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Robert Harris, the distinguished novelist, has not, perhaps, done his friend Peter Mandelson many favours by dedicating his book about Cicero to him.
We are effectively invited to see Lord M as another Cicero. And that comparison does no favours to the Business Secretary, poor thing. Come to that, the contrast between Roman politics then — in Julius Caesar's time — and ours doesn't altogether flatter us either.
This isn't to say that Lord Mandelson is a negligible figure. He is patently the most intelligent man in government and has a knack not only of backing the man who matters, but of making the man he backs into a winner (Blair), or less of a loser (Brown). Cicero, by contrast, was rubbish at picking winners. He chose Pompey against Caesar, but luckily Caesar was nice about it. Less happily, he made an enemy of Mark Antony (“lend us your ears”), who had him assassinated.
Cicero was doomed to live in what the Chinese curse calls interesting times, when the Roman republic collapsed under its own weight and the political ambitions of successful generals. The stakes were high: the choice was between a system run by a powerful elite but which still had noble ideals about government in the interests of the people, or dictatorship.
And Cicero was, notwithstanding his inconsistencies (he was decidedly high-handed in the episode known as the Catiline Conspiracy), against dictatorship. You knew what side he was on: you still do, from his treatise, The Republic. His ideal was a state with an engaged citizenry and leaders who governed in the interests of the people.
By contrast, it's not entirely clear what Peter Mandelson stands for. Obviously, he's a democrat. But he's eminently modern in seeming to be interested chiefly in the retention of power, not in what power is for. He doesn't lay his ideals open to public scrutiny.
Cicero, by contrast, never kept his mouth shut: even in exile, the equivalent of Lord M's time in Brussels, books poured out of him. And although Mandelson has been an MP, lately his power has come from patronage: as EU commissioner, as a minister-peer. Yet Cicero occupied every notable office.
Perhaps the chief difference between them, and between our politics and theirs, is that Cicero was pre-eminently an orator. He had to engage not just the ordinary people but the elite, a body of highly educated and influential men, who knew good rhetoric when they heard it. Theirs was a better class of the art of persuasion than ours.
Cicero's oratory is legendary; tellingly, the only line of Lord Mandelson's anyone remembers is his “I'm a fighter, not a quitter” in retaining his seat in 2001. None of our politicians, in fact, would be in his league, though Barack Obama is perhaps another matter. We don't have the capacities of a Roman audience to appreciate clever flourishes. But rhetoric still matters in our day.
A good speech can make a political career (as it did for David Cameron, when he ran for the Tory leadership in 2006) or sink one (after David Miliband's at the last party conference there was little more talk of him as leader). We've abandoned the era of elaborate oratory — Churchill would sound overblown now — but the lesson of Cicero is that the art of persuasion in public, and not just the tricks of television, is still worth cultivating in political life.
But comparisons with Cicero aren't all to Lord Mandelson's disadvantage. Cicero ended having his head and hands cut off by his enemies (for good measure, Mark Antony's wife Fulvia stuck her hairpin in his tongue). Let's hope the Business Secretary suffers a less painful end.
Reader views (1)
'the only line of Lord Mandelson's anyone remembers is his “I'm a fighter, not a quitter” '
Not quite true - he's the originator of the "New Labour is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" remark which sums up so much that is wrong with our current City-bedazzled government. But a good article otherwise, which reminded me how much I need/want to re-read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series.
- Jo, London, UK, 06/08/2009 12:18
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