Every time he got sacked from one job he got a better one

IT was bound to end in tears, because it always does with Peter Mandelson.

- PAUL ROUTLEDGE

That's what I said earlier this year to Steve Smith, the journalist profiling Our Man in Washington for BBC Radio. He laughed, but agreed it might be true.

And so it came to pass, because ego-driven Milord Mandy kept on making the same mistake: seeking the glamour of mixing with stinking rich, powerful men.

Big money was his downfall and since I had none, as a Labour Party press officer in the 1980s, he looked down his supercilious nose at me.

He was also suspicious of anyone old Labour with strong links to the unions. He preferred to schmooze younger, less experienced reporters at Westminster, who he called “my captured castles.”

But he soon became a power in the land, and as political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, I wrote an unofficial biography of Mandy (as we all called him).