Peter Mandelson yesterday revoked permission for Hannah Rothschild to show her documentary about him at the Hays Festival. The organisers announced that "Hannah Rothschild's film 'The Real PM: A Portrait of the Real Peter Mandelson' has been withdrawn on the insistence of the subject." The film was said to show, in unflinching detail, both Mandelson's personal life and him at work within the Government from October 2009 up to last month's general election, creating a portrait of the man as the power behind Gordon Brown's throne.
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Speculation about the cancellation focused on the Labour peer's writing of his own memoirs, published this summer by HarperPress and raced out ahead of Tony Blair's autobiography The Journey, which will be published on 2 September. Mandelson's book comprises diary notes he has taken over the past twenty years. The publishers promise that it will be "frank, honest and revealing ... a dramatic first-hand narrative", and that it will "lay bare Peter Mandelson's intimate, complex relationship with Britain's two New Labour prime ministers". Riveting.
I await news of Mandy the Musical.
I await news of Mandy the Musical.
