POISON ADMINISTERED BY A PRO

Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's spin doctor and later Mirror hack, has a go at Peter Mandelson in Tribune:

The Third Man is a continuous justification of a serial offender with no convictions, unable to understand why he, one of the “three founding fathers of New Labour,” was badly treated by the other two (Blair and Gordon Brown). Everything was the “three of us” who began the “reforming crusade”, with Alastair Campbell blanked out of this adventure.

He knew Gordon best, he says, and worked closest with him, and Tony couldn’t do without him. He approvingly quotes a Guardian article which described Blair and Brown as “star pupils of the Peter Mandelson finishing school” in media presentation. Personally, if Brown were one of my star pupils, I’d have kept quiet about it, but this book abounds with embarrassing false modesty and insensitive boasting. He has the conceit of Caligula, not the wisdom of Machiavelli.

He doesn’t understand that he was never the equal of the other two.