Jonathan Glancey is a bit of a romantic, but he shows an acute awareness of not simply the lost skills that vanished when industry went global, but of the fact that nothing replaced what was lost except fractional reserve banking and fiat money, those two drivers of the current recession.

Mandelson, of course, is right. The old smokestack industries are not coming back; the future for the UK - if it has one - is hi-tech.

Which does rather call into question the dumbing down of schooling, the cuts in higher education, and, the plans to cut a year off degree courses.

Mandelson's "hi-tech, low-carbon, digital revival" comes up against his cuts in higher education.

Mandelson shows he's ready to fight

Derek Draper

Michael White

Tories release dossier on Peter Mandelson

Blair thought Brown was 'mad, bad and dangerous'

Tony Blair branded Gordon Brown 'beyond redemption' and reneged on deal to stand down after his second term ...

crinklyoldgit 14 Jul 2010, 1:41AM After reading this horrific account of two people caught up in a vicious personal vendetta, almost certainly to the exclusion of their huge responsibilities, does it not look more and more that these putrid examples of our political elite- deciding on the fate of millions-directly in the case of Iraq, should be properly brought to account?

This article describes simple criminal negligance, never mind all the other serious moral, political and legal issues associated with these two.

We need to ask the question: How did two such deeply flawed individuals rise to their respective positions?

They have conspired, and inflicted monumental damage on our country, in undermining the rule of law and our attachment to principles of justice and the democratic processes of representation.

It really is time to start some grass roots movement to bring these people to account properly, for their actions, and to impose some real restrictions and control over the people who are elected on behalf of our country.

How about a two term limit on elected representatives, no comfortable 'house of lords' sinecures, and an end to the power to appoint the people who carry out the investigations (Chilcott, Butler etc).

It is time for parliament to re-assert itself at the very least. Our country really needs to waken up.

Guardian  14 July 2010    Blog    Tony Blair

The mystery of Lord Mandelson's finances

An investigation has uncovered several alleged aspects of the Mandelson story which seem most unlikely to feature in the pages of this week's authorised version.

It is a tale of a rich friend, inside information, allegations – denied – of a dubious oil connection and the apparent concealment of financial interests in breach of Parliamentary rules.

It starts in one of London's most expensive streets, at the heart of the Nash terraces around Regent's Park. On it lies a beautiful peach-stucco villa, and a long-standing mystery.

There is no puzzle about the owner of the house: Lord Mandelson. There is no secret about its value: Land Registry records show that in 2006 he bought the place for £2.5 million, including stamp duty.

The mystery has always been how he could possibly have afforded it ...

Telegraph  11 July 2010

If he was made of chocolate, he'd eat himself

Mandelson accused of running 'worst election campaign in Labour history'

Mandelson blamed for Labour's election 'disaster'

The risk of deglobalization

Tax rise for rich won't make society fair

In defence of globalisation

Globalisation is good

Mandelson warns over dangers of 1970s anti-market politics

Mandelson warns on protectionism

Peter Mandelson

Wikipedia

Lord Mandelson gets personal over banker’s pay

As the pot said to the kettle:

Lord Mandelson has singled out the president of Barclays as the "unacceptable face" of the banking sector in one of the most vitriolic attacks on financiers since the financial crisis.

The Business Secretary, who said 12 years ago that Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes", said that Bob Diamond was socially useless and paid an unjustifiable amount of money ...

Lord Mandelson told The Times: "If you look at Bob Diamond, who took £63 million in pay — that to me is the unacceptable face of banking. He hasn’t earned that money, he’s taken £63 million not by building business or adding value or creating long-term economic strength, he has done so by deal-making and shuffling paper around."

Times  03 April 2010

Tristram Hunt to face independent Labour challenge

Tristram Hunt, the television historian ... was selected earlier this week to fight Stoke-on-Trent Central for Labour ...

(He) was the overwhelming favourite for the selection, but there was anger in some quarters of the constituency that no local candidates were included on the shortlist, amid complaints of a “stitch up” by the party leadership.

Gary Elsby, the constituency party secretary, has now confirmed that he will run as an independent in the seat, which Labour currently holds with a majority of nearly 10,000.

Claiming that Mr Hunt had been parachuted in at the behest of Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, Mr Elsby told the BBC: “It has been a shoo-in for Lord Mandelson’s friend ... " ...

