4:22pm Friday 24th October 2008
By Tomasz Johnson
There’s something about the Mandelson-Osborne-Rothschild story that truly captures the imagination.
It’s just all so utterly, inescapably filthy. Everyone is trying their best to remain aloof and come out of it whiter than their crisply-starched holiday polo shirts. But they all come out of it coated with the lustre of filthy lucre.
It says everything about democracy in Britain that Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson could snivel and sneak his way back into a position of domestic power after being embarrassed into leaving the cabinet twice. And it is fitting that no sooner had he done so than it turned out he had been “dripping poison” about Gordon Brown on his Corfu holiday.
Why was he on holiday with these people? One Mandelson ‘friend’ reports that “Peter does have a weakness for extremely rich friends” and one paper reports that he has become “a fixture on the elite social scene.”
Perhaps Mandelson is, in the truest sense of the term, a Blairite. After all, it was his friend and former leader who set the trend for hanging out on holiday with the rich and the glamorous. (Okay, Cliff Richard is not exactly glamorous). Keir Hardie must be turning in his grave.
Mandelson’s bestest buddy is not a cheesy 60s crooner, however, but Nathaniel Rothschild, a man so rich he can not only command the attention of two of Britain’s most influencial politicians but also threaten to “break” one of them. That’s some reflection of Mandy’s fitness to be a Lord, or Baron Mandelson of Foy, Hartlepool, Regents Park, The Ivy and Dom Perignon, to give him his full title.
And so rumours emerge that George Osborne had been soliciting cash from a Russian oligarch. He says he didn't. His old Bullingdon Club chum Nat says he did. It's not nice to see Bullingdon alumni squabbling. They should be making money through hedge funds or running the country. Maybe it's because they're not that they're squabbling.
In any case, why should he or the Conservative party really need roubles when they have people like Nat Rothschild’s mummy to bankroll them?
I just hope this story runs and runs, and tucked away in yesterday’s instalment was a little gem that suggests things can only get better.
According to the Guardian, some Tory MPs are getting fed up with the precocious boy shadow chancellor and are “enjoying his discomfort”.
“One Osborne tactic which has irritated colleagues is his tendency to send out text messages to junior frontbenchers, often late in the evening, with mildly critical remarks,” the paper reports.
“When the hapless MPs reply they receive no response because Osborne has switched off his phone.
“The following day he will joke that he meant no harm and that he was sending group texts.”
Osborne’s a text bully! Maybe next it’ll come out that he has been posting mean comments on his colleagues’ Facebook walls, ‘poking’ them lots of times and throwing chickens at them.
Or maybe he’ll be more careful, just in case any of them look through his pictures and find any embarrassing snaps from his summer hols. I can’t wait.
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