Why Mandelson didn’t answer the phone

We knew Peter Mandelson hadn’t spoken to Gordon Brown on the day of the January 2010 (Hoon/Hewitt) attempted coup after a phone conversation that morning about his speech on economic growth.

Now we know a bit more about the context and how it must’ve all seemed to Gordon Brown, sitting in No. 10, wondering why more ministers weren’t racing out to defend him.

Because Peter Mandelson tells us in the memoirs, serialised in The Times, that he’d rowed over his economic speech that morning and was so furious with Gordon Brown for trying to water it down that he refused to take a call from the then Prime Minister after the coup attempt had been unveiled – a moment of maximum danger.

You don’t have to be a paranoid, deeply unpopular Prime Minister to have suspected your First Secretary of State was up to something or at the very least keeping his options open. The Mandelson description of the phone conversations with David Miliband looks touched up like a Cameron poster to insulate the former Foreign Secretary from any allegations of disloyalty.

There were phases to Peter Mandelson’s closeness to Gordon Brown and the January 2010 coup attempt came just as a prolonged period of froideur was supposed to be coming to an end. Mandelson fed up, as were others, with Gordon Brown’s refusal to spell out who had what job in the election campaign. Mandelson was also furious, as was Alistair Darling, about Gordon Brown’s refusal to embrace the language of cuts.

Cuts were a little more visible when Gordon and Sarah Brown held a “thank-you” tea-party at London zoo yesterday for those who’d helped them in the election campaign. Well, for some of them anyway. I hear MPs were excluded, some disinvited, presumably to keep a cap on costs?