Archie Bland

But what's really striking about Mandelson's role in particular is that he sees himself very much as the person who can provide the person that you need, usually the man that you need to get the thing that you want done.

Right.

And he has a kind of a vocabulary about who those people are, which is very striking and telling, I think, of the kind of politics that he emblematises.

He talks a lot about how you want to grown up for this.

There is always this sense that he is endorsing people by his long association with them as being one of the people you can rely on here.

Whereas there are other people who don't meet necessarily those criteria and they are dismissed sometimes as being immature or not serious.

He talks about West Streeting, actually a former acolyte of his.

Yeah.

as being pathetic because he distributed to other members of the cabinet a dossier based on testimony that doctors had given about what they had seen in Gaza.

And according to Peter Mandelson, that was evidence that Streeting was having a midlife crisis.

Definitely a good move on his part.

I don't think he could have expected that he was going to be further vindicated by Mandelson insulting him, but that has probably helped him out as well.

Yeah, we've seen that he appeared to have been setting up meetings with senior people at MI6, even when he had not completed the vetting process.

We've seen that he believed that he would be entitled to that information on the basis of being on the Privy Council.

And we've seen really interesting insights into what feels like a quite unserious way that the vetting process was treated by him and by the people around him.

There is the suggestion that he just knew too many people.

And how on earth was he going to distinguish between the contacts that mattered and the contacts that didn't?

And there's a suggestion that the protest is really all a bit artificial and that you just need to get through it.

And as we've seen more recently, you know, that couldn't have been further from the truth.

Actually, it was a very serious process.