The Guardian’s Martin Kettle buffs himself to a shine over the return of Peter Mandelson with the strangest of analogies…

Mandelson is, of course, no Churchill – the most he aspires to do is to save his party, not save the country. Nevertheless, both Labour and Tory strategists treat him with the same sort of awe that wartime Allied strategists thought of Rommel, a man who can change the game, a lucky general, an infinitely wily opponent.

Mandelson as… Rommel? That being the case, we all know what that makes Blair. And Alastair Campbell. I doubt, however, we’ll be reading Kettle’s purple prose about how ‘both Labour and Tory strategists treat Blair/Campbell with the same sort of awe that wartime Allied strategists thought of Hitler/Goebbels’.

Lucky? The man’s twice disgraced (and counting). Wily? Tell that to the people whose careers the bastard destroyed with a whispered briefing to a journalist (the kind of sly, anonymous, top secret briefing that fuels the likes of Kettle’s self-importance). Mandelson’s a preening, passive-aggressive coward with a moral compass like a propeller. What kind of deficiency of faculty does it take to regard his reappointment as a good thing? Or him as a Nazi hero?