Peter's Finger

by Graham Davies

It was crass, over-blown and embarassing. The Mandelson Ego on the Labour Party stage was just as unpleasant to behold as it has always been.

Granted, he has learnt a sense of irony and self-parody. But coming from his mouth, the carefully calculated humorous attempts to make Mandelson 2.0 seem humble had exactly the opposite effect.

He seems to have employed the services of a Body Language Coach from the 1970s: his gestures attached to supposedly significant phrases showed the straight jacket of over-rehearsal. And his obsessive use of the right forefinger pointed to the sky was an his unconscious way of telling us that there is still only One Man worth listening to.

And he just can't help giving himself away. At one point, he told Brown "you will have my undivided attention". A few seconds later, perhaps as an afterthought, he said it would be accompanied by his undivided loyalty. This was the speech of a smugly superior, supervising schoolteacher, not a faithful warrior.