Until today, I was the only person other than Tony Blair to have fired Peter Mandelson. And if it’s any consolation, Peter, now that you have lost yet another job, you have the distinction of being the only person I ever fired.
It wasn’t even because I had suddenly gone power crazy. I was acting on instructions. But more of that later. Keir Starmer caved into pressure and rid himself of our troublesome US Ambassador rather than face any more questions over the relationship with vile paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
The questions for the PM, of course, will not end here. Tories are rightly asking what he knew and when and why he appointed Lord Mandelson to this sensitive post in the first place.
There were questions junior Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty was reluctant to answer when announcing the sacking in the Commons.
All he would say is that more information had come to light, making Lord Mandelson’s position untenable. I thought Peter might survive this one and said so on GB News. Being pictured in a bathrobe on Epstein’s Caribbean island was embarrassing, as were his effusive displays of love and friendship.
But embarrassment was not a reason on its own for an ambassador to lose his job.
Defending Epstein following his conviction was.
But this was typical Peter. He has one of the best political brains I have ever encountered, first as comms chief to then Labour leader Neil Kinnock and then as a columnist on the Sunday People when I was the paper’s Political Editor.
I fired Peter Mandelson during a fractious phone call. I warned him to be on guard - Nigel Nelson
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There are many senior Labour politicians who owe their own survival to his sound and wise advice. Peter’s problem is that he is not so good at advising himself. It was always his biggest blind spot.
Tony Blair had to fire him in 1998 as Trade and Industry Secretary for taking a six-figure loan on a home in London’s Notting Hill from fellow MP Geoffrey Robinson when Robinson was being investigated by Peter’s own department.
If it had been anyone else, Peter would have told them not to do it.
In 2001, he was out of the Cabinet again over a passport scandal. He may now regret ever being introduced to Epstein, but once the child sex charges began to mount, he should have skedaddled pronto.
That’s what he would have told someone else in his position to do. And his career as a political columnist came to an end because he wouldn’t take the advice I gave him.
We had a new editor. Columnists are always vulnerable to new editors keen to make their mark by showing they’re changing things. I warned Peter to be on his guard.
In our new editor’s first week, he wrote a column about Princess Diana. As Diana was all over the paper, the editor wanted a column about something else.
This was a perfectly reasonable instruction, and I urged Peter to follow it.“Are you telling me that if I change my column I’ll definitely keep my job?” asked Peter. “No,” I said. “But I’m telling you that if you don’t, you’ll definitely lose it.”
Peter didn’t write a new column. And in a fractious phone call, I told him he wouldn’t be writing any more. The great irony was that if I had been the columnist, Peter would have given me the same advice I had just given him.