The Peter Mandelson Memorial Dim Sum Supper Club met in emergency session last night, prompted by our hero’s third fall from grace. We are a group of friends who were lunching in a Chinese restaurant when Mandelson resigned as business secretary just before Christmas in 1998. By coincidence, we were doing the same when he resigned again, as Northern Ireland secretary, in January 2001.
Since then, we have gathered at the turn of each year to make predictions about politics that have appeared in The Independent. Our forecasts have been noticed by David Cameron and Keir Starmer – as a way of boasting about how we got them wrong. We predicted a hung parliament in both the 2015 and 2024 elections.
