“... 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 ...”

“... here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all coming to blows (Mandelson v. Campbell in the course of an argument about whether Blair should wear a tie), bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each others’ backs, and ruthlessly doing each other down while secretly ...”

“... his previous employers without our knowing that they had a connection.Another Labour grandee, Peter Mandelson, who was made a peer in 2008, also has his own consultancy business, Global Counsel, which recently spent £36,000 on seconding a staff member to the office of the Treasury minister Tulip Siddiq for six months (another member of Siddiq’s ...”

“... however. Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, was obliged to resign when it was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while Mandelson, the man who borrowed the money, was reinstated a year later. Robinson’s special ...”

“... from the early ruthlessness of New Labour operators such as Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. Nor is there any reason to assume that New Labour’s 1990 analogue methods of data analysis – focus group and polling – are less informative or useful than automated psychometrics. As for Nix’s boast that they ‘operate in the ...”

“... on the cronyism and political corruption the files reveal, and in the UK on the misdeeds of Peter Mandelson. Only Anand Giridharadas, appearing on the Ezra Klein Show, appeared to have read Virginia Giuffre’s book. The men she was dispatched to have sex with, Giuffre wrote, might have been rich and powerful, but they were awkward, socially ...”

“... the end the best woman wins, whereas in real life the best woman got fired for dishing the dirt on Peter Mandelson and now faces the Herculean task of sexing up William Hague. I wonder if this is the terrible karmic fate of any journalist who becomes too cynical about their trade. If you really hate journalism you don’t write longingly about this ...”

“... and benefits, Lord Hollick, chairman of United News and Media, to advise on industrial policy, and Peter Jarvis, Whitbread chief executive, who was asked to head the Low Pay Commission, charged with setting the rate for the planned legal minimum wage. In previous Labour administrations, it was trade-union leaders like Ernest Bevin and Frank Cousins who were ...”

“... evident reliance on Bodo Hombach, described here as having the ambition to become ‘Germany’s Peter Mandelson’, whose intriguing Lafontaine later found to be ‘intolerable’. Although the parallels with the early experiences of New Labour are fascinating, they are also often misleading. First, although both sets of social democrats eventually ...”

“... The threat from the Alliance was the main reason for the modernisation of the Labour Party. Peter Mandelson was given a tree hand to follow where the SDP had already led. Labour remains cautious on Europe, uneasy on defence and conservative on constitutional reform. The institutional authority of the Trade Unions, enhanced in 1980-81, is ...”

“... at the Foreign Office nursery, she clenched her teeth in fear that passing figures – including Peter Mandelson, ‘the ever elegant, sharp-suited paragon of style’ – would recognise her. She needn’t have worried: in her uniform, she was invisible. Mandy glanced, gave ‘half a nod’, then looked away. A sense that all good things were out of ...”

“... off debts, he sold out to Mark McCormack of the International Management Group, recently hired by Peter Mandelson to raise funds for Britain’s millennium celebrations. IMG runs the finances and Bollettieri runs everything else. Bollettieri emerges from the memoir as an endearing hustler, vain (about his waistline, his teeth, his muscles, his tan) but ...”

“... a rare instance of effective political improvisation on his part. Less astutely, Brown brought Peter Mandelson back into the cabinet, despite their volatile relationship and Mandelon’s history of personal scandals. As political correspondent for the New Statesman, Macintyre was one of the facilitators of this ‘imaginative move’, he tells us, a ...”

“... to ensure that their cables were never ‘flabby’ or ‘cute’. ‘Be strategically nasty,’ Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, recommended.The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables (only 6 per cent of them classified as ‘secret’) was treated by the national security establishment and its helpmates as ...”

“... of these Russian billionaires had wined and dined European and American leaders and officials. Peter Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and George Osborne, the future chancellor, spent some time on the aluminium mogul Oleg Deripaska’s yacht Queen K off the coast of Corfu in 2008. Queen K, later renamed Clio and now renamed Altair, was in the ...”