Telegraph  03 April 2010

Export rules raise child labour fears

British exporters backed by taxpayers’ money would have greater freedom to use child workers and even forced labour abroad under a policy reversal floated by an arm of Lord Mandelson’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skill.

The Export Credits Guarantee Department, the creditor and insurer of many multinationals’ projects in poor countries, is proposing to ease tight standards on underage workers that it adopted six years ago after a political outcry ...

the department – which has exposure of more than £13bn covering almost 100 countries – now proposes following Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development rules that would give it the discretion to allow companies to use underage workers “where appropriate”.

In ECGD support deals lasting less than two years – the first of which was struck with an unnamed company last month – the department proposes imposing no conditions at all relating to either forced labour or child labour.

Critics say the planned changes would take the ECGD – whose sphere of operation includes countries such as India, Brazil and Nigeria – back beyond even its contentious previous position of allowing British companies to use underage workers only in “exceptional circumstances”.

That rule was toughened after it came under attack in 2003 from an all-party Commons committee, which said it was surprised there were circumstances “under which ECGD would consider supporting projects which exploit children” ...

FT  15 Jan 2010

England's department for higher and further education has been scrapped, just two years after its creation.

The prime minister has created a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills under Lord Mandelson.

Universities do not figure in the name of the new department, whose remit is "to build Britain's capabilities to compete in the global economy".

Number 10 said it would invest in a higher education system committed to widening participation.

The role would include "maintaining world class universities, expanding access to higher education, investing in the UK's science base and shaping skills policy and innovation".

"It also puts the UK's further education system and universities closer to the heart of government thinking about building now for the upturn," the statement said.

The new department will be headed by Lord Mandelson ...

In response to the latest shake-up, the further education organisation, the Association of Colleges, said that "in the middle of a recession and with less than a year to run to an election it's unhelpful to introduce this degree of change in terms of ministerial responsibility" ...

The Million+ group, representing new universities, said that the department would have to address "immediate challenges".

"In particular the tens of thousands of potential students who will be turned away because there are no places for them at university this year."

This refers to a problem facing the new department this summer if, as has been forecast by universities, there is a shortfall of places following a surge in applications.

The UCU lecturers union expressed its disappointment at the scrapping of Dius.

General secretary Sally Hunt said she was "very concerned" that the "merger seems to signal that further and higher education are no longer considered important enough to have a department of their own".

"The fact they have been lumped in with business appears to be a clear signal of how the government views colleges and universities and their main roles in this country." ...

BBC NEWS 05 June 2009

Mandelson takes charge of universities

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: "UCU is very concerned that this merger seems to signal that further and higher education are no longer considered important enough to have a department of their own. The fact they have been lumped in with business appears to be a clear signal of how the government views colleges and universities and their main roles in this country.

"Education has the power to change people's lives, and if we are serious about the important role it can play in helping us out of recession, then we need experts in education at the helm, not business interests. We will be seeking an urgent meeting with, and assurances from, the minister that both further and higher education have clear and defined roles in the new department."

Guardian 05 June 2009

Universities 'side-lined'

One of Lord Mandelson's first responsibilities will be leading the Government's review of tuition fees later this year. Ministers are already under pressure to lift the existing £3,100-a-year fee cap, despite claims from students that it will leave graduates heavily in debt.

Telegraph 06 June 2009

Growing outcry at threat of cuts in humanities at universities

Higher education must adapt to more austere times

Invest in education to beat recession

Universities' annual funding reduced by £533m

University budgets to be slashed by up to 14%

Further education budget reduced by £573m

Warning over university budget cuts

University spending cuts arouse concerns

Science and education budgets face 'bleak' £600m cuts

Universities warn that budget cuts will be challenging

Universities 'must widen access'

Mandelson backs consumer students

Brown scraps DIUS

Neoliberal Education

BERR, now run by Lord Mandelson, functions as a fifth column within government, working for corporations to undermine democracy and the public interest.

Since he became business secretary in October, Mandelson has been quietly building a bonfire of the measures that protect us from predatory corporate behaviour.

You don’t have to look very far to see where BERR’s interests lie. Most government departments contain either one unelected minister or none. Two departments (the Foreign Office and Innovation, Universities and Skills) each accommodate two unelected ministers.

