“... many extended passages of high style in A Journey, but those there are make a lasting impression. Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, he says, made a formidable political team. ‘Peter would slip into the castle through a secret passageway and, by nimble footwork and sharp and incisive thrusts of the rapier, cleave ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan ...”

“... was still keen to explore the options but the rest of them just didn’t seem that interested. Peter Mandelson was detached (‘Surely the rich have suffered enough,’ he says at one point, when Laws tries to find some common ground on progressive taxation), Harriet Harman was distracted, Ed Balls was truculent. Worst of all was Ed ...”

“... hostility other than to fawn. There are other recognisable names. Kinnock was very dependent on Peter Mandelson: when Mandelson resigned as director of communications in order to stand for Hartlepool Kinnock ‘almost literally’ hopped with rage. He thought ...”

“... barons). The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in ...”

“... his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a hypocrite, of course, but that ...”

“... listed than the US, where regulations are tighter. Then there are the ‘Lords on the Boards’. Peter Mandelson, for example, was recently made an independent director of a Russian company called, with a truly Muscovite sense of irony, Sistema, whose owner, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, was part of the crowd around the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri ...”

“... Driver, or the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. How exactly did Epstein come to have ten numbers for Peter Mandelson? We are all, to some extent, defined by the company we keep, and if there are things we don’t notice about our ‘friends’, it is often because we realised it was better not to look. For students of the society black book, there are some ...”

“... plot to get rid of Scott. Despite support from the militant Young Liberals (whose former chairman, Peter Hain, insisted that ‘we are with you in resisting the politics of smear and innuendo’), Thorpe resigned as Liberal leader in 1976, soon after Newton’s conviction. He lost his seat in the 1979 general election and was put on trial (along with his ...”

“... an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later commissioned by Peter Mandelson ahead of the 2010 general election to write the higher education review that opened the floodgates to the marketisation of British universities.)The Soviet Union owned the pipelines through which all Caspian oil was exported, but with ...”

“... American oil companies since that’s ‘what gets the marines coming in’. Meanwhile, Calil knew Peter Mandelson – Mandelson had rented a flat from him – and questions were asked in the House of Commons as to whether ministers or officials had discussed the matter with ...”

“... Morecambe and other Labour Conferences down the years, the week was full of ironies. Schooled by Peter Mandelson (Herbert Morrison’s grandson), Labour had become the party of striped shirts, dark suits and tidy haircuts. It had also become a party of women, dressed brightly by Next and Benetton, confident, informed and taking a week off from their ...”

“... and Gordon Brown made much more use of the practice of outside appointments, with Brown appointing Peter Mandelson in 2008 as secretary of state for business and then in 2009 as ‘first secretary of state’, a title that was chosen instead of deputy prime minister because he sat in the House of Lords not the Commons.In a report published in 2010, the ...”

“... began there were nine billionaires in the UK; in 2022 there were 177. They were to be encouraged, Peter Mandelson once suggested, so long as they paid their taxes. But they don’t. And can anybody now say, with a straight face, that people on low incomes are in a better place than they were thirty years ago? Behind the nation’s back, and with ...”

“... effects of policy-wonking on circulation. He became a management consultant, author and adviser to Peter Mandelson. Living on Thin Air is, for the most part, a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with ...”