They had hoped that when Mr Mandelson returned to Britain he would keep quiet

They had hoped that when Mr Mandelson returned to Britain he would keep quiet.
Mr Mandelson tells us he will not act in a way that is “designed to harm the Government or the party” On this he is being disingenuous. He might not act in a way that is “designed” to do harm, but every time he speaks, the story will remain on the front pages.But then Mr Mandelson has not been given much choice in the matter. He has already lost his job, and almost certainly his ministerial career is over. Bizarrely, he was sacked at the same time as an inquiry into his conduct was announced. He has been branded a liar, although there is a haziness over what he is supposed to have lied about.

Mr Mandelson should therefore be allowed to put his side of the case. After all, cabinet ministers were not slow in coming forward to attack him for his alleged mendacity. At least, as one of the architects of New Labour, he will attempt to clear his name without bringing down the edifice he did much to build. His decision to contest his seat in Hartlepool is also understandable. If he were to throw in the towel now, the gesture would be widely regarded as an acceptance of guilt.At Prime Minister’s Question Time last week, William Hague should have asked Mr Blair a simple question: “Why did he sack his Northern Ireland Secretary?” Mr Blair would not have been able to give a clear answer. While the facts remain so blurred, Mr Mandelson, who has lost nearly everything, has a right to speak out.. Death is sometimes described as the last taboo.

The producers of the new film of Martin Amis’s early novel Dead Babies, for example, reportedly found it hard to persuade cinemas to show it, even before the traumatic revelations from Alder Hey hospital about the Dutch pathologist who obsessively collected organs from dead children. The film-makers were apparently warned that “no film with the word ‘dead’ in the title has ever done good business”. (The squeamish publishers of the first paperback edition had renamed it Dark Secrets.) Yet it’s not about dead babies at all The title is just one of Amis’s sour jokes

Death is sometimes described as the last taboo. The producers of the new film of Martin Amis’s early novel Dead Babies, for example, reportedly found it hard to persuade cinemas to show it, even before the traumatic revelations from Alder Hey hospital about the Dutch pathologist who obsessively collected organs from dead children. The film-makers were apparently warned that “no film with the word ‘dead’ in the title has ever done good business”.

(The squeamish publishers of the first paperback edition had renamed it Dark Secrets.) Yet it’s not about dead babies at all. The title is just one of Amis’s sour jokes.
Contemporary attitudes to death are a strange muddle of fascination and denial. This confusion ran like a red thread through the reporting, last week, of the bizarre and inhumane events at that ill-run Liverpool hospital.But it’s too easy to talk about a taboo. Look at the non-Amis fiction in any bookshop and you’ll see, on the contrary, a grotesque preoccupation with death. In days of yore, in an Agatha Christie story, all that mattered was how the woman in the locked room got herself murdered The precise details of her death concerned no one. Nor were they even lingered on by American thriller-writers such as Raymond Chandler, James Cain or Ross Macdonald – for all their supposed toughness – when they sent their heroes to walk those mean streets. But now you get this:”The dead woman was nude and pitiful on her cold, steel tray.