Lord Mandelson of Foy sticks his nose into the room in which I am waiting for him and sniffs the air theatrically. ‘This place smells,’ he declares. And this, it seems, is my invitation to follow him through to his office — for an interview and some light admonishment. He is cross with Charles Moore for revealing in this magazine the details of an extraordinary shooting party at the Rothschilds’ manor. The cast of characters included Cherie Blair, Lord Mandelson and Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator. The noble lord is keen to set the record straight.
‘I never clapped eyes on Cherie Blair,’ he says, indignantly. ‘She was nowhere to be seen, unless she came afterwards.’ He lists other complaints: he was not dining at Waddesdon Manor but another building (he doesn’t specify). But he has no qualms about meeting Gaddafi. ‘He did appear over pudding and I did sit him down and talk to him about something.’ And is he an all-right chap?’
‘I don’t regard him as an all-right chap or a bad chap. I mean, how can you judge?’
What seems to annoy him most is the idea that he aimed a gun at a pheasant. ‘I’m not saying that these people don’t shoot. That’s what you do when you’re that sort of person, when you’ve got nothing else to do and you haven’t got two large red boxes of work to do. But I went to dinner on Friday and I went home and did my boxes, like a good boy.’
For some time now, Lord Mandelson has been a very good boy indeed. When he returned to government, it was said by unkind souls (including me) that he would be Gordon Brown’s executioner.
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