Tim Walker

Mandrake

‘Old Friends’ and New

Although the focus has inevitably been on Peter Mandelson’s web of influence within the party of government, it also extends to the Conservatives in the shape of former Chancellor George Osborne.

Mandrake was the first to disclose in October 2008 how Mandelson and Osborne had been hobnobbing with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska – at the time regarded as persona non grata by the US Government – aboard his superyacht, Queen K, off Corfu during their summer holidays.

I’d first been tipped off that Mandelson, then Gordon Brown’s Business Secretary, had alone been wined and dined by Deripaska – but his spokesman, when I inquired, alerted me to the fact that Osborne had also been on board. He added that the two of them were “old friends, who just happened to be in Corfu at the time and this was a purely social occasion”.

Mandrake was in residence at the Daily Telegraph at the time, and the paper – then edited by Sir William Lewis, later to become Boris Johnson’s image guru at No 10 – had initially proved reluctant to run the story. It sat around for several days before, finally, being cut down to just a few paragraphs and run in the column at the bottom of a page on a Monday, the day of the week the paper sells the fewest print editions.