“... first all-night superclub. One of its founders, James Palumbo (the son of Conservative peer Peter Palumbo), occasionally lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson. He even pitched, unsuccessfully, that Ministry be adopted as the corporate sponsor of the Millennium Dome’s Faith Zone, on the grounds that ...”

“... Paisley – who helped maintain the minority Labour government in power was fair game. Thanks to Peter Wright’s revelations we are more or less familiar with what went on in this period, though it is important to say that Wallace was the first to make public admission of these campaigns, well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward ...”

“... possible worlds, we would doubtless be blessed by their absence: but we live in a world containing Peter Mandelson and Sir Bernard Ingham. This sobering thought is not banished by wishfully thinking of the Internet as a cybernetic samizdat, where the citizenry of orbis tertius partake of free discursive interchange: the problem is not that the Net’s ...”

“... And looking beyond the limits of this collection, what about Count Metternich (not to speak of Peter Mandelson, who is invoked, perhaps not altogether seriously, in the publisher’s press release)? ‘The World of the Favourite’ appears to be a piece of string which can be stretched so far that it turns into fairly useless elastic. It was also a ...”

“... the support of the queen,’ Lownie writes, ‘and the endorsement of the former trade secretary Peter Mandelson.’ Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints ...”

“... proved by Brown’s simultaneous and unwilling admission to Harman that he was about to make Peter Mandelson deputy prime minister. ‘Over my dead body,’ Harman said, and eventually Brown promised he wouldn’t do it. That same afternoon it was announced that Mandelson had been appointed first secretary of ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... time is short, and the people guiding you are actually trying to run rings round you (think of Peter Mandelson leading a citizen jury through its paces), amateurism starts to lose its appeal. Ober knows how difficult it would be to replicate Athenian conditions in the modern world, but that doesn’t stop him wanting to try. ‘The Athenian case ...”

“... Countdown Calendar (published in Tower Hamlets, printed in Hong Kong) with illustrations by Peter Kent. Kent has adopted all the standard tricks – colour enhancement, elimination of the funnel that carries away the exhaust fumes from the Blackwall Tunnel, weird perspectives promoting the status of the peninsula – but he can’t do much to put a ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* ...”

“... Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, single shareholder in the late lamented Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice ...”

“... out in the cold. Jones, by contrast, concludes with a defence of the project’s politics. Peter Mandelson, a sepulchral voice of Blairism, reads him the chargesheet: Corbynism failed, and its failures were congenital, not contingent; the damage done to the party was immense. A more self-aware critic might have admitted his own part in creating ...”