Peter Mandelson Family History

Peter Benjamin Mandelson was born on October 23rd, 1953 to Tony and Mary Mandelson in Hendon, north London.  He grew up nearby in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

By his older brother Miles’ account, Peter resembled his extrovert father more, but was much closer to his mother.  Peter spoke of her as his rock.  She was chiefly responsible for shaping him as “a moderate mainstream Labour party member,” he would later say.

A grammar school boy, Peter studied PPE at Oxford and contemplated a career in politics.  But he arrived in politcs in 1985 through his prior work as a TV producer with London Weekend Television.

Peter’s Political Rise.  The Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock appointed Peter as the party’s Director of Communications in 1985.  In this capacity he was one of the first people in Britain to whom the term “spin doctor” was applied.

Here he learnt the dark arts of political management which caused him to be called the “Prince of  Darkness.”  Peter also tended to be very private about his personal life at this time and it was only later that he came to be known as gay.

Nvertheless his political rise continued.  He was the architect of the “New Labour” campaign under which Labour won the 1997 general election.  The triumvirate heading Labour at this time were Tony Blair (Prime Minister), George Brown (Chancellor), and Peter Mandelson (who became Trade Minister).

Peter remained an important player within the Labour party during its period of government from 1997 to 2010.  He also served as Britain’s European Commissioner from 2004 to 2008 before being brought back by Gordon Brown as his Business Secretary.

When Labour returned to power in 2024 Keir Starmer appointed Peter as Britain’s Ambassador in Washington.  As a veteran on trade issues, Peter’s appointment was aimed at helping the UK secure trade opportunities with the US.

Peter’s Rise and Fall.  Peter’s political career was characterized by rise and fall, the falls each time necessitating his need to rehabilitate himself.

The early blemishes happened in 1998 and 2001:

• the first case revolved around an undeclared interest-free loan he secured from a Cabinet colleague whose business dealings had been subject to an inquiry by Peter’s department
• while the second case came out of the accusations that he used his position to influence a UK passport application for a wealthy Indian businessman.

In both cases impropriety was established and Peter had to resign his Cabinet position.

A more serious charge emerged in January 2026 with the US Government’s release of files relating to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.  These files revealed that Peter had been secretly leaking confidential Government information and intentions to Jeffrey while he had been Business Secretary in 2009.

He was promptly sacked as the UK Ambassador to Washington.  He would lose his Labour party membership and probably his peerage in the House of Lords as well.  There seemed little chance of rehabilitation this time.

The Mandelson Side

A Jewish Line.  Mandelson, possibly originally Mendelssohn, is a Jewish surname likely to have derived from the Germanic word mandel meaning “almond.”  This name was mainly to be found amongst Polish Jews.  Its numbers in England have been few.  There were only two Mandelson families recorded in London in the 1891 census and none outside London.

Peter’s Mandelsons were not amongst the impoverished Jews fleeing oppression and arriving in London’s East End in the late 1800’s.  Instead, his Mandelson ancestor was in London much earlier.  He came from a better-off Jewish family and, as it turned out, soon made a success of his new life.

This Mandelson was Nathan, son of Napthali and Rachel Felthusen in Warsaw, Poland.  Rumor has it that he had to flee Poland in the late 1820’s because he had been involved in a plot against the Czar.  Maybe to hide his tracks, he changed his last name to Mandelson on arrival in England.  Then he married Phoebe Cohen in London in 1830.

Australian Interlude.  The Mandelsons were not to stay in London long.  Four years later, the young couple departed as free settlers to Sydney, Australia.

Nathan moved with his family south to Goulburn, NSW where he was one of its earliest settlers.  Other Jews came there too.  But Nathan was the leading Jewish businessman in the district.  He was, from 1840 until his death in 1867, proprietor of the grand and opulent Goulburn Hotel (now restored to its former glory as Mandelson’s).

Nathan’s son Levy had been born on the crossing from England and arrived in Australia as a baby.  He married in Sydney in 1861 and settled for a time in Tumut, a town some 150 miles southwest of Goulburn.  He ran a general store there.  Levy was a short man and bore the nickname of “little Levy Mandelson of the Tumut.”

Levy did not stay in Tumut long.  He gave up his store in the early 1870’s and moved back to Sydney.  Then retired, he brought his family to England in 1877.  He died in London in 1891 and was buried in the Willesden Jewish cemetery.

London.  These Mandelsons settled in London initially in Bayswater and later in Kensington.  Levy and his wife Sarah were the parents of nine children, seven girls and two boys.

