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No writer can contain the scandal in an elegant sentence. The subclauses pile up. Soon after the financial crash, as a UK minister of state, Peter Mandelson forwarded sensitive emails to Jeffrey Epstein, who even at the time was a convicted child sex offender, and had previously given cash to Mandelson, who later “lied” about the relationship, according to the current prime minister, to get appointed ambassador to Washington. “Britain’s worst political scandal since at least the Profumo affair”, might be easier.
What, besides disgust, should the public take from it? For one thing, a better understanding of the elite(s).
Let’s start with the rich. Most people do not find money — or the main ways of making money, such as banking — intrinsically interesting. This might be less true in societies that are new to wealth. But it holds in the established western cities. There, the self-made often discover too late that all their work and risk-taking has brought them less social status than expected. A minor magazine editor outranks them at a party. A hand-to-mouth actor is more welcome at Soho House. A bureaucrat can affect their business.
Most rich people don’t mind. Even those who do tend to react maturely, perhaps sponsoring the arts for some reflected glory or buying a media outlet. But some will cross the line in seeking to be near the beau monde.
Which consists of whom? Artists, intellectuals, politicians, even the occasional journalist: the public rather than private 1 per cent. Their value in social settings is high. Their income might not be. It is hard to get rich doing something fun. Again, most of them just shrug this off as the tax on having a cool job. Even those who really mind will often find a clean solution, such as the classic private-public intermarriage, where one spouse provides the wealth and the other the social clout. (George Washington’s marriage to a Virginia plantation-owner is a template from the annals of hypergamy.) A few, however, will do improper things for the rich to get some of their crumbs. It is just too jarring for them to be the star of a dinner party and then fly economy.
What the public sees as a monolith called “the elite” is really two different tribes, and so much corruption stems from the gap between them. Their desires are not just distinct but fatally interlocking. The private elite can scratch the public elite’s itch to live beyond their means. In return, the public elite can relieve some of the boredom and anonymity of business. Even without privileged information to offer, Mandelson was beguiling to the rich because he came from the world of ideas and events, not their world of facts and numbers. Their appeal to him scarcely needs spelling out.
Nowhere is the intra-elite split more obvious than in Davos. Often misunderstood as a place of homogenous privilege, it showcases the private-public difference. Journalists do fireside chats with tycoons and then retire to very different hotels. Celebrity academics peddle their books to half-comprehending executives. Famous campaigners seek donations for their favoured humanitarian causes. Both sides need each other. The rich get a sort of vicarious respectability out of it. For the public 1 per cent, it might be their first time in a Swiss ski chalet.
Mandelson, who adored the game of public life while chafing at its relative penury, tried to bridge the two elites. It turns out that some gulfs are unbridgeable. Part of growing up is choosing.
He is often celebrated as a political strategist, but this has to be put into perspective. The only electoral advice that matters is “pitch to the floating voter” and “choose a good leader”. Even those amount to the same thing, as a good leader will by definition prioritise the floating voter. If Mandelson had a real sixth sense for something, it was human insecurities. He understood that people who make huge fortunes do not quite feel themselves to be on top of the world. There always seems to them to be another room where the real party is going on.
His legacy will be that people will say of the establishment, louder than ever, “They are all the same”, when the problem is precisely that they aren’t.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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