But BERR has four. It is the only department of government in which unelected ministers outnumber members of parliament.

Until he became minister for communications in BERR, Lord Carter was the chief executive of Brunswick Group, a big corporate PR firm whose clients include British Airways, Barclays, Unilever, Rolls Royce and BT.

Lord Davies, the minister for trade and investment, was chairman of Standard Chartered and a non-executive director of Tesco. Until October, the trade minister was Digby Jones, formerly the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry. Lord Jones refused to join the Labour Party, or to say which party he would support at the next election.

As for Lord Mandelson, who was twice obliged to resign from the government and who previously ranked second on Mr Brown’s execution list, the only convincing explanation for his appointment is that business demanded it.

Mandelson, who once avowed that “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” was partly responsible, both in Blair’s government and as European trade commissioner, for promoting the culture of deregulation that catalysed the economic crisis.

Yet even today he boasts about “a decade of reform that has given the UK the most open and flexible product and labour markets in the world.” ...

Mandelson is the promoter of Labour’s crazy scheme to part-privatise Royal Mail ...

But most of his assaults on democracy have achieved much less attention.

Last week he helped to neuter the EU’s working time directive by ensuring that European companies will still be able to push their employees into working for more than 48 hours a week.

BERR issued a gleeful press release bragging that talks on the directive “have broken down without agreement being reached” as a result of government filibusters.

Mandelson’s attempt to prevent companies from exploiting their female workers was less successful. The equality bill sought to audit large companies to ensure that they were not paying women less than men for the same jobs. Mandelson insisted that the audits should be voluntary, and that the policy should first be approved by the Confederation of British Industry ...

Last month, though it passed almost unnoticed, BERR deregulated the news distribution industry. This is a gift to the supermarkets, but a disaster for both small newsagents and freedom of speech.

The companies which distribute newspapers and magazines to the shops had guaranteed, in return for exclusive delivery rights, to supply whatever stock a shop requests, however small the order might be. This allowed small newsagents to survive, and protected publishers from censorship by powerful retailers ...

Tesco has been trying to break the distribution agreement since 2000; now Mandelson has delivered ...

Monbiot.com 04 May 2009

There is no G20 country that has not benefited from the expansion of trade and the creation of a global economy in the 20th century. Open trade has driven the rising levels of global prosperity that have defined the two decades leading up to the credit crunch. The growth of trade allowed countries and their companies to specialise and compete for sales globally rather than just in their home market.

By allowing developing countries to become part of global production lines supplying developed world markets, it drove the growth that has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than ever in human history. As they grew, these economies created demand for imports from the developed world in turn.

It is this massive demand engine that is the basis of global prosperity and that has been stalled by the credit crisis, not least because the crunch has dried up a lot of the temporary credit that finances 90 per cent of international trade. The fundamental challenge facing G20 governments is getting that global demand engine turning over again. Rebuilding demand, and transmitting that demand throughout the global economy, will both require an open trading system.

The Times 16 March 2009

Banking regulation has to be "the right touch", not "the light touch", Lord Mandelson has told business leaders.

The government was trying to combine a competitive market with a greater sense of public responsibility, the business secretary said in a speech in London.

"A modern industrial economy is built not on money as such, but on the stable and reliable availability of credit," he told his audience at Mansion House.

He said the UK would emerge stronger and better from the global recession.

Lord Mandelson said he had spent months explaining to "angry" businesses why banks had an "urgent and unique claim" on the taxpayer's support ...

He also repeated the case against British protectionism.

"British companies thrive in, and depend on, an open European and global market, and the same is true for any European country or company," he said.

Lord Mandelson said that despite the current economic downturn, the UK's strengths built up over the past had to be recognised - including in the City.

"It is important to recognise that whatever went wrong in some City institutions, the legal and commercial expertise that has developed here has not somehow been wiped away in the last year.

"They will remain central to the UK economy in the decades ahead, just as they have been for centuries."

BBC NEWS 05 March 2009

Mandelson calls for more state activism to replace 'light touch'

• Mandelson releases letter from Royal Mail trustees
• Ministers want to sell 30% stake to private sector

Lord Mandelson tonight raised the stakes in the battle over the future of the Royal Mail by releasing a letter from its pension trustees warning that if part privatisation does not go ahead, staff may have to see the value of their pension slashed in half ...

