SEARCH the 1504 pages of the latest Mandelson papers for any reference to ethics or morality and you’ll be largely disappointed. There are a few mentions of the Cabinet Office’s Director of Propriety and Ethics. But virtue ethics seem not to be his brief so much as utilitarian realpolitik.
The internal government files released on the appointment, and defenestration, of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s Ambassador to Washington have exposed backbiting and infighting inside the Labour Party. Cabinet ministers have been embarrassed. Opposition politicians have gathered ammunition in caricaturing Labour as the party of “welfare, not work”. And the Prime Minister has seen his authority undermined even further by internecine accusations that he lacks a sense of political purpose. But the machinations are largely Machiavellian politicking.
Where the notion of morality does surface, however, it provides what may prove to be an important political insight. It occurs in the section that records a long exchange on WhatsApp between Peter Mandelson and Wes Streeting. In it, the younger politician seeks advice from the former Labour guru on the implications for UK domestic politics of Britain’s giving official recognition to a State of Palestine.
Before a special Cabinet meeting on the Middle East last July, Mr Streeting disclosed that, for more than 20 years, he had been a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel and had “never been a shrinking violet” on the subject. But his view had shifted “morally and politically”, because “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes.” As the Health Secretary, he had “met with our own medics out there who described the most chilling and distressing scenes of calculated brutality against women and children”, and the Netanyahu government talked openly in “the language of ethnic cleansing”.
When Lord Mandelson replied that recognising a Palestinian state might prompt Netanyahu to accelerate the annexation of the West Bank by illegal Jewish settlers, Mr Streeting was uncompromising: “This is rogue state behaviour. Let them pay the price as pariahs with sanctions applied to the state, not just a few ministers.”
The Labour peer, it emerges, had personal interests in Israel. UK Security Vetting , we now know, has uncovered that he borrowed £1 million to invest in an Israeli start-up, and that he had close links to a former Israeli military-intelligence general. What he really thought was revealed in a WhatsApp exchange with his old Blairite colleague Pat McFadden. “I received a wild, long hysterical message from Wes about Israel. I pushed back,” he wrote, opining that it “reflects pretty badly on his maturity in my view”. When he learned that Mr Streeting had circulated a series of Gaza videos to the whole Cabinet, the ambassador wrote: “It’s pathetic. . . I think Wes is experiencing an early mid-life crisis.”
The exchange is important for two reasons. First, it reveals a significant shift within a government that has verbally condemned Israel’s disproportionate assaults on Palestinians — in Gaza, the Occupied Territories, and now in Lebanon — but has failed to back words with actions. And, in a future Labour leadership contest, Mr Streeting, routinely described as being on his party’s right wing, will be able to make common cause with Labour’s hard Left , which is vocally pro-Palestinian. That will give Andy Burnham food for thought.