Peter Mandelson once told me to f**k off. Most people now think it’s time he did the same. The vulpine Labour grandee is desperately clinging on to his Peerage after quitting the House of Lords as the storm rages over his links to Jeffrey Epstein. It was 16 years ago when the Prince of Darkness delivered his acerbic barb to yours truly.
Back in 2010 he was already well into his third comeback, brought into government to help save Gordon Brown’s bacon. It failed. Brown capitulated at the election, which ended in a hung parliament, ultimately ushering in 14 years of Tory rule. Mandelson, inevitably, was at the centre of frantic Coalition negotiations as Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats embarked on days of political horse-trading.
On one such fever-pitched morning I spotted a serpent-like figure slithering its way along a dimly lit and gargoyle lined underpass on the parliamentary estate.
It was Mandelson, of course, so I rushed to quiz him on the negotiations.
He gave me short shrift, the words oozing out of his sneer like crude oil from a leaking tanker.
The next time I came face to face with the Dark Lord was during his fourth political comeback at a glitzy champagne and cocktail party on a balmy February night in Washington DC last year.
Sir Keir Starmer had just jetted in, with myself and a bunch of other political hacks in tow, to welcome the man he appointed as the new British ambassador to the US.
What he knew that night was that Mandelson had been close friends with paedophile financier Epstein.
It is those links and subsequent bombshell revelations that will undoubtedly end his political career once and for all.
And they may just hasten the end of Sir Keir’s too.
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