Robert Marshall-Andrews

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Let's make a bonfire of Labour vanities (from The Sunday Times)

Tony Blair has a famous predilection for the Old Testament and its prophets. When surveying the wreckage of the past months from the bombing of Baghdad to the fall of Mandelson he would do well to contemplate the great warning and apparently meaningless lamentation of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity."

When he plans the immediate future, the details of policy and the vernacular of leadership, he might also reflect that, in politics, there are few self-inflicted wounds more deadly than the appearance of strutting conceit, for vanity, in the perception of the people and his own party, is the handmaiden of corruption.

It is, in reality, the only compendious indictment of new Labour that begins to stick, but within its compass lie all the smaller vices and vanities that have beset some parts of its stewardship; the manipulation of the media, the use of patronage, global posturing and, most topical, the raiding of Geoffrey Robinson's apparently bottomless tuck box to fund the lifestyle of the arriviste.

This last, unedifying piece of covert glad-handing has illuminated a much wider area of concern for party and government alike. The prime minister once apparently observed that "the Labour party will finally come of age when it learns to love Peter (Mandelson)". The im portance of this statement is not its crude condescension, it is the failure to understand the apparently inexplicable aversion, throughout the Labour movement, to one of the architects of its own electoral success. The answer that the prime minister must swiftly grasp is of vital importance to Labour's future. It lies in the profound difference in personality between some parts of new Labour and the party it purports to serve.

The Labour party, in addition to being the most effective democratic socialist movement of the 20th century, is many things to many men and many women, but it is emphatically not vain. Nor, incidentally, is it dull. My own constituency party contains more precious and original wit than all the soirees of west London - and we also have our share of sybarites.

The gloomy perception that dedication to the interests of the disadvantaged, the disabled, the sick and the poor requires the flagella and the hair shirt belongs only to the Marxist minority of British socialism. The bar stool and the dining chair are familiar to the bottoms of the Labour movement. But the peacock throne is not.

The party also possesses a fine generosity of spirit. It understands full well the difficulties and disappointments of government, the inevitability of compromise, the testudinal rate of progress to social equality and the language of pluralist economics. All this it understands and will accept with good grace and goodwill. What it will not tolerate is sermons on restraint and lectures on political adolescence from the pulpit of personal vanity. Unlike its European counterparts, British socialism has never resented success and has always embraced the good fortune of its friends. However, it reserves nothing but contempt for social aspiration that tries to live beyond its means. This particular vanity has now received its own quietus and the justice is not without obvious irony, but the legacy should not be allowed to remain. Other vanities require consideration and redress. Let us have our own bonfire and be done with it.

First the vanity of spin. Manipulation of the media is not new. A feckless and dishonourable press demands its own response. Nobody denies the need for a press office, least of all those of us who endured years of deliberate misrepresenta tion by a controlled media hostile to anything that threatened the sanctity of market capital. But in government, to retain legitimacy this must be a defensive weapon. Powerful, perceptive and fuelled by the priceless monopoly of information it undoubtedly is, but unless rigorously restrained to the defence of policy and vision it be comes, inevitably, a monstrous instrument of vanity.

This is the shadowland, the black art of politics, and now that its high priest has quit the altar the sacrifice must cease.

And so with patronage, the ultimate power and the ultimate vanity. Employed to import the odd unelected genius into the sphere of government it may just stand scrutiny. Used to create a parachute regiment of courtiers it certainly will not. In a democratic society nepotism is not merely a corruption - it is a contempt for the process by which you govern.

Labour's hostility to the absurdity of the House of Lords did not inhibit a raft of appointees having greatness and public office thrust upon them before most new MPs had a desk. The inexperience of elected members provides the most threadbare of excuses and the target must now be clear. As part of Lords reform no office in government shall be open to the recipients of patronage. Full stop.

Last comes the vanity of the world stage. Of course we must tread its boards, as the foreign secretary has done, with all the confidence and urgent necessity of the international democratic socialist movement of which we are, perforce, a part. We should also employ the relative prosperity, independence and influence with which we have been endowed by fortune, geography and the North Sea to broker harmony and to promote peace and prosperity in a hungry world.

But let us cease immediately to wage sudden, arbitrary war as a tiny strutting figure in the giant shadow of unstable friends. Let us resist the temptation (no doubt skilfully employed) to be first in the field, with our bellicose declarations packed with the popular playground vernacular of "hits" and "strikes", likely in its very awfulness to prime the jingo vulgarity of the predictable press. The Romans always encouraged their satraps to rush first headlong into battle in the vainglorious pursuit of influence and the near certainty of death. So let us learn, and also, to revisit the Book of David, avoid the fate of Uriah the Hittite, thrust into the front line for the convenience and gratification of his cuckolding king.

If, and it is a big if, it is necessary to confront and ultimately to wage war on tyranny that threatens us or the weak and vulnerable who genuinely live within our tents, then let us do so strictly through the agency of the United Nations on the basis of its unequivocal and direct mandate with the sadness and gravitas that human conflict dictates. The spectacle of White House junketing on the eve of war did much to ensure the collapse of public support. Public vanity and cruise missiles do not mix.

Finally, in rejecting the vanities of government, let us relax. Vanity is paranoid. It encourages obsessive fears and the creation of secret lists of colleagues bound for the Gulag. Now is the opportunity to have done with that. Those who, on occasions, dissent are no more necessarily enemies than those who always praise are necessarily friends.

Let us, the happy elect, enjoy the massive legacy the electorate has bestowed as a source of strength and humble generosity containing within it the luxury of original, and even dangerous thought.