office by accident, and mistook accident for mandate. Worse, he remained committed to the destructive phase of the New Labour project at just the moment when the ruling class had decided it was no longer useful.

Starmer does not understand Thermidor. He does not grasp that the system now wants a pause, not an escalation. He continued with censorship, with politicised policing, with ideological enforcement, with the smug moralism of a regime that believes it has time. It does not.

Mandelson, for all his past usefulness, lacked what matters at moments like this: friends. He was tolerated, not trusted; employed, not protected. When the need arose to discipline Starmer and to signal a change of direction, Mandelson was an obvious sacrifice. His exposure served multiple purposes. It discredited the Prime Minister by association. It reassured external interests that a line had been drawn.

This is the excuse. It is not the cause, but it is the mechanism. Starmer himself will now be replaced, or neutralised, by someone more attuned to the moment. What follows will not be a reaction in the proper sense. There will be no return to liberty, no restoration of free speech, no dismantling of the surveillance state. The leftist police apparatus will remain intact. But its tone will soften. Enforcement will become selective rather than enthusiastic. Ideology will be muted, not abandoned. It will be leftism with a human face.

This will be sold as renewal. It is not. It is maintenance. Nevertheless, it is welcome. A Thermidor, even a cynical one, buys time. It loosens pressure. It creates space. And space is the precondition of organisation. Those who imagine that Britain will be saved by a change of personnel misunderstand how power works. Those who imagine that nothing can be gained from a tactical retreat misunderstand how revolutions actually end—and sometimes begin.

The sooner this managed restoration occurs, the better. It will not free us. But it may give us the breathing room required to build the base from which a genuine challenge to power can eventually be mounted. That challenge ucome, if it comes at all, from those who understand that the system reforms only to preserve itself—and who are prepared, when the moment arrives, to demand rather more than a human face.