Inside Westminster: Mandelson makes his mark and election fever flares

Published on Thursday 18 December 2008 21:10

WHY do so many of us repeat our mistakes? According to psychologists, humans are programmed to replicate patterns, even destructive ones.

The attraction for Labour leaders to Lord Mandelson is a case in point.

Just months after a dramatic comeback, he is already creating ripples, if not waves.

Plans to part-privatise the Royal Mail and sell off a chunk to a Dutch firm have been greeted with trepidation by everyone except the Liberal Democrats.

Talk of courting the firm TNT has proved explosive for the career of one Parliamentary Private Secretary. Jim McGovern, the Dundee West MP, resigned over the talks on Wednesday. The Scotsman understands he sent out an e-mail on Tuesday night to some Scottish papers (not this one), but it apparently ended up in junk mail boxes and no-one covered it until the following day. A lesson in how not to make an impact.

His resignation, noble though it may be, has not had the seismic effect of the PPSs who fled Tony Blair's government in 2007. They were ultimately successful in deposing Mr Blair and supplanting him with Gordon Brown.

One gets the feeling that the only scheming tendencies the decent Mr McGovern has involve fortifying his constituency against an assault by the SNP.

The problem for some Labour MPs is that the promise to sell off bits of Royal Mail would be a breach of their manifesto commitment. Why would Lord Mandelson give this the green light, unless, of course, the election was due quite soon?

This is one mistake that Mr Brown is perilously close to repeating: allowing election fever to spread. And senior Scots are already saying they believe the PM will consider going to the ballot box early.

Labour may be behind in the polls, but the five points is enough to sway some of the smaller parties to come into a coalition.