It is often said that politics is the art of forgetting — and few exemplify that art better than Peter Mandelson.
The architect of New Labour’s sleek modern image is rarely associated today with his youthful radicalism, much less with the darker politics of violence that shaped Britain’s late 20th century.
Yet to overlook Mandelson’s formative political affiliations, or to ignore the ideological company he once kept, is to miss a thread running through the tapestry of modern British politics — a thread that connects his past with the bloody legacy of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Mandelson’s membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the 1970s is sometimes waved away as the indulgence of a precocious youth. Yet the CPGB was no mere debating society: it was the British outpost of a revolutionary movement that openly sought to dismantle liberal democracy and capitalism. Its literature spoke of class war, the overthrow of the bourgeois state, and the triumph of proletarian internationalism. Such ideological commitments were not theoretical abstractions; they offered intellectual succour to militant groups across the globe, including the IRA, which shared the CPGB’s Marxist disdain for the British state.
The Provisional IRA, formed in 1969, did not initially present itself as a Marxist organisation. It was rooted in Catholic nationalism and framed its campaign as a war of liberation against British rule in Northern Ireland. Yet by the late 1970s and 1980s, Marxist doctrine increasingly influenced its political wing, Sinn Féin, and much of its military leadership. The movement forged links with other revolutionary organisations — from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Palestine Liberation Organisation — and adopted an explicitly socialist programme. This was not mere rhetorical camouflage. It reflected a conviction that their armed struggle was not simply about Irish unification, but about dismantling what they regarded as an imperialist, capitalist British state.
When Mandelson entered the Cabinet as Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999, it was therefore striking to many observers that he appeared unusually solicitous towards Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA. To be sure, by that point the Good Friday Agreement had been signed, and mainstream politics required a measure of engagement with former combatants. But Mandelson went further than many of his colleagues were comfortable with. He was notably reluctant to criticise the IRA for its continued paramilitary activities and its evident unwillingness to fully disarm. He repeatedly insisted that the peace process required “confidence building,” a phrase that often seemed to mean overlooking IRA bad faith.
Those qualms were not trivial. The IRA’s so-called ceasefire did not mean the end of violence. Throughout the 2000s, splinter groups and continuations of the organisation — including the Real IRA (RIRA) and the Continuity IRA (CIRA) — continued terrorist attacks. In August 2002, the Real IRA detonated a car bomb outside a military base in Derry, injuring soldiers and civilians.
In March 2009, Real IRA gunmen murdered two off-duty British soldiers at Massereene Barracks in Antrim. Just two days later, the Continuity IRA assassinated a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officer, Stephen Carroll, in Craigavon — the first murder of a Northern Irish policeman in over a decade. And in April 2019, journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead in Derry during rioting orchestrated by the so-called New IRA, a direct descendant of the Provisional movement. These were not historical curiosities; they were brutal reminders that the ideological flame had not been extinguished, only passed to new hands.
Against this backdrop, Mandelson’s indulgent rhetoric towards the Republican movement takes on a more troubling hue. He repeatedly urged “understanding” of Republican grievances and spoke warmly of Sinn Féin leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, men who had long been implicated in IRA command structures. While he did not openly endorse violence, his consistent refusal to condemn Republican intransigence carried a whiff of ideological sympathy. It was as though his youthful revolutionary instincts — however dormant they may now be — had inoculated him against the moral clarity that terrorism demands from democrats.
To suggest that Mandelson supported terrorism would be inaccurate. Yet it is equally naïve to pretend that ideological backgrounds leave no trace. The CPGB to which he once belonged viewed armed revolutionary violence as a legitimate instrument of political change. It saw the British state not as a neutral guarantor of law but as an oppressive bourgeois structure to be overthrown. The Provisional IRA, and the Real and Continuity factions that followed it, were animated by precisely the same premise. Their bombs and bullets were intended to smash the apparatus of British governance in Northern Ireland, in pursuit of a socialist Irish republic. The parallels are not incidental; they speak to a shared intellectual lineage.
Mandelson’s admirers may protest that people change. Undoubtedly they do. Yet what makes his case unsettling is the way he has sought to erase, rather than reckon with, that earlier worldview. He appears to have not publicly disavowed Marxism in principled terms, nor offered any searching critique of the revolutionary Left’s moral failures. Instead, he has cloaked his past in the soft language of political pragmatism, as if Marxism were merely an adolescent fancy rather than a doctrine that sanctified mass violence. This refusal to draw a clear moral boundary creates the impression — however unfair he might consider it — that the boundary is blurred in his own mind.
The contrast with those who truly broke from extremism is stark. Former radicals who became democrats — from the ex-Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens to the former IRA man turned critic Eamon Collins, beaten and stabbed to death by former IRA colleagues, on 27th January 1999 — did so by repudiating their old dogmas. They understood that democracy cannot be built on the rubble of terror. Mandelson, by contrast, seems almost embarrassed to discuss the ideological commitments of his youth, as if they were an awkward wardrobe choice rather than a worldview. It is this coyness that leaves open the suspicion of lingering sympathy with those who once sought to bomb Britain into submission.
That suspicion matters because history has shown how fragile peace can be in Northern Ireland. The Real IRA, the Continuity IRA and the New IRA may be diminished, but they are not extinguished. MI5 still regards dissident Republican terrorism as the principal domestic security threat in Northern Ireland. Every indulgent remark from a British statesman, every hint that Republican grievances somehow justify continued “armed struggle,” risks breathing oxygen into embers that have not yet gone cold.
Peter Mandelson may sincerely regard himself as a champion of peace. Yet his record reveals a reluctance to confront the ideological nature of the forces he dealt with in Northern Ireland — an ideology not wholly alien to his own youthful commitments. That may not make him an apologist for terrorism. But it does make him a cautionary example of how the Marxist enchantments of youth can cloud the moral judgment of adulthood. In the end, the line between indulgence and complicity is thinner than many politicians care to admit. Mandelson has spent his career walking it. Britain can ill afford others to follow.
– Lord Mandelson official headshot 1
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