Peter Mandelson: The Model for Future PR politics Continued.

As usual a dumb article written by what passes for a journalist these days called Maria Hyde has written a banal article trivialising the trivial to no greater effect than making the sceptical reader feel something is weird about England.

In The Guardian, this halfwit opines,

Eyes down, players of New Labour bingo, and dabbers at the ready. The great Peter Mandelson memoirs game is afoot, and you must mark off the hilarious reactions of his lordship's former colleagues one by one. Thus far we've had "friends of" Tony Blair complaining that Mandelson is opportunistic and mercenary, David Blunkett accusing Mandy of self-absorption and slagging off his comrades in print, and Alastair Campbell whingeing about him getting his facts wrong. The minute Gordon Brown brands Mandelson deranged that will be your cue to shout, "Bingo!"

Of course, those pinning their hopes on a full house may be waiting for Geoff Hoon to accuse Lord Mandelson of being an overpromoted dimwit, Dr John Reid to lament his wildly misplaced self-regard, Tessa Jowell to claim he'd ditch his nearest and dearest to save his political skin, and Hazel Blears to brand him a tediously perky redhead.

But it has been an encouraging haul so far. Indeed, arguably the most telling aspect of Mandy's memoirs, for those who find their revelations engrossing and at the same time merely confirmatory – Blair used to call us "cynics and sneerers" – is the reaction from those involved. How can people who so apotheosised image and presentation still lack self-awareness to such a mind-blowing degree?

In their rush to define themselves against Mandelson's book, almost all the major figures of New Labour have confirmed its every last implication.

The more one knows about the narcissistic posturers and spin doctors who governed Britain between 1997 and 2009 the more the public's disgust will increase. But this is part of the point. Politicians are, as J G Ballard pointed out, now part of the "entertainment economy".

But they are second rate even as celebrities and that's to say not very much at all.

Politicians are not as important as they used to be and are largely messengers between the money markets and the public dedicated to squaring circles and "triangulating" and crafting precision tooled soundbites that tap into collective emotions and herd sentiments.

The chattering classes ( as this article confirms ) will get trills of delight whilst an interpretation of the bigger picture, that is to say what this kind of politics really represents about the UK's decayed democracy and declining civic institutions, needs to be addressed at least partially seriously.

In time, Mandelson will not be remembered that much. Blair will because his name is associated with Iraq. Only Mandelson's vanity makes it seem that he will always be forever preening in the TV spotlight.

New pathological dark spinners will emerge that delve deeper into trying to "give the people what they really, really want".

That could well include some Gentile Fascism of the sort Orwell once predicted in his great essay The Lion and the Unicorn. Or the dystopia of mass conumerism and fascism conjured up by Ballard in Kingdom Come. Let's face it: these people are and were more than a bit creepy.

That was obvious to those who saw how Blair was carefully choreographed and presented, the near totalitarian style entrance into Downing Street in 1997, the rhetoric of the People's Princess, and slimy proteges like the slightly odd psychotherapist Derek Draper.

Politics is now oily PR or even "public diplomacy", how to manage and depth psychologise the docile masses who linger in suburbia and who voted for PM Blair partly because he looked like a reassuring Daytime TV Doctor on the Richard and Judy Show.

The future will consist of more permatanned creeps somewhat like Robert Kilroy Silk who are experts at straddling telly talk shows but others who might have a background in soap opera and encouraging the masses to shop and feel real good. The feel good factor.

All whilst the nation embarks on illegal wars and destroys social harmony, leaving nothing but large shopping malls to affirm social solidarity rituals where the only other contact with real "lived life" is through being plugged into consciousness through TV.

As an ideas man would most probably suggest Peter Mandelson should work as a Cable TV presenter or like a David Dickinson try selling a range of perfumes and luxury goods for Westfield in London.

But in broadcasts peppered with warnings about those enemies within who don't share "our values" of total devotion to consumerism.

Dying to be Famous: Spasms of Reality TV Grief.

One of the worst features of the banal celebrity infested and suffocating media wastescape that Britain is immured in is both the obsession itself but also the idea that Andy Warhol's "prophecy" that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes has turned out to be something that has become true: as a talentless purveyor of dreck he was well placed to know .

Last year I just could not stand the self-indulgent media bollocks with regards the death of Jade Goody. Have you heard anything about her since ? No, she is totally forgotten. At the time things were very different as when I wrote the following......


Following the death of reality telly star Jade Goody, the BBC has made this item the top news story. Goody was famous for being having her terminal illness filmed on camera no less than her 24 hour day on the Big Brother series.

As with Princess Diana, there will be oodles of collective grief by those who thought they knew her. Those who resist the 'emotional correctness' and mention the fact that she did not acheive much with her life will be attacked with self righteous zeal.

The grief over Goody is narcissistic: partly it reflects the inability of many people in Britain to deal with death or to draw lessons from it with regards the way they are living their own lives now and the way they have lived them and will live them.

It's grief for the consumer age in which nothing is of lasting value beyond the money that will buy the pleasures that divert one from having to reconsider their shallow celebrity, sex and shopping obsessed lifestyle choices. People fear death because they aren't really living a full emotional life.

Plugged into reality through whar Bernard Levin called "the idiot's lantern" in the corner of their 'living room', millions of Britons are living surrogate lives when they are not trying to force themselves to feel something because Britain has become such a deracinated, atomised and eerily denatured society.

