Bad Gays

Today we are reaching the next to last chapter––for now!––of the Mandelson story.

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As we are recording this, on 18th May 2026, the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is facing a potential leadership challenge and a collapse in legitimacy following two major crises, both of these the responsibility of Peter Mandelson; one, directly, the other a consequence of the changes of which Mandelson has been the driving force of for almost 40 years. The first crisis is Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States, despite his having failed a Foreign Office vetting procedure, and the fallout of that once Mandelson was outed as a close long-term friend of the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, to whom it’s alleged he passed sensitive government and financial information while in power. The other is the complete decimation of Labour in the recent local elections, and in elections for the Welsh and Scottish devolved assemblies, which saw the party lose close to 1500 local council seats and, in Wales, lose a century-long winning streak as the country’s largest party. In today’s episode we’ll talk about Mandelson’s journey from MP to peer to Ambassador, and we’ll also discuss how his enormous influence over that time, usually behind the scenes, has led to a Labour Party and indeed the two party system itself on the edge of total collapse.

Peter Mandelson has been the definitive comeback kid of British politics, and it’s impossible to ever rule out his return.

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Today, we will learn why he got that reputation as we look at Mandelson in power. The Millennium Dome, a Y2K fever dream! His public outing! A wider cultural shift in attitudes towards gay men, one which contributed to the idea that poofs were everywhere at the top of society! Resignations, and returns!

This week, on Mandelson: A Homosexual History, we cover the 1992 UK election and the birth of New Labour.

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If Huw's Margaret Thatcher wasn't enough to turn your stomach, try his John Major on for size. Neil Kinnock loses the 1992 election. John Smith becomes leader of the Labour Party, flanked by two feuding up-and-coming reformers named Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Peter Mandelson buys a lovely home in Notting Hill with questionable financing, and sets himself to defeating Clause IV once and for all. The exciting but fundamentally reactionary Cool Britannia cultural moment helps us understand how tentative New Labour were about rocking the cultural boat. Their victory in 1997 was more about stasis than change.

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Last week we looked at Mandelson’s early years, and his move from a flirtation with Marxism to being firmly on the right of the Labour Party. We also discussed the left-right split in the Labour Party, and how, in the 1980s, that became a full blown civil war. This week, it's time for the 1987 General Election, and for the paranoid homophobia of late-Eighties Britain: section 28, sleaze, AIDS panic, and tabloid hell.

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They call him the Prince of Darkness. Peter Mandelson's decades-long political career is a skeleton key to everything that's gone wrong in Western politics in the last forty years. He's a spin doctor, a sometime minister, and a networker whose downfall through the Epstein files now threatens the survival of the British government. This miniseries examines his gay life and times, tracing the collapse of mass politics, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the political history of homosexuality in the UK, from decriminalisation to Section 28, from Sleaze to Gay Marriage. A Faustian story, Mandelson: A Homosexual History plays out on a world-historical scale, but at its heart is driven by the failures and compromises of greed and lust. In Episode One, we trace the emergence of Mandleson’s career in the Labour Party, and the formation of the networks of power that would help hollow out British social democracy in the years of Thatcher and Blair.