He looked nervous. That was the first thing you noticed about him.

When Morgan McSweeney sat down to give his testimony about the Peter Mandelson affair to a committee of MPs, you instantly detected a great yawning gap between his reputation and his presentation. He was halting, hesitant, apologetic, diminutive and seemingly eager to please. He spent much of the evidence session almost hugging himself, as if wishing he could be anywhere but here.

It was hard to shake the memory of Dominic Cummings, when he gave his press conference over the Barnard Castle scandal. Of course, nothing McSweeney said was remotely as absurd as that. He hadn’t claimed that he packed his own family into a car to test his eyesight, for instance. But the moment felt eerily familiar. Here he was at last – the great backstage strategist, the Rasputin figure, usually cloaked in shadow but now revealed in front of the cameras. And then that secondary realisation that they are so much smaller than you expected – in terms of their presence, their manner and their intellect.

McSweeney’s approach was fundamentally a game of reputational mathematics. Yes sure, he admitted, he had supported Mandelson’s appointment. But then so had many others. Yes sure, other people had opposed it. But then apparently so had he. His own errors were not made alone, but other people’s successes were certainly shared with him.

“I thought [Mandelson] was the right choice after the US election,” McSweeney conceded. But then, “quite a lot of views were coming back in support of Mandelson as a candidate”. Should he really have........

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