Peter Mandelson

The Right Honourable Peter Benjamin Mandelson (born October 21, 1953) is a British Labour Party politician and former Member of Parliament for Hartlepool who is widely regarded as one of the key architects of the repositioning of the Labour Party and its rebranding as "New Labour". He has twice been a Cabinet minister and has twice been forced to resign.

Peter Mandelson was born in London in 1953, the grandson of London County Council leader and Labour cabinet minister Herbert Stanley Morrison. He studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and became Director of the British Youth Council in the late 1970s. He was elected to Lambeth Borough Council in September 1979, but retired in 1982 due to disillusion with the state of Labour politics.

He worked as a television producer with London Weekend Television before becoming the Labour Party's Director of Communications in 1985. In this role he was one of the first people in Britain to whom the term "spin doctor" was applied; during this period he acquired the nickname "The Prince of Darkness". He managed Labour's widely admired but electorally unsuccessful 1987 general election campaign.

He left the job on 1990 when he was selected as Labour's candidate for the safe Labour seat of Hartlepool. He was elected to the House of Commons at the 1992 general election. 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.

Mandelson had a leading, though unannounced, role in the campaign to elect Tony Blair as Labour Party leader in 1994 after Smith's death, and became a close ally and trusted adviser. 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 became Labour's election campaign director for the 1997 general election which was won by a landslide. After the election he was made a Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet Office, with responsibility for the Millennium Dome.

In 1998 he joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry but on December 23, 1998 he resigned as after it was revealed that he had been secretly lent £373,000 to buy a London house by his wealthy government colleague Geoffrey Robinson, without declaring it within the government, or to his mortgage company. During his few months in the job, he had been the centre of a great deal of media attention: Matthew Parris, the openly homosexual parliamentary columnist of The Times, had mentioned during a television interview for Newsnight that "Peter Mandelson is certainly gay". This fact had been well-known at Westminster, but not widely publicised, and Mandelson had not wanted it discussed. After this "outing" by Parris, the press felt free to discuss his personal life to a much greater extent. Mandelson's reputation may have been harmed rather than helped by the initial decision by BBC's political adviser, Anne Sloman, to ban any mention of his private life on the BBC.

In October 1999 he returned to the Government as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, replacing the popular Mo Mowlam at a time when the peace process seemed to have stalled. He oversaw the creation of the devolved legislative assembly and power-sharing executive, and reform of the police service.

Mandelson was brought down by a second scandal in early 2001. In June 1998 he had personally phoned a Home Office minister on behalf of Srichanda Hinduja, an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the Millennium Dome's "Faith Zone". It appeared that Mandelson had misled both the public and the Prime Minister about his role in the affair, and on January 24, 2001, he was forced to resign from the Government for a second time, while 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 with respect to parliamentary rules, a conclusion that was welcomed by Mandelson and his sympathisers, and greeted with scepticism by his critics.

On July 23, 2004 he was nominated as Britain's new European Commissioner. He was allocated by José Durão Barroso to the Trade portfolio, subject to the entire European Commission being confirmed by the European Parliament. In order to take up this office, Mandelson resigned as Member of Parliament for Hartlepool on 8 September, 2004, by applying for the office of Steward of the Manor of Northstead.

He is Chair of the Policy Network and of the UK-Japan Group, and President of Hartlepool United F.C..

Preceded by: Margaret Beckett	Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1998	Followed by: Stephen Byers
Preceded by: Mo Mowlam	Secretary of State for Northern Ireland 1999–2001	Followed by: Dr John Reid
Preceded by: Dennis Canavan	Steward of the Manor of Northstead 2004–	Followed by: Current incumbent
Preceded by: Pascal Lamy