A caricature of Peter Mandelson smiles from the wall of my downstairs lavatory. It's from an original cartoon by the great Michael Heath, portraying Mandy on the deck of a ginormous super-yacht called 'Oligarch 2'.
The now-disgraced peer is drawn in typical early-21st Century mode – clutching a glass of champagne – while his host, the yacht's Russian owner Oleg Deripaska tells him: 'And after we beat you with birch twigs, we'll take you for a nanosecond to an aluminium smelting plant.'
I'll explain this rather brilliant – and pertinent – allusion a little later.
Suffice to say, I was presented with the cartoon at the end of an unpleasant three-year-long libel action which went all the way to the UK's final court of appeal. In October 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that one of Mandelson's gilded cronies had to pay the Daily Mail more than £1million in legal costs.
They'd contested an investigation I'd conducted into a secret trip that Mandelson, the then European Commissioner for Trade, had made to Russia in 2005. The 2010 article suggested Mandelson had pimped himself out to an unscrupulous foreign gazillionaire. Imagine that!
