Mandelson risks dragging Labour into its revenge era

Politics is a terminal business. Everyone goes in the end, mostly unwillingly, often unhappily, sometimes in humiliation.

- JULIAN GLOVER

There's anger and shame, picked over in columns like this, which try to work out what the latest sacking or resignation might mean. Is this shock loss a fatal blow to the government? What does it say about the prime minister’s judgement? The sort of nice, easy, open-ended media babble that is cheap to create, leads to much speculation, but doesn’t, in the end, matter at all.

Most political departures are just noise. Scandals get forgotten. People slip from the news. Something else more exciting or important happens. Can anyone remember why, say, Damian Green had to go in 2017? Or Hazel Blears in 2009? Or Beverley Hughes in 2004? Can anyone, other than their closest friends, remember that they were once front-line politicians at all?