Investment bank Lazard have confirmed Guido’s story from Monday:

“London, 21 January 2011 – Lazard Ltd (NYSE: LAZ) announced today that Lord Mandelson, former Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulation, effective immediately.   As a Senior Adviser, he will provide independent strategic counsel to the firm and its clients.”

Clients like Kraft, who took over Cadbury, on Mandy’s watch. You read it here first.

Guido was the first to report the rumour that Mandy is eyeing up some sort of role with Lazards and according to the FT the investment bank has not denied the speculation. Still one good turn deserves another – Lazards advised Kraft about their controversial buying of Cadbury, something the government didn’t block…

Guess who was the Business Secretary at the time…

Kevin Maguire and Charlie Whelan are two of the most high profile former members of the inner-circle of the TaliBrown, now they are at the core of the continuity-TaliBrownies. Both are allies of, and boosters for Brown’s heir, Ed Balls. Both of them today are not happy…

Our Kevin says Not-So-Red-Ed was “scared of his shadow – or at least the notion of making either Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper his Shadow Chancellor. So the timid new Labour leader fluffed his first big call and played safe with Alan Johnson. As a result he missed a glorious opportunity to recast his party’s economic policy and to turn the tables on the Tories.” Maguire, in his role as TaliBrown propaganda chief, makes no secret of his preference for deficit denial.

Despite swinging the unions behind Red Ed to win control of the Labour Party, the TaliBrown bully and union-fixer Charlie Whelan is still unhappy; mainly with Peter Mandelson and David Miliband. Telling The Times that David Miliband was annoying and should “get a life” after his failed leadership battle, adding for good measure that his exit from the Shadow Cabinet was ungracious.

“It was slightly self-indulgent to just go off. It didn’t look good. It would have been best for him to say straight away what he was going to do. It’s a tragedy when you lose your job, you are on the dole and you have no money for your family. Politician losing top job is not a tragedy. It’s personally uncomfortable but that’s all. This is why David’s attitude annoys me. He didn’t get the job but it’s not a disaster. Get a life.”

Whelan also backs Ed Balls to be Chancellor in the Shadow Cabinet claiming “He’s got a grasp of the economy and his position on the economy is the right one”. Charlie adamantly rejects the accepted wisdom that Labour’s defeat in the last election was in any part down to Gordon Brown’s deficit denial, claiming

“We could have won that election. Peter Mandelson went round at Christmas saying it’s going to be a catastrophic defeat. Well, if you’re going into the election with your main man telling you you’re going to be defeated then you might as well pack up and go home. Obviously the campaign was an unmitigated disaster.”

Guido can see Balls and his boosters waging low intensity political warfare on Red Ed for as long as he seeks to get on the reality-based side of the deficit denying dividing line. That is something Balls and the rest of the continuity-TaliBrown will be determined to block…

Guido commented yesterday on the nervousness in the David Miliband camp, but it seems things could be worse than previously thought. After so many years it is impossible to take anything Peter Mandelson says at face value so when his head pops up above the parapet it is not without reason. He has kept a relatively low profile in the campaign so far, only pushing his book rather than David Miliband. However with just a matter of hours left to vote, he dips an oar in to slam Ed.

Given most ballots have already been cast, the impact of such a spurious and late intervention is negligible, but it certainly shows some eleventh hour desperation to give it a go…

Lord Mandelson told Steve Richards…

“I’m absolutely mystified by the manifesto on which we fought because its creator and author, Ed Miliband, has distanced himself from it, criticised it sharply and created the impression it’s not the manifesto on which he would have fought the Election… a lowest common denominator manifesto, a crowd-pleasing Guardianista manifesto that completely passed by that vast swathe of the population who weren’t natural Labour voters”.

Lord Mandelson told Radio 4′s Today programme this morning…

“It is only available in all good book shops and on Amazon today.”

Two years ago when Guido first asked the question “Is Brown Bonkers?“ he raised hackles in the unpopular parts of the blogosphere, Sir Michael White and others said it was an unpleasant smear and there was general condemnation for bad taste. Guido felt, once again, like the little boy who pointed out the emperor’s nakedness.

