The Mandelson solution, just keep taking the pills

Peter Mandelson dominates the Sunday newspaper; it seems that everyone has a long profile of him. But the best anecdote is in Jonathan Oliver’s Sunday Times piece: 

One aide recalls the recent humiliation of a junior member of the cabinet: “We were called into Mandelson’s huge office. Peter said to my minister, ‘You look dreadful, poppet, take one of these’. Peter produced a bottle of painkillers and gave [the minister] two pills. He meekly swallowed them with a glass of water provided by Peter. It was all about asserting psychological control.”

This tells you so much about the current state of the government and the extent to which Mandelson is acting as the doctor keeping everyone stable: stopping David Miliband resigning, telling the Prime Minster what to do and keeping the whole show–just about–on the road. But the Cabinet will soon find, as the Verve would say, that the drugs don’t work, they just make things worse.