The pension fund has more than 450,000 members, and Newell's warning will disturb members as they decide how far to take their opposition to the government's reform. The letter was sent following a meeting between Newell and Mandelson on 13 February. She stresses her views reflect those of all trustees.

The Hooper review warned the deficit on the existing ongoing basis was £5.9bn, but says the figure next year would be significantly larger. Newell says the law gives the trustees and Royal Mail until June next year to agree this valuation.

Guardian 24 February 2009

Smoke and Mirrors

Blog posted by 2barrows:

There is an incredible amount of misleading spin about all this. Not surprising given that Mandelson is at the heart of it.

1. The Royal Mail pension fund has assets of £22bn, and the government is keen to get its grubby little hands on it particularly because that £22bn can then be used to reduce the public borrowing numbers. The minor matter of a £5.9bn or £8bn or £10bn pension deficit or whatever can then be covered by yet more borrowing which future tax will have to pay for, and today's public borrowing is then reduced by £22bn less £10bn = £12bn. It is a piece of accounting jiggery-pokery.

2. During the 1990s, the Royal Mail pension fund was in surplus, and the Royal Mail took a contribution holiday. Even their own pensions website http://www.royalmailgroup.com/portal/rmg/content1?catId=55200710&mediaId=62800713 acknowledges this. So the pension shortfall has become a problem relatively recently.

3. Much is made by Mandelson and his junior ministers about other postal services having been modernised, and that they are more efficient than Royal Mail. They fail to recognise an unpalatable difference - we actually pay less that our Continental brethren for our postal deliveries. These Continental postal services have all been charging more than Royal Mail for deliveries, so they can afford to invest, and they are all profitable: France - La Poste Euro 0.55; Germany - Deutsche Post Euro 0.55; Netherlands - TNT Post Euro 0.44; Poste Italiane Euro 0.60. Even the new Royal Mail 1st class 39p rate is still less than these.

We get what we pay for, although in 2007/8 it was reported that Crozier on top of his £633,000 salary, received bonuses of £843,000, £1.99m for a long-term incentive plan, and £208,000 cash in lieu of pension, so obviously Royal Mail decided that it could afford that.

Ministers defend Royal Mail plan in pension row

A government-brokered deal between trade unions and employers to improve agency workers' rights is threatening to unravel as tens of thousands of people are laid off without redundancy benefits.

No 10 has been accused of allowing employers to treat agency workers as "cannon fodder" after refusing to extend their rights to cover notice periods and compensation for loss of jobs.

Labour backbenchers, union leaders and Downing Street disagree about which benefits should be incorporated into UK law from the newly ratified EU agency workers directive.

One prominent parliamentary campaigner has questioned whether the government is backtracking on its promises. The TUC would like redundancy and job protection benefits included in the regulations.

Unions want the government to fast-track any new protection so it is introduced well before December, 2011 - the final date set by the EU for incorporation into UK law.

There are fears, according to Whitehall sources, that the two ministers in charge of the legislation, Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, and Pat McFadden, the employment minister, are anxious not to offend business and may not be sympathetic to union demands.

Mandelson, according to Whitehall sources, sent for the entire package of measures agreed for the Queen's speech, including legislation on the directive, to see how business friendly it was - with the aim of going for the minimal protection allowed by law ...

Guardian 21 February 2009

Global Labour Market

So what is the London meeting going to be about? Well, London's big problem, London's big challenge, what we are confronted with, is, in my opinion, nothing less than a risk -- a sharp risk of dismantling or at least damaging the global economic machine: the risk of deglobalization.

We have a crisis, as we all know, in the global real economy. It started in the financial markets, as we know too. And we also know that it's turning into something much worse and that the sort of bottom is -- the floor is being sort of taken out of global growth. Trade is set to go -- move into reverse in the global economy for the first time since 1982.

Now, after, therefore, a 20-year bull market, the core engines of growth, trade and international investment are suddenly becoming very vulnerable. A risk, in my view, involved in all this is not really a sort of a Smoot-Hawley style tariff wall of the sort that we have known generations ago. The WTO constrains states on tariffs.

