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The man behind New Labour’s new online propaganda ghetto LabourList, Derek Draper, has something of a track record for wild boasts.

Back in 1998 when Draper was hooking up big business with New Labour ministers (or ‘top lobbyist with GPC Market Access and former chief aide to Peter Mandelson’ as he was billed), he said of British democracy to undercover reporter Greg Palast – who broke the Lobbygate/cash-for-access story – that ‘there are 17 people who count‘.

He then went on to brag: ‘And to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century.’ Wow. How’s that for a ticket on yourself?

At Chancellor Brown’s confidential request, he put out a supposedly independent newsletter praising Blair’s keeping the minimum wage low. Press control was especially valuable. In the Sunday Telegraph, Draper authored a 2,000-word profile of Ed Balls, a Brown aide. He’d given Balls editorial control and the Telegraph was none the wiser.

He revelled in his time as go-between for the great and the good and was eager to impress Palast:

We needed proof of Draper’s insider bona fides. Draper rose to the challenge, literally. He stood up from his chair, took a pager from his belt and, holding it up, read off one phone message after another – nearly two dozen in all – from the powerful and near-to-power. “Ed Miliband – call me; Dave Miliband – please call; Paul Hackett… that’s (John) Prescott’s office … ” There were several messages from Liz Lloyd of the Downing Street Policy Unit, Balls from the Treasury and others. Draper was in cheery mood. His clients at the House Builders Federation would be happy: Blair’s advisor Geoff Norris was again looking at plans to use several green belt areas for housing – “just a bloody bunch of mud tracts at the edge of town,” as Draper described the disputed land.

Palast went on to describe Draper ‘as nothing more than a messenger boy, a factotum, a purveyor, a self-loving, over-scented clerk’. A disgraced Draper retrained as a psychotherapist.

Now, you might have thought that after that, Draper might have learned a little humility in the intervening years but not a bit of it. Take a look at what Draper had to say to Tim Ireland when the latter asked why his reasonable comment on LabourList had been binned:

i am building a site for 60 million people, not 60 bloggers

How about that? What drive. What ambition. What narcissistic balls. And to think Draper is a psychotherapist. Come one, come all. British online politics has a new father figure. Let’s just hope he doesn’t want to be ‘intimate with every one of them’.

‘What I really am,’ Draper told Palast all those years ago, ‘is a commentator-fixer’. How times have changed. Mind you, it must be galling for Draper to have sunk so low, from rubbing shoulders with the most powerful to badgering them into writing heavily-policed propaganda disguised as blog posts.

(The full story of Lobbygate can be found on Greg Palast’s website. I highly recommend it – it reads like a thriller. A very depressing thriller. It’s amazing how many figures caught up in the scandal are still around.)