My old boss at the Daily Mirror, the crook Robert Maxwell, delighted in making prestigious hirings before he got around to stealing our pensions.
And the former ambassador to the US was quite a catch as his chief of staff. Not Peter Mandelson, but Peter Jay. Maxwell then proceeded to humiliate Jay at every turn, subjecting him to bullying late-night phone calls and treating him as his general dogsbody. Britain’s onetime top diplomat was reduced to looking after the staff car park.
Maxwell did not even refer to his parking attendant by name, always calling him Mr Ambassador. But then Maxwell never could remember names. I was Mr Reporter.
The two Peters have much in common. Both were political appointees and not professional diplomats. The installation of both in our Washington embassy caused controversy.
Jay got the job through then Labour PM James Callaghan, who also happened to be his father-in-law. There were the inevitable accusations of nepotism.
The two Peters both had impressive political brains and might well have made a decent fist of dealing with their respective US presidents. But clearly, the baggage they carried made them high risk.
Keir Starmer will survive the first wave of the Peter papers. But the worst is yet to come - Nigel Nelson
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Just as Callaghan should never have chosen Jay, so Keir Starmer now recognises his grievous mistake in settling on Mandelson.
He will now have to explain why the process was “weirdly rushed”, in the words of No 10 chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Neither should Jay have accepted the job Maxwell dangled in front of him.
But like Mandelson, he tended to make bad personal choices. It was typical of Mandelson to demand more than £500,000 in severance pay when Keir Starmer fired him. Did he really think he would get it?
The £75,000 the government ended up giving him is enough to cause outrage. But when he worked as our political columnist, he made outrageous demands, too. I had to sack him when he refused an editor’s order to change his column.
He wanted my guarantee that he would keep his job if he did as she asked. Did he not realise that the only guarantee I could give him was that he would lose it if he didn’t? Which is what happened. Perhaps Mandelson’s only hope of work now is to be belittled as Jay was by some latter-day Maxwell.
The 147 pages of documents the government released yesterday over his appointment did not really tell us much more than we already knew. Which means they are not a pivotal moment for the future of our current PM.
By admitting in PMQs two weeks ago that he knew about Mandelson’s continuing friendship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, he took the sting out of yesterday’s document dump.
Labour MPs will ignore Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s urging to get rid of the PM now, though their simmering fury over the whole affair is still bubbling.
If there is worse to come when all the emails and WhatsApp messages are released, we are unlikely to see them for some time because the police have asked that they be held back until their investigation is complete.
As Mandelson firmly denies any wrongdoing, this is going to be a long and complex evidential process. Which means that the time of maximum danger for the PM continues to be the Scottish, Welsh and local elections in eight weeks. They are not looking good for Labour.
Just before the tranche of Mandelson documents dropped, YouGov released its latest voting intention poll. It now puts Labour in fourth place.