Yet senior Blairites were adamant, telling Guido that Brown was mentally unsound. In Westminster there was a muted but open debate in the margins as to Brown’s mental state; Was he autistic? Was it Aspergers? Did he have a personality disorder? Was he on medication? Even Andrew Marr asked him “Are you on drugs?“

Now Mandelson reveals that it was the view of Tony Blair, who had worked closely with Gordon Brown for two decades, that he was

“Mad, bad, dangerous and beyond hope of redemption… flawed, lacking perspective and having a paranoia about him… He’s like something out of the mafiosi… He’s aggressive, brutal…there’s no one to match Gordon for someone who articulates high principles while practising the lowest skulduggery.”

The national tragedy of Gordon Brown is two-fold; he blocked Tony Blair’s necessary welfare reforms not out of principle, but merely to frustrate Blair for his own personal political advantage. Secondly for purely political reasons he pursued Kamikaze economics that drove the economy into unprecedented levels of debt. The mad rivalry with Blair when the British economy was in the best shape to carry out the reform of the welfare state wrecked the best opportunity to ready Britain to compete in the global economy of the future.

Brown’s personality problems will be paid for over generations, this government is now implementing many Blair-like reforms that could have been carried out a decade ago when the economic conditions were far less difficult. The madness of Brown’s debts will be paid for by our children’s children.

You have to laugh at the cheek of Mandelson. His memoir The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour is out tomorrow and Guido will be providing full excerpts here on the blog from over-the-paywall.  Mandy is clearly enjoying himself…

When Rawnsley’s The End of the Party book came out in January on the heels of Peter Watt’s Inside Out and the allegations of Prime Mentalism committed by Gordon Brown were again denied, Guido predicted that Labour Will Have a Khrushchev Moment of Truth in the End:

When Brown has gone after the election it seems inevitable that we will eventually have a Khrushchev moment, where a senior Labour figure articulates what everyone knows.  It will be devastating.  Gordon Brown is a malevolent, deeply damaged and unpleasant human being.  He is at the centre of a culture of political bullying that has been unhealthy for the Labour Party and the government.  The loyalist cabal around him are unpleasant people who have no place in a healthy political culture, they are as secretive and malicious as they are vindictive and vicious.

Gordon Brown was often compared to Stalin, but who will be Labour’s senior Krushchev figure who condemns the previous regime? Mandelson has laid to rest any continuing pretence (if there was any) about the TeeBeeGeeBees, the vicious infighting that paralysed Whitehall for a decade, yet was denied on camera in barefaced lying by Labour politician after Labour politician, including Mandelson. Mandelson is getting all the coverage for his book The Third Man highlighting the failings of Gordon Brown. Less focus is on David Miliband, Mandelson’s new protege gave a speech yesterday that comes near to that Krushchev moment

I agreed completely with Gordon Brown, when he became Prime Minister in 2007, that we needed renewal.  I supported and voted for him.  I agreed that we needed greater moral seriousness and less indifference to the excesses of a celebrity drenched culture.  I agreed with him when he said that we needed greater coherence as a government, particularly in relation to child poverty and equality.  I agreed with him on the importance of party reform and a meaningful internationalism that would be part of a unified government strategy.  I agreed that we needed a civic morality to champion civility when confronting a widespread indifference to others. But, it didn’t happen. It was not just more of the same.  Far from correcting them failings – tactics, spin, high-handedness – intensified; and we lost many of our strengths – optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope.  We did not succeed in renewing ourselves in office; and the roots of that failure were deep not recent, about procedure and openness, or lack of it, as much as policy.  That is a political fact and now words are cheap but the stakes are high.

It was a backhanded condemnation of Brown’s failure. If David Miliband wants Labour to move on, a frank, uncoded, reflection on the period of Labour brutalism is required. Brown was a disaster for the Labour Party and the country, if Miliband wants a reborn Labour Party he first has to bury Brown in the truth.

UPDATE : Punters give David Miliband a 63% chance of being the next Labour leader.

Instead of sending us to Sion Simon’s Swiss Viagra supplier, Labour-Uncut actually had an intriguing little snippet yesterday. It won’t get as much coverage as Liam Byrne’s letter to David Laws,nevertheless for those interested, Mandelson’s letter to his successor apparently simply stated “don’t let them break this department up.”

Wishful thinking perhaps for the huge counter-productive Whitehall empire that Mandy acquired. The Treasury has its cross-hairs firmly pointed at  the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, now in the equally slippery hands of Vince Cable. With the largest chunk of cuts coming their way, Mandy’s last wish looks unlikely to be granted.