People often fear death because they really fear they have not lived yet. When someone famous dies, not least someone who could have been them like Goody, there is a curious relief more that 'Thank God it isn't me' rather than any genuine consideration as to the achievement of that person.

If Goody's death from cervical cancer saves others by getting more young women to get tests that can offer some rationalisation for a largely pathetic and meaningless life that Goody lived. Yet the number who will die from it is hardly equal to those who will die from their current sex, drug and booze binges.

Goody's premature death will not make her life seem any better than it really was and it was not particularly good. The celebrity obsessed lifestyle is not a good one and had she lived it out beyond it's natural duration she would not have been able to get the retrospective good gloss it has been given.

Such criticisms will seem callous. The point is that it is what we do with our lives when the threat of death is not immediately there that has to matter. Otherwise any life, no matter how tawdry or squalid, can be glorified as better than it really was as long as that person is famous for anything.

What matters is that people respond to the knowledge of an early death by realising that we all live on borrowed time and that as we only die our own deaths alone the way we deal with others when we still have our life potential before us is the most important thing.

When Goody believed she had all her life in front of her she was as shallow, vulgar, foolish and narcissistic as those who watch Big Brother. Young people today are more so than ever because they think the world belongs to them and that the old are boring and worthless.

Then when faced with their own deaths they become terrified because death only is supposed to happen to those who are pushed out from conscious view-from the old to the one million dead Iraqis who have died so that people in the UK can continue to drive their cars on cheap petrol.

Elsewhere death is a normal part of life. In Britain it is not supposed to happen which is why, in an age of spectacle, Islamist terrorists are seething to punish Western consumers for not caring about the death of fellow Muslims just so they can maintain their vulgar and trivial pleasures.

It is no good thinking about helping others, or even thinking of them, just when you personally are threatened by the prospect of death or because one sees one dying person on TV. It might mean that the way you have chosen to live is wrong.

Consumerism, The X Factor, and Dictatorship.

The capacity of "think tanks" to deliver utter reams of drivel is most certainly a main driving for of Bullshit Britain.

It could even be a major part of the "creative economy" they espouse, those like Tony Giddens whose speciality in gobbledegook is a speciality of his and all those who supported "rebranding Britain" in 1997.

One of the most odious examples is the pathetic Charles Leadbetter, he of the proposterous neoliberal tract Living on Thin Air about how Britain would live in a post-modern knowledge economy and who wrote late last year of how the X Factor talent show could rejuvenate politics.

Its interesting, as the X Factor is considered more important by many Britons than global heating, resource wars, Peak Oil or any cultural pursuit that involves having some form of inner life, that Leadbetter fails to understand that it applies precisely to democracy under New Labour.

But , of course, being praised by the slimy spin doctor Peter Mandelson as a visionary thinker, rather than a purveyor of fly-by-night pseudo-philosphies akin to New Age and "Third Way" crap, meant not criticising New Labour.

The X Factor recipe is known to political scientists as "authoritarian deliberation" ? the public deliberate on a set of options decided by a dictator. Whatever the public ends up choosing, the dictator always wins, just as whatever act we choose as the X Factor winner Cowell's record label is bound to win.

And this is now what passes for serious political analysis in The Guardian.

The point this half wit does not get is that in the UK we have a similar choice with "NuLab" and "NewCon" which genuflect to the money markets and offer slightly different consumer packages instead of allowing 'the electorate' to choose different policies.

"Cowellism carries strong echoes of Margaret Thatcher's authoritarian populism. Vladimir Putin skilfully deployed authoritarian deliberation to legitimise dictatorial rule".

Well, Putin is actually not a 'dictator' but a market authoritarian and populist who runs a nationalist government that is termed a sovereign democracy. Anyone who thinks Putin is Stalin or a 'dictator' lacks basic knowledge. Or is just a feeble propagandist.

And why hark back to Thatcher ?

The X Factor represents the 'entertainment economy' and it's epitomised by Tony Blair's tawdry Cool Britannia, the erosion of civil liberties and give the plebs their doltish drivel so they do not question what their rapacious manipulators are doing in their name.

Anyway, apart from that, the article raised interesting question posed by the late JG Ballard: could consumerism lead to a new form of Fascism ?

On reflection we can only be thankful that most politicians do not watch X Factor and still fewer understand its appeal.

Politicians do know about these kinds of things. That's what creepy little shits like Derek Draper are there to do: depth psychologise the national mood and script some balmy medoicre platitudes about Great Progressive Britain, the "feelgood factor" etc etc.

Politicians have aides who tell them to spout banalities, as William Hague did when he commented on the nation's mood concerning the seriousness of the death of Deidre Barlow's husband in the cliche ridden and mind rotting Orwellian prolefeed that is the soap opera Coronation Street.

In any case part of the problem is that politicians as politicians today do not matter that much. They are interchangeable and expendable as they reflect nothing more than corporate interests and the rule of money. As Ballard wrote, elections are nothing more than a folkloric ritual.

The real power of choice has gravitated to the shopping mall where the most important choice is what brand of sweatshirt the wholly empowered consumer is entitled to buy to consolidate his being.

Higher levels of consumer satiety breed a lethal boredom from which only the promise of voyeurism, cruelty, sensation and even violence can deliver them-hence the attraction of the Stag Nights, noisy pubs with telescreens, G 20 "Protests" and other ways of working up a sweat.

First written on Friday, 11 December 2009 and rewritten today.