Lord Mandelson met the Queen in a private audience at Buckingham Palace — thanks to his new title of Lord President of the Council.
The title, once held by his grandfather, puts him in charge of the highly-secretive Queen’s Privy Council.
Hilary Benn\’s, umm, a fourth generation MP and third generation Cabinet Minister as well.
Good to see such social mobility, don\’t you think?
Not to mention Neil Pillock’s wife.
Nick Hurd is fourth generation too.
Herbert Morrison (Mandelson’s grandfather) was one of the most spectacularly ill-advised picks for Churchill’s wartime cabinet. He was almost aggressively stupid. This is a man who attempted to argue on the basis of tempting Providence against misreporting, via our stock of turned German agents, the impact points of V1 flying bombs in order to make the Germans miscalibrate the air-log and thus prematurely cut off fuel to the engine, making the bomb fall short on less densely populated areas*. Sense prevailed, and Morrison’s idiocy was blithely ignored, but it is a measure of the man that he could have held such a profoundly unserious viewpoint in the midst of Total War.
Hoary old socialist dinosaur though he may have been, the memory of Ernie Bevin is always to be cherished for the following exchange re Morrison: “He’s his own worst enemy.” Bevin: “Not while I’m alive he ain’t!”
* R. V. Jones, Most Secret War, p. 422, Hamish Hamilton 1978. Jones estimates the number of lives saved via the deception policy at ~2,750, with an additional 8,000 serious injuries avoided.