Why Lord Mandelson's career has been a personal and national tragedy, so far

His services to the Labour Party are notable and undeniable.

What he did was make the Labour Party make promises to the voters they wanted to hear.

Even if they could not keep those promises, as we have now seen, acknowledging that they would have to make the right kind of promises was a big start.

It was the tribute that the undemocratic vice of ideology paid to democratic virtue.

Lord Mandelson should be thanked for paying that tribute to our much-vaunted democracy.

You see, he is really a Conservative and bourgeois at heart. It is his misfortune that he had been born into the wrong family and joined the wrong party.

If he had joined the right party, he would have been the Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher.

And that is why I feel for Lord Mandelson this peculiar tenderness one might feel for a storm-soaked pussycat, who has aroused deep maternal emotions I never knew I had.

Lord Mandelson's political career has been a national and personal tragedy. He joined a party that is even now too dim, spiteful to feel the gratitude they should rightfully feel and too apathetic, timorous and small-minded to enthusiastically endorse his leadership even if they are secretly grateful to him.

As Phil Woolas once said of him: "He may be a bastard, but he is our [ie a Labour Party] bastard."

Brown could perhaps redeem himself by acknowledging Mandelson's unique suitability to lead the Labour Party into the next election, publicly and dramatically, at the Brighton conference.

If that happened I may even start believing in God.