Mandela’s message is wasted on MPs

In reaction to his passing our politicians seem determined to demonstrate just how much better than them Nelson Mandela was.

Parliamentary proceedings on Monday were taken up by tributes to the great South African president and activist.

In the Lords, where there are plenty of characters who lived through apartheid and tried to dismantle it and plenty who overtly or covertly supported it they took just an hour to whizz through tributes.

In the Commons it went on for hours with every backbencher determined to have their say.

Seema Malhotra spoke of how she could “scarcely believe the breaking news on Thursday night”.

Barely believe a 95-year-old man who has been gravely ill for months had died?

Frank Doran spoke not of meeting Mandela but of being in the same room as him. Twice.

Valerie Vaz had also never met him so spoke about meeting American black civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson instead.

Those that had met the great man often had little more of value to add.

Former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind attempted to explain why F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, who enjoyed decades of privilege based on the colour of his skin and built on the back of the repressed black majority, actually had a harder time as apartheid ended than Mandela who’d been unfairly incarcerated for nearly three decades.

Highlight of the tributes came from Gordon Brown. If the new intake of MPs only see him as the nutty and gnarled Prime Minister of caricature they know different now as he turned in a superb and statesmanlike performance.

But even Brown couldn’t resist the temptation to draw comparisons and come up short.

The former PM made sure to mention that Mandela’s work after he stepped down from politics should not be forgotten and summed it up with: “He teaches us that indeed no injustice can last for ever.”

Brownites and there are still a few hope that is true when it comes to history’s verdict on their leader, too.

One person who couldn’t contribute during the tributes was Speaker John Bercow.

He received a few mentions though as MPs, most notably Welsh member Susan Elan Jones, reminded him that during his student days he’d been part of a particularly virulent right-wing strain of the Tory party that denigrated Mandela and the ANC as terrorists.

Far be it from anyone to suggest that Bercow having transitioned from nasty party patsy to champion of political correctness over the years really wanted to have his say about Mandela but on Thursday a hastily assembled event took place in historic Westminster Hall, the entire point of which seemed to be to allow Bercow to do his own tribute.

He padded it out with some South African singing and other speakers, including TUC General Secretary Frances Grady who revealed Mandela had qualified for a TUC gold badge. Presumably it’s a sort of socialist version of the Blue Peter badge that guarantees free entry to anti-government demos and right-on poetry readings rather than the railway museum.

With all the talk of Nelson Mandela as a peace maker, a man of forgiveness and forger of a rainbow nation, one might have hoped that Prime Minister’s Questions would be a bit less confrontational than usual.

It wasn’t.

Ed Balls, his historic flat palm gesture to signify a stagnant economic growth graph now redundant, aimed all sorts of odd finger jabs at the Government benches which only made him resemble the dodgy sign language interpreter who provided a nonsense commentary for the deaf throughout the memorial.

Seems our MPs were paying attention to the silly sign language instead of heeding the true message of Mandela.