05.23.03
Mandelson answers
This is fun. Bored, and going from Laura-Ann’s tip,
- Gasp at his detailed rebuttal of the famous story of mistaking mushy peas for gaucamole:
When my former boss Neil Kinnock recycled this joke at my leaving do from the Labour Party – this time with me as the unsuspecting dupe – it took on its own reality. The rest, as they say, is history.
- Admire his cunning Judo-style twist on why New Labour made so many mistakes in its first term:
Part of the reason for this was that we had not fully comprehended the scale and depth of the problems we had inherited from the Conservative government. We found a desperate lack of investment in our core public services, and had to tackle the social exclusion and poverty that 18 years of Thatcherism worsened in Britain.
- Gag at his undimmed ability for shameless fawning:
Sorry to be creepy but my chief ideological hero is Tony Blair.
- Wonder where the bleedin’ stuff on the Two-and-a-half musketeers gets a look-in
Still, the man lists Zola’s Germinal as one of the two books most influential on his career. He can’t be all bad, then.
Laura-Ann said,
May 24, 2003 at 4:12 pm
Personally, I have a bit of a ‘thing’ about Politician’s websites, and another that I found while going through the list of members on the Parliament website (need to get out more?), was Michael Portillo’s - http://www.michaelportillo.co.uk - Endless hours of fun looking at various pictures of the backbiting Tory. I will say that some of his speeches are rather good (”Ghost of Toryism Past” comes to mind). And now, for a terrible confession…I find him strangely attractive.
*Ahem*…anyway, his site is there for mocking, just wish Boris Johnson had one now.