Who should be Oxford University’s new Chancellor? Anyone but Peter Mandelson.
The world is already engulfed in fake news, fake science, and fantasy served up as fact in the interest of their creators. The tide is rising. All three superpowers will be ruled next year by liars without conscience.
The one thing I want from my old University is to remain a bastion of truth in this bad world. There are now five candidates left for its Chancellor. I trust four of them to commit themselves to this cause. One I do not: Peter Mandelson.
He made an early and lasting reputation for treating truth as an instrument not as an ideal and certainly not as an imperative. If he became Chancellor, the University could create a new graduate degree: Doctor of Spin. Aspirants would take modules in enhancing and editing the truth, filleting and flavouring it, over- or under-cooking it, and at times inventing it. They would begin by studying the lie he planted in the media against the present Chancellor, among his first acts in government. They would retrace his two enforced resignations from government, for failure to meet basic standards of transparency and veracity - and the even worse offence (at the time) of embarrassing Tony Blair.
On his return to government (without facing any voters) he wrested ministerial control of British universities from the Department of Education to his own empire over Business and Industry. It symbolized a shift in the basic concept of a university, no longer the pursuit of knowledge and the training of minds but the servicing of global commercial markets. Students were to be prepared for that service, for which the state would give them loans, to be repaid when they were successful. In support of this concept, Mandelson commissioned his good friend Lord Browne to write a report. When it appeared, it did not once mention the word “scholarship”, even in its secondary sense of a payment of money.
In his statement of candidacy, Mandelson promises to raise money for the University from his international networks gained post-government as founder of his public affairs consultancy Global Counsel. That would be more attractive if we knew the identity of these networks. The firm and Mandelson himself have been extremely reticent about its clients and what it has done for them, especially the governments concerned. In spite of several rule changes intended to achieve greater disclosure, Mandelson has never declared a single client to the House of Lords.
We do know, from public sources, that the firm and Mandelson himself have long links with the Putin régime and the Chinese communist one. They served Putin’s economy long after it became clear that its guiding principles were corruption, extortion and violence. Mandelson himself served as a non-executive director of the Russian conglomerate Sistema. He remained there, drawing a handsome salary, after Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine. Sistema contained two important defence contractors. Assuming that Mandelson added any value to the group he helped to arm Vladimir Putin.
The record shows a long record of public advocacy by Mandelson in the interests of communist China. The website of Global Counsel still contains his account from six years ago of a delightful tea party with Xi Jinping, presumably because it thinks this still attractive to potential clients. I would prefer a Chancellor for Oxford University who is not proud of meals with totalitarian tyrants. I have certainly no confidence that he would resist any communist Chinese attempts at encroachment into Oxford.
However, since his departure from office in 2010, I am more troubled by what I cannot find on Mandelson’s record than what I can. I have traced no public activity from him in support of basic human rights, including academic freedom, in any country, especially in those where he is known to have done business. Nor any activity which in the broadest sense takes the side of the have-nots against the haves. I offer £50 to any Oxford charity if someone can prove me wrong.
Add to this many unanswered questions about Mandelson’s long relationships with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and his service as corporate eye-candy to the chequered financier Lars Windhorst and the troubled new start-up Bank of London.
I do not trust this candidate for Chancellor to uphold Oxford University’s commitment to truth or any of its other essential values.
Richard Heller was chief of staff to Denis Healey and Gerald Kaufman, and as a journalist has reported on and analysed six Presidential elections. He is also the author of The Prisoner of Rubato Towers.
