A life of slime
By naming his book after The Third Man – a novel famous for its magnificently slithery protaganist – Peter Mandelson demonstrates an acute grasp of his unpleasant role in the rise to power of Britain's New Labour
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 19 Aug 2010
I have on your behalf been reading Peter Mandelson's 560-page autobiography, The Third Man, and have reached the end. Before that, I finished the book. I want some credit for this.
The work has widely been reviewed for its entertainment value – as a bonus bout of knockabout knife-fighting following the formal end of New Labour rule. But – I grow old, I grow old – a drowsy numbness pains my soul at yet another vignette of vicious friends skulking the shadows for a passing back to drive a dagger into.
Still, Mandelson chose a perfect title for his tome.
The Third Man was a classic film noir, maybe the best British movie ever made. Set in post-war Vienna, it was directed by Carol Reed from a script by Graham Greene and starred Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard – and Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the 'Third Man'. Lime is a brilliant, stylish, fascinating, amoral wheeler-dealer in the anything-goes city divided into separate zones of corruption between the Russians and the Allies. He's on the lam for having sold dodgy penicillin to desperate hospitals. The great Dilys Powell – film critic of the Sunday Times back when the Sunday Times was a great newspaper – described the character: "No mere rascal, or persona non grata, but an appalling ingrate, a ruthless, unregenerate, incarnate force of evil."
Having misused and manipulated people who foolishly loved him and lied and cheated and calculated every human situation for what personal profit it might bring him, Lime breathes his last after being shot in the back by a journalist as he tries to clamber out of a sewer. You have to admit – Mandleson to a T.
Amazing the things you learn while zonked out on good sounds.
Dropped round to Joe Mulheron's moral bar one recent Wednesday night to hear Johanna Fagan's new band with Paul Cassidy, Bodhicitta.
Considering the wonder-woman warrior sound of Ms Fagan at full tilt, you might assume, as did I, that Bodhicitta is a cool version of the name of that big-breasted Brit battleaxe (I mean that in a good way) who smote the Roman forces of savage Suetonius before falling in the epic encounter at Mancetter near Nuneaton in AD61.
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