I think the greater risk and the greater threat of protectionism to the global economy, to trade and to investment is a rather more insidious one. It comes in the form of a competitive subsidy wall or a -- or regulatory protectionism, like "Buy America" -- or buy British or buy whatever it is -- or a retreat into domestic lending by banks that have been operating internationally, you know, directly or through subsidiaries. It's a sort of -- you know, a retreat into the sort of familiar confines of your home market, a retreat from the internationalism that has characterized international finance to date.

And this, in my view, is a pretty toxic combination of economic short-termism, economic nationalism and retrenchment, which in that sort of lethal combination has the potential, in my view, to do an enormous amount of lasting damage to global economic growth and our ability to sustain living standards at home, but also to generate growth and rising prosperity elsewhere in the world.

Now, this is not just like taking your foot off the gas, in other words, as far as growth is concerned. It's actually attacking the very engine of global growth. And I think the lesson of the 1930s is that protectionism might seem to treat the symptoms of the downturn, but it is a poison as far as global recovery is concerned, because it puts a structural check on future economic growth.

So I think the first challenge therefore for the London summit is to address this crisis in growth and demand and, in doing so, preserve the openness of the global economy. And therefore, I think that there are three priorities with this view in mind.

First, the G-20 should agree that fiscal stimuli, the sort of national recovery plans mounted in each of our countries, need to reinforce each other. There has to be an international sense and dimension to what we are doing, each of us, domestically. In the classic Keynesian model, a closed national economy stimulates its own falling demand, but our economies are now dependent on each other's demand. You know, we are not closed and insulated in the way and to the extent that we were generations ago. For example, you know, U.K. car industry sales -- something currently sort of close to my heart, as to any politician's heart who deals with the immediate repercussions of collapsing demand -- our sales won't recover unless European demand, and indeed Asian demand, for cars rises ...

Secondly, the G-20 should agree on the need to make sure that the stimuli take the right form and push in the right direction, that they reach into activities and sectors that will do most to strengthen our economies in the longer term -- in other words, to build tomorrow today in the measures that we are selecting to form part of our stimulus programs. For example, using fiscal stimuli to draw down on vital infrastructure investment and the transition to the creation of a low-carbon economy ...

And thirdly, I think the G-20 should commit to keeping the multilateral trading system open and cross-border investment flowing. It -- it's -- it may not be the conventional way of looking at a sort of demand stimulus, but I would argue that a world trade deal meets many of the criteria of an effective demand stimulus. I would actually call the Doha Round not a trade deal so much as another stimulus package for the world economy, and get it done, incidentally, in 2009 ...

Times Online 18 February 2009

Lord Mandelson warned Labour yesterday not to impose big taxes on the rich during the recession as he urged the party not to revert to the "politics of envy".

At a Fabian Society conference entitled Fairness Doesn't Happen by Chance, the business secretary described as "ugly" the view prevalent in some Labour circles that politicians can promote fairness by "dragging down" the wealthy ...

The Labour deputy leader, Harriet Harman, also insisted that the gap between rich and poor needed to be addressed, saying: "As we seek to build a fairer society in the future, there must be no return to the awful spectacle of directors of companies awarding themselves bonuses of hundreds of millions. No one seeks to defend that now and that sort of excess and greed has no place in the new social order of a fair and equal society." ...

The Guardian 19 January 2009

MPs expenses: Standards watchdog condemns latest secrecy move

Labour must not use the financial crisis as an excuse to revive its economic policies of the early 1980s, Peter Mandelson has warned.

He said there would be no return to the 1983 manifesto - dubbed the "longest suicide note in history" for its emphasis on state economic control.

The business secretary told Progress magazine the idea that Labour should reject market economics was "absurd". ...

"I think there is a danger that some see the financial and banking crisis as an opportunity to resurrect the 1983 party manifesto.

"It is not going to happen. We have all moved on. More than anything, the public is not going to be interested in that.

"I don't believe what has happened is market failure in the financial sector. I believe it is a regulatory failure."

BBC NEWS 24 October 2008

One of Lord Mandelson's jobs will be to decide whether to bring proceedings to bar someone from being a director of a company.

To this task he will bring his own "morality".

As I understand it, he applied for a mortgage and, in answer to the question "are you borrowing any part of the purchase price from anyone else?" answered "no", when in fact he was borrowing over £300,000 from a colleague.

Now, if that is right there are two interpretations.

