DOUBLETHINK: James Cusick

It's said that a man with a surplus can control circumstances, but a man without a surplus is controlled by them. Never one to bother with economic or political convention, first secretary Lord Mandelson offered his own version of such wisdom when he in insisted last week that it was changing "market conditions" and "current" circumstances that had forced him to abandon government plans for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail.

The first thing to note about Peter Mandelson is that it is never his fault that anything unwanted has occurred. Blame is for other small people around him; self-blame is a territory he's never visited.

So let's forget the political miscalculation made by the business secretary. When he first offered up the sale of Royal Mail earlier this year as something that was necessary and had to happen with a degree of haste, it was suggested there would be resistance throughout Labour's backbenches. Mandelson, with Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Gordon Brown, recreated the Labour Party, some say against its will. So resistance from a few Labour rebels would not have put Mandelson off, at all.

Except the Labour resistance to the Royal Mail sell-off was likely to be around 140 backbenchers, meaning only Tory support for Mandelson would do the trick. Some media described Mandelson's backdown as a "personal embarrassment", essentially because he'd stated, continuously, that the issue couldn't be ducked.

But Mandelson doesn't do embarrassment, it's not in his DNA. Instead, he looks around for tangential blame, excuses, and then believes all he needs to do is to offer something, anything, semi-plausible - and move on.

"Market conditions", he said last week, had made it "impossible to conclude the process to identify a partner for the Royal Mail on terms that we can be confident would secure value for the taxpayer". Those with a spot-the-error mentality, will notice that the market conditions some six months ago when he first thought up the partial sell-off plan were worse then than last week. So while "market conditions" may be a factor, they cannot be the deciding factor.

So what will the noble lord do now? He will do what he serially does. He will sneer that his critics do not have his intellectual grasp on the economic reality facing Britain. He will insist the "current circumstances" were not right, and when they are, he alone will be able to spot them and then, as "market conditions" change, he will "return to the issue" as he promised.

Except he won't. As William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, noted after the back-down was announced, Mandelson is part of a "government of the living dead" and in a state of inertia. Last week, the new home secretary sounded the official retreat on ID cards. The prime minister has already entangled himself in U-turns over the Iraq war inquiry. "In the current circumstances" is, therefore, an easily translatable phrase. In the current circumstances, neither the PM nor any senior member of the Cabinet are in a position to issue order to their party backbenchers. Why? Because they are no longer listening.