Peter Mandelson: better off misquoted
Looking around for Peter Mandelson’s famous ‘filthy rich’ quote, I find a letter to the Guardian from January this year…
You quote my comments to California computer executives in 1998 that “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” (Leaders, January 11). I do not object to being quoted, as long as I am quoted accurately and in full. What I in fact said on that particular occasion was “as long as they pay their taxes”.
Peter Mandelson
EU trade commissioner
The thing is, when you look at the tax loopholes that New Labour has failed to close over the years, allowing the rich to avoid tax, and costing the country billions, I’m not sure quoting Mandelson in full shows him or his party in any better light.
Posted on November 25th, 2008 at 11:04am under New Labour
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• 2 Comments |
There was something about the tone of this that was nagging at me and I think I’ve worked out what it was.
At first, I thought it was:
as long as I am quoted accurately and in full
which I confess gets on my nerves a bit: you don’t really have a right to be quoted “in full”, you just have a reasonable expectation of not being quoted out of context. Which is not the same thing. That said, it ’s just a short sentence My Lord Mandelson (as he was not, when he wrote the letter) is insisting on, so iut’s not such an important point, but one perhaps worth raising nonetheless.
But really, the thing that was getting at me was this:
I do not object to being quoted.
Well how big of you. How very, very, perhaps even enormously generous of you.
Nobody gets to “not object to being quoted”. Not unless what they said was specifically and reasonably off the record. In which category, what the gentleman said was not.
“Object to being quoted?” It’s not up to you, sir. Some things aren’t.
[...] And while the poor get poorer the rich get richer. But then NL were always relaxed about the rich…… [...]