IS BRITAIN READY FOR A NEW THIRD WAY?

Having taken some time out for reflection and reading, this blog is now resuming service with some thoughts inspired by "The Third Man" of British (and international) contemporary politics, New Red Baron Lord Peter Mandelson.

I purchased Lord Mandelson's autobiography, "The Third Man", from Waterstones for the princely sum of £0.99, being told by the young bookseller that this was one tome the shop "couldn't shift". This surprised me as the book has an elegant red and black cover, with a rather scary-looking Mandelson on its dust jacket.

In fact, the book was well-received by serious reviewers such as Matthew Dancona on its publication in 2010, shortly after Labour's general election defeat but before the election of Ed Miliband as new party leader.

However, it is perhaps testimony to the British public's lack of love for Lord Mandelson, as much as his own party's, that this rather good book has received less attention than the rantings of new raving loony party contender, Alastair Campbell. It may also be the case that Mandelson, the King of Spin, was and is not the lovely boy of the British media that we all assumed.

For my money, and sadly I'm not filthy rich, this makes what the Red Baron has to say all the more interesting; even if the Queen of Sofa Government tends to be rather more preoccupied by the microcosm of New Labour than the wider realities of politics at home and abroad. Cherie Blair's health guru Carol Caplin, for instance, receives rather more attention than most female ministers.

This said, Mandelson's account of his time as director of communications for the Labour is not only fascinating for anyone interested in the history of the modern party, but also explains why he and Tony Blair, the only two people to understand what New Labour was all about according to the latter, were willing to jettison so much in order to win and sustain power.

"He would say that wouldn't he", may well be the reaction of many to Mandelson's literary positioning of himself not only as the power broker of New Labour, but also its prime mover in matters of strategy. Nevertheless, it is he, rather than Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who emerges through his book as the architect of the promised (but never actually delivered) political Third Way.

"The Third Man" ends with Lord Mandelson looking forward to "a new chapter" in his own life and the lives of  fellow protagonists in what has been called "The Project". It now seems that this chapter is already being written.

For an article in last weekend's "I" newspaper, funded by one of the "filthy rich" Russian oligarch's with whom the Red Baron is reported so friendly - another, incidentally, owns Waterstones bookshops - speculated on a "theatrical" Lord Mandelson playing a leading role in the appointment of Tony Blair as prime minister of a Lib-Lab Coalition following the 2015 general election.

Could such an arrangement deliver the Third Way for which many of us have been waiting. Having read "The Third Man", I'm still not so sure. It might well have been better for Britain and the world stage if the Churchillian Ken Clark had staged a military coup to prevent New Labour assuming government in 1997, and imposed a benign dictatorship on the country. But that's another story!