Hello and welcome to Episode 2 of Mandelson, a homosexual history, a special series

from the creators of Bad Gaze.

My name is Ben Miller.

I'm a writer and historian, a member of the board of the Schvulles Museum in Berlin, and currently

at work on a biography of the fashion designer Rudy Gernrick.

And my name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.

And as a reminder, Mandelson, a homosexual history, is a series built around the idea that the life of Peter Mandelson is a scandalous gay skeleton key to everything that's gone wrong

in politics in the West in the last 40 years.

Last week, we looked at Mandelson's early years and his move from a flirtation with Marxism

to being on the hard right of the Labor Party. We also discussed the splits in the Labor Party

and how in the 1980s those splits became a full-blown Civil War. If you haven't heard that first episode yet,

you really should. All of that context will be very useful when we understand and think

about Mandelson's continued political career. As we left Peter in 1985, when, despite his very

ugly baby blue socks, he'd just been appointed as director of political communications to the leader

of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock. And this was at a moment when the right of the party was

wrestling control from and purging the left using a leader who had run as a soft left unity

candidate. And surely nothing like that would ever happen again. So, yes, we're not talking about 2020. We're talking about 1985.

Well, in today's episode, we're going to talk about Peter Mandelson's life in the late 1980s.

It was a time of a rising homophobia driven in partly by the HIV AIDS crisis, but one that was politicised by the Conservative government eventually in

Section 28, and we'll talk a bit about that. And we'll also focus on how this homophobia would go on

to affect Peter Mandelson's own personal and political life. So it's 1985, and Mandelson has

very big ambitions for the Labour Party, as we discussed.

...