For Labour, the Epstein smell will prove impossible to shift

Peter Mandelson has always cast a spell. That spell would sometimes be broken, but then somehow, he would work the magic again.

- JOHN RENTOUL

When he first started working for the Labour Party in 1985, he was unlike anyone else in politics at the time.

Journalists were drawn magnetically to him, for his waspish charisma and because they knew he had the confidence of Neil Kinnock, the leader.

My friend David Aaronovitch, who knew him as a TV producer before he became Labour's head of communications in 1985, says: "He was the epitome of that saying attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth: 'If you don't have anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit next to me."

Mandelson was funny, gossipy, and a determined social democrat. What made him attractive to journalists and Labour leaders alike were the qualities that led, repeatedly, to his downfall. He was obsessed with power, who had it and how it worked, and he took risks in trying to obtain it for himself.

During Tony Blair's leadership campaign in 1994, Blair was dependent on him to know how to conduct himself in interviews - yet Mandelson was already so unpopular with other Labour MPs that he was known, among the inner campaign team, by the codename "Bobby". The vision that sticks in my mind is from Donald Macintyre's sympathetic biography of Mandelson, when Blair went round to his secret adviser's flat to find him sitting on his sofa in his white dressing gown, "tearful" and apparently "inconsolable" because he was being "kept in a box, behind the scenes".