In 1996 Peter Mandelson wrote a book, now out of print but available for a penny on Amazon. Eagerly awaited at the time for clues about the more opaque corners of the new Labour agenda, or the Machiavellian scheming of its author, The Blair Revolution roundly disappointed. It contