A marriage made in heaven-that's pre 1994 heaven

There is an interesting essay in this New Statesman for thosw who wsh to explore the relationship between Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown in more depth.

Donald Macintyre asks

How did Mandelson’s sworn enemy come first to bring him back into government and then to locate him as primus inter pares among his ministers?

and it goes back a long way

it is easy to forget now the cohesiveness of this triangle, before John Smith’s death in 1994, that had gradually formed since the “discovery” of Mandelson as Labour’s communications director, and the subsequent promotion of the backbenchers Brown and Blair as early as the run-up to the 1987 election. Alex Stevenson, working as a young researcher for Mandelson, recalled that, during 1993, when the group felt relatively isolated as “modernisers”, there were “incessant” telephone calls from Blair and Brown, but that those from Brown were even more frequent. The three men’s closeness – with a largely unspoken understanding that Brown was the leading figure of the three – can scarcely be exaggerated. Probably no one but Mandelson and Brown remembers that it was the latter who painstakingly advised the former on his crucial speech to the selection conference that chose him as parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool in 1989 – and actually wrote the peroration of it.