Two years ago I would have regarded this as a gross impertinence, but now I find I’ve rather grown to like it.There are certain times when the informality and familiarity of American life strains my patience – when a waiter tells me his name is Bob and that he’ll be my server this evening, I still have to resist an impulse to say, “I just want a cheeseburger, Bob. He asked some of my personal details, and then said, “Excuse me, Bill. I have to put you on hold a minute.”Did you catch that? He called me Bill Not Mr Bryson Not sir Not O mighty taxpayer, but Bill. There I was, all poised to have a recorded voice tell me: “All our agents are busy, so please hold while we play you some irritating music interrupted at 15-second intervals by a recorded voice telling you all our agents are busy so please hold while we play you some irritating music” and so on until teatime.
So imagine my surprise when, after just 270 rings, a real person came on the line.

(Though, having said that, I don’t actually need an unexpected event to achieve this. All I need is a soft drink.) What caused this fizzy outburst was that I called a government office – specifically, the US Social Security Administration – and someone answered the phone. It also had the added advantage of being pounds 35,000 cheaper Mandelson had found a London home he wholeheartedly liked.. THE OTHER day I had an experience so startling and unexpected that it made me spill a soft drink down my shirt. Why not go for a small house instead? This appealed strongly to Mandelson. The first house which attracted him was in Ladbroke Road, just behind Notting Hill Gate It had an asking price of pounds 500,000 Mandelson made an offer on it but he was swiftly gazumped. But then they found the narrow, four-storey Georgian house in Northumberland Place, a significantly quieter street.

Then, as Mandelson would later confide in his friends, Robinson said: “Fine – I could tide you over.” The conversation was left hanging, with the loan from Robinson not finalised until early October. When Robinson asked how substantial, Mandelson replied that it would be “in the region of half a million pounds”. According to Mandelson’s friends, it was Robinson, a famously generous man, who said something like: “Eventually, you’ll be in the Cabinet, you should have somewhere in London where you can have a good home, where you can bring people round.” Mandelson said that he did not have the “resources” and Robinson said: “Well, one day you’ll write your memoirs.” Mandelson then told him that he would inherit a substantial legacy. The Mandelson version was slightly different: he had indeed explained he wanted to “get settled” soon; once he was a minister he wouldn’t want to be bothered with selling his “poky little flat in Clerkenwell”. Robinson always made it clear to Mandelson that one of his prime responsibilities was to ensure that the bond between Blair and Brown was never `rent asunder’.Geoffrey Robinson would say later, when both men had resigned from the government, that Mandelson had “asked” for a loan. They had already spoken on this subject several times since the traumas of the leadership crisis in 1994, when Robinson, unlike Mandelson, had remained a Brown man. `I Can Help’IT WAS during the summer of 1996 that Mandelson went, at Geoffrey Robinson’s invitation, for dinner a deux in the annexe of the Grosvenor House Hotel, where the MP, now a multi-millionaire, occupied a flat with a wide balcony looking across Park Lane and Hyde Park.The principal topic over the sole was Gordon Brown, and Mandelson’s painfully fractured relationship with him.

And he should sell his house.`When You Join The Cabinet, You Should Have A Good Home in London,’ Said Robinson. He should demonstrate that he was a conviction politician “freed to do and say what you believe in” He should spend more time in Hartlepool He should “mix more in Parliament and be a team player”. Having faced the knocks, he should accept them and get on with life. In the event Blair went out of his way in his official letter to say that he expected Mandelson to do “much, much more with us”; he believed that politicians can rebuild themselves.Much less officially, he took the trouble to write out, for Mandelson’s arrival at Chequers, some private advice on how he might do just that It was full of common sense.

On the other hand the political price paid by the party and the government, not to mention Mandelson himself, would have been too heavy to contemplate. But if he hoped, and it would have been unnatural if a part of him had not, that Blair would talk him out of it, then he was disappointed.It was true that Sir Michael Scholar, who was deeply dismayed by Mandelson’s departure, had cleared him of a conflict of interest over Roinson’s affairs; Lord Jenkins, a former Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, subsequently told a friend of Mandelson’s that in view of that he did not need to resign. By Wednesday morning, Blair had come to his own clear view that Mandelson should go Mandelson, in other words, had been prepared to resign. Did Mandelson jump or was he pushed? The answer appears to be that Mandelson acted with propriety in raising spontaneously and directly with Blair the possibility of resignation as early as his telephone call of Tuesday evening.