The first is that he forgot about the loan from Mr Robinson or didn't read the question before ticking the box. These are consistent with honesty, but not competence.

The second is that he deliberately gave a false answer. That is fraud. It is the criminal offence of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception.

On either intepretation - and I have no idea which is correct - he is wholly unsuitable to hold the office ot which he has been appointed. Or any office.

Mr Mandelson resigned in 1999 without answering questions on this. Having resigned, he was not interviewed. When he regained office, he said, in effect, he'd paid his dues. He has, so far as I can recall, never explained his conduct publicly.

Posted by "AnOldBoy" Oct 04 08, 10:48pm

Guardian 03 October 2008

Globalisation works by widening economic networks. It multiplies the sizes of markets, increases the economies of scale that push down prices, and allows countries to tap into sources of productive investment from around the world. Those networks have created a global economic engine that is the biggest eliminator of poverty and creator of opportunity the world has ever seen. But globalisation transmits risk and volatility as well as benefits.

Sustaining the huge benefits of economic globalisation relies on preserving these fundamental networks of interdependence, not rolling them back. Changes to financial regulatory frameworks must tackle excessive risk while defending open trade and foreign investment as vital to development.

Beyond ending the liquidity crisis, our first response should be to fix the source of the shock. We need to inject confidence by regulating to control excessive risk-taking and heavy leveraging, and to improve the way ratings agencies work. The European commission is right to now come forward with new European rules on these questions. Certain financial products have become so complex that they are not understood by the very institutions that buy and trade them. This is a regulatory and professional failure of the first order. ...

It has always been a mistake to believe that globalisation was putting governments out of business. States and effective governance are what makes globalisation possible: they preserve open markets, enforce rules and responsibilities, and manage the risks for individuals and society. We have been reminded over the past two weeks that the state underpins the market as lender of last resort. But it has a legitimate claim to a wider role. Its role is to ensure that the conduct of individuals or businesses does not put at risk the stability of the system or the foundations of our economies.

We have nothing to gain by shutting down financial globalisation. But the networks that make up globalisation will keep transmitting the shocks along with the benefits unless we take a tougher line with excessive risk, and strengthen the multilateral instruments that govern the global financial system.

If there is anything cathartic in this crisis it will be a healthy new scepticism for financial products we don't understand, a heightened intolerance for excessive risk-taking, and a new conviction that a global economy needs global economic governance.

Guardin 03 October 2008

... The Atlantic world is no longer the centre of the economic world, because the economic world no longer has a centre. How McCain and Obama interpret that fact matters to all of us.

The protectionist and anti-trade rhetoric evident in the presidential primaries suggests that many Americans see global economic change in zero-sum terms. Asia rises, we decline. Economic inequality is reduced between countries, but widens within our own societies. Globalisation is no longer something we do, it is something that others do to us. An increasing number of Europeans feel the same way.

Nobody would disagree that globalisation has its dark side. But the open markets and economic integration that drive it are still by far the best tool we have for increasing global economic welfare. That is an essential contribution to global stability. Only stable, cooperating states can manage the coming squeeze on resources. For 60 years, the US has underwritten economic internationalism with openness of its own. A crisis of American confidence in globalisation could knock it off course ...

Guardian 09 June 2008

“he was forced to quit a second time in January 2001 over allegations of misconduct over a passport application for Dome supporters, the Hinduja brothers. This was seen as terminal even though inquiries later cleared him of any wrongdoing.”

BBC NEWS 13 August, 2004

Following Peter Mandelson’s return to the Cabinet, as Northern Ireland Secretary on 11 October 1999, the Observer alleged on 24 January 2001 that he had called the immigration minister Mike O’Brien to pass on an enquiry about the possibility of an Indian business man, Srichand Hinduja, obtaining British Citizenship.

Concerns arose about whether undue influence had been exerted on behalf of Srichand and his brother, particularly as they had donated £1 million to sponsor the Faith Zone in the Millennium Dome when Mr Mandelson was the Minister in charge of the project in 1998.

Following discussions between Tony Blair and Mr Mandelson, it was decided that he should resign, particularly in the light of vociferous calls for this in the press, and he announced this outside No. 10 on 24 January 2001.

Individual ministerial responsibility .pdf - Page 29ff - 05 April 2004

Peter Mandelsohn: Secret Loan