A fight between Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson? A difficult one to call, really. Like a war between Pakistan and Turkey: you kind of want both sides to suffer unimaginable losses. It happened fairly often, though, in that uniquely dysfunctional Blair government and before, when his cabal of liars and smarmers were preparing for power. Here’s Campbell on the subject: ‘He started to leave, then came back over, pushed at me, then threw a punch, then another. I grabbed his lapels to disable his arms and T.B. [Tony Blair] was by now moving in to separate us and P.M. just lunged at him, then looked back at me and shouted, “I hate this. I’m going back to London.”’

Stamp, stamp, stamp went those dainty little feet, probably clad in moccasins. The row was about whether or not Blair should wear a suit to address some young socialists, or a nice pair of cords. Mandy was for the cords, since you asked. But the truth is you cannot underestimate how deranged that administration was, the bile and the seething hatreds, the manic depressives, such as Campbell, chucking up in the toilet, Blair upstairs telling God what he ought to do about stuff, Mandelson sucking up to the rich and powerful and slithering around, the one sliver of ideology he retained from his days in the Young Communist League being that the end justified the means, even if the end had been forgotten.

He adored people with wonga and it didn’t much bother him how that wealth had been........

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