US Edition 'AH!" the Prince of Wales is said to have declared when first introduced to Peter Mandelson. "The red rose man!" If Neil Kinnock is to be believed, the prince was misinformed.
Kinnock now boasts that it was he and not, as is commonly supposed, Mandelson, who invented the red rose logo which supplanted Labour's red flag for the 1987 election. Speaking on Radio 4's Why People Hate Spin Doctors, Kinnock says Mandelson's only contribution was to tweak the design in accordance with his aesthetic preference for long-stemmed roses.
"I talked to a designer, a marvellous designer, and I gave him an idea of what I wanted," he says. "The one I wanted was from a rose catalogue given to me by my father-in-law, and I showed it to the guy: 'This is the one I want, this kind of red.' And he went away and he designed. It was marvellous. When he brought back the design, I said: 'The stem's a bit too long, but other than that it's perfect.' When I saw it printed for the first time I said: 'You haven't changed the bloody length of the stem.' And he said, 'No, Peter thought the stem was the right length.' So Peter's contribution, God bless him, was to put an extra millimetre on the length of the stem on the Labour Party rose."