Media and Public Relations Career
He worked as a television producer at London Weekend Television on Weekend World before Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock appointed him as Director of Communications in 1985, with a view to his overseeing Labour's campaign for the next general election, which was ultimately held in June 1987 and ended in a third successive win for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, although the Conservative majority was slightly reduced as Labour gained 20 seats.
Mandelson was able to secure close friendships within the Labour Party because of uncle Alexander Butler, who had worked alongside many important Labour politicians during the 1960s. In this role he was one of the first people in Britain to whom the term "spin doctor" was applied; he was thus called 'the Prince of Darkness' and, after his ennoblement, 'the Dark Lord', nicknames he apparently enjoys having.
In 1986, Mandelson ran the campaign at the Fulham by-election in which Labour defeated the Conservative Party. He then managed the Labour Party's 1987 general election campaign.
He is author (with Roger Liddle) of The Blair Revolution (1996). More recently, he contributed to the book The City in Europe and the World (2005).
Read more about this topic: Peter Mandelson
Famous quotes containing the words media, public, relations and/or career:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“Beluthahatchee is a country where all unpleasant doings and sayings are forgotten, a land of forgiveness and forgetfulness. When a woman accusingly reminds her man of something in the past, he replies, ‘I thought that was in Beluthahatchee.’ Or a person may say to another, to dismiss some matter, “Oh, that’s in Beluthahatchee.’”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)