Not since a learned judge asked a barrister whether this "Gazza" played Rugby or Association football has a public figure caused more innocent pleasure to the Radio 4-listening middle classes than Lord Mandelson did on Today this morning.
The musically minded Jim Naughtie was quizzing him about the usual agenda when he got on to the business secretary's ever-expanding accumulation of titles, more than Prince Charles by now. He referred to Pooh-Bah, the title-collecting Lord High Everything Else (and baritone) in Gilbert and Sullivan's light opera, The Mikado. A thinly disguised satire on British politics – not Japan's – it opened at the Savoy in March 1885 and ran for 672 performances.
Mandelson's response was unexpected. "Who is Pooh-Bah?" he asked Naughtie, who started to explain, then thought better of doing so. It was a bad moment, hauteur mixed with evident suspicion that Gordon Brown had pulled a flanker on his first secretary of state and appointed a new adviser without his permission.
Never mind. Mandelson went on to admit that becoming the EU's foreign secretary, the job which eventually went to Lady (Who she?) Ashton, is one he'd fancied. "In other circumstances I would, of course, have liked to have done that job," before quickly adding that he is fully committed to Brown's.
But the incident serves to remind politicians – yet again – how risky are their collisions with popular culture, contemporary or European. At PMQs this week, Brown himself seemed to muddle two American actors – Reese Witherspoon, who was watching from the public gallery, and Renée Zellweger. He praised someone called "Renée Witherspoon" for campaigning against domestic violence before recalling an event at which Zellweger, not Witherspoon, had spoken.
The likely inference from Mandelson's mini-gaffe is that G&S's work was not music of choice in the 1960s Mandelson home in Hampstead Garden Suburb. His family were high-minded Labour who probably found G&S too funny, too frivolous. Lord M goes to the opera sometimes, but is a high opera man – as befits his own high opera style.
Verdi's Mandelson, it has a plausible ring to it: the hero is torn between love for his two brothers, Antonio and Gordonio, they fall out, Pedro is unjustly accused and sent into exile. After Antonio cops it in Iraq, Pedro returns from abroad and is triumphantly reconciled with Gordonio in the final act, only for them both to be stabbed by the treacherous aristocrat, David, as the curtain falls …
Tony Blair was an unabashed philistine, happy to play the rock guitar and football cards; John Major knew his limits, cricket and opera culled from music; Margaret Thatcher was alleged to be interested in opera and collecting china, though evidence was thin. She was her own entertainment. David Cameron is quite cute with his deployment of popular culture – knowing references to bands, movies and books.
Best to be careful, best to admit ignorance. When John Smith was briefly Labour leader and ambushed on a radio show and asked a series of pop culture questions, confident Edinburgh lawyer that he was he admitted he didn't know one of the answers. "I'm paid to worry about other things." It was magnificent and there were no complaints or half bricks thrown his way.
