Ruth Dudley Edwards: Before rushing to judge Peter Mandelson, remember that we are all fallible
I disliked everything about Peter Mandelson when I first became aware of him in the early days of New Labour.
He seemed to me to epitomise everything I loathed about the new manifestation of his party: amorality, style over substance and the bullying of the press.
In 1999 I was unimpressed with his first snippy communication to me about what was quite a mild criticism of something he had said in his capacity as secretary of state for Northern Ireland.
I responded equally sharply.
But I soon changed my mind.
In competence and open-mindedness, he was a vast improvement on Mo Mowlam.
Unlike her, he preferred police to paramilitaries.
I soon came to see him as the most able of all Northern Ireland secretaries of state as well as being the one with the greatest sympathy for the people I most cared about – the victims of terrorism.
Against the advice of the Northern Ireland Office, Mandelson had visited Omagh to meet victims’ families, had broken down after seeing bereavement therapy artwork from children, and had promised the campaign group I was part of to do whatever he could to help the case against the Omagh bombers.
He was a joy to work with: clever, practical, imaginative and utterly reliable.
Despite losing his job in 2001, he stayed utterly loyal to this little group of victims who had neither money nor social status.
Whenever asked by us campaigners to back particular events, he did so.
It was he who bullied Tony Blair against all precedent to provide us with legal aid.
But Mandelson kept getting into trouble through his lust for money.
I always defend him with the verse Longfellow wrote in the 1850s about one of his daughters, who could be angelic or mischievous.
“There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.”
I have much to thank my parents for, including the prejudices we shared from the time I was old enough to understand them.
Neither of them could stand Holy Joes, the breast-beating, sanctimonious and the pious whom we laughed at in the Dublin of my childhood.
Mostly, they were dismissed in my home as thundering hypocrites.
These days people like that gather in herds on social media putting those of whom they disapprove in metaphorical stocks and pelting them with abuse.
I don’t know all the facts of what sins Mandelson has committed, but I’m with Jesus.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged.
"Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.”
I learned quite young that we are all fallible and have done much of which we are — or should be — ashamed.
I doubt if the slavering mobs of Holy Joe accusers will pay much attention to Jesus or Longfellow, but we could all benefit from being reminded by Shakespeare of the unfairness whereby “the evil that men do lives after them” while “the good is oft interred with their bones”.
When Peter Mandelson was good, he was very good indeed.
l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and also of Aftermath: the Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice