Paper Monitor
12:51 UK time, Wednesday, 14 July 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
After yesterday's celebration of lukewarm revelations, three more mildly interesting points from the diaries of Lord Mandelson, as serialised in the Times.
1. Operation Teddy Bear sounds benign, which was just the plan. Blair and Mandelson and others devised a plan to split the Treasury in two, thus hoping to neutralise Gordon Brown's power base. It was called Teddy Bear so as to avoid suspicion. It hit the buffers: "[Tony] outlined the plan to Gordon, who responded with a flat 'no'."
2. After Mandelson was sacked from the cabinet the first time, over a house loan, he and partner Reinaldo were invited to spend the night at Chequers with Cherie and Tony. "Cherie invited me to return, with my mother, for Christmas," he writes.
3. Blair loves Mick Jagger. "Tony summoned up his courage and went up to Mick [Jagger, after a dinner]. Looking him straight in the eye, he said: 'I just want to say how much you've always meant to me.' For a moment," writes Mandelson, "I thought he might ask for an autograph."
The Times really is filling its boots with its Mandelson - and it is all a good read for those who are interested in this sort of thing (which Paper Monitor is). They must be highly chuffed with their purchase.
But there's a line in Daniel Finkelstein's column today which turns the head: "One of my favourite cartoons appeared the morning after the resignation of Paddy Ashdown as leader of the Liberal Democrats," he writes. "Two men are walking past a newspaper billboard that reads: 'Ashdown stands down.' One man is turning to the other, saying: 'I've already forgotten what I was doing.'"
Priceless work, showing once again how a cartoonist can in a single sentence and a few squiggles say something contemporary, something human and something funny. So who, pray, is this talent that has stuck in Finkelstein's mind since 1999, the year Ashdown stepped down? There is no mention in the article. But come now... a moment's thought and if Paper Monitor is wrong here please do speak up and humble pie will be eaten, but surely the responsible cartoonist can really have been the one and only Matt? Of the Daily Telegraph?
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