The eldest of these boys was Norman Mandelson, born in Australia in 1872.  As a young man he started work for the Jewish Chronicle in London.  He would later found the Harrow United Synagogue and be very involved in Jewish community affairs there.

He and his wife Sadie had just one son – George but always known as Tony – who was born in London in 1920.  Tony was Peter’s father.

The Morrison Side

Londoners.  The Morrisons on Peter’s maternal side were not Jewish.  But they were Londoners.  Not necessary north of the river Thames Londoners as the Mandelsons were.

Instead they were Londoners from along the river or south of the river.  Herbert Morrison – Peter’s maternal grandfather who became the Deputy Prime Minister in Clement Attlee’s Labour Government – was later ennobled as Baron Morrison of Lambeth.

His father Henry Morrison, born in 1849, was a London police constable in Brixton.  He married Priscilla, the daughter of an East End carpet fitter, in Stepney in 1872.  They would raise seven children in Lambeth, three girls and four boys.  The youngest of them, born in 1888, was their son Herbert who would achieve great things.

Henry was known for his love of the bottle; and also for his right-wing political views which Herbert vigorously opposed.

Herbert Morrison, The Labour Politician.  Herbert left school at fourteen, was a conscientous objector during World War One, and an early conscript to the London Labour party.

He began as the Mayor of Hackney in 1920 and rose to become leader of London County Council in 1934.  A year later he was returned to Parliament and soon challenged for the Labour party leadership.

He was completely absorbed in his political career.  This would take him into Churchill’s wartime coalition as home secretary, then as one of the dominant triumvirate – with Attlee and Bevin – in the post-war Labour government.  His last hurrah came in 1955 when he challenged Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership but lost.

Herbert had married his wife Margaret in 1919.  But theirs was not a happy marriage.  He would have affairs.  And she hated the public attention which he craved.

Even so, Margaret did remain within the Labour party fold.  This was also true of their daughter Mary who had been born in Hackney in 1921.  She would be a lifelong member of the Labour party, even though she too disliked the public exposure.

When Herbert made a speech on the eve of the 1929 election asking the voters of Hackney South to return him to Parliament as an “eighth birthday present for Mary,” she told her father brusquely to keep her name out of “beastly politics.”

Peter’s Parents Tony and Mary

Tony Mandelson had served as an officer with the Royal Dragoons during the Second World War.  Afterwards in 1947 Tony – although not particularly interested in Judaism – had got a job through family connections with the Jewish Chronicle.  He spent the rest of his working life with the paper.

He was their flamboyant advertising executive.  Peter recalled:

“I would occasionally go with my father to the offices of the Jewish Chronicle off Holborn.  His army of advertising salesmen and administrators were unfailingly deferential to him.”

Mary Morrison, prior to the outbreak of war, had moved to the Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London.  During the war she worked with a Quaker organization helping the refugees from Europe. She was married briefly to Bill Williams, the son of a junior agriculture minister.  But it was not a happy marriage.

Mary had inherited the distaste of her mother Margaret for the exposure that went with public life.  She was also quite shy in public and notably unimpressed with fame and the famous.  When Harold Wilson, her former neighbor at Hampstead Garden Suburb, invited her children in the 1960’s to the Prime Minister’s residence at No. 10, she herself would not go.  She had had that experience many years before at the invitation of Ramsay MacDonald.

She was working as a secretary for the advertising agency Dorland when she met and fell in with love with a witty, irreverent Jewish extrovert named Tony Mandelson.  They married in 1951.  Photos showed her to be stunningly pretty; and he was equally handsome at the time.

Home Life.  They made their home in Hampstead Garden Suburb.  Both were Labour party supporters.  Tony and Mary joined in the highly sociable expeditions that the family would make in their Sunbeam Talbot.  They loaded up with a roast chicken and wine picnic in the early 1960’s to meet up with friends on the last leg of the CND-organised Aldermaston marches.

Mary was a lifelong Labour Party member of strong political views, but of a centrist kind.  This was true even in the 1970’s when her husband Tony veered to the left, supporting Tony Benn and his like.

Tony died in 1988 in London, Mary in 2006 in St. Helens, Lancashire where she lived in her later years and her son Miles had his clinical psychology practice.

Peter Mandelson’s Family Tree

• George (Tony) Mandelson m. Mary Morrison from Hackney, London (1921-2006) in London in 1951 and moved to Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London
• – Miles Mandelson (b. 1952), clinical NHS psychologist
• – Peter Mandelson (b. 1953)

• Henry Morrison, London police constable from Mile End, London m. Priscilla Lyon (1848-1907) in Stepney, London in 1872
• – the older, three boys and three girls
• – the youngest, Herbert Morrison (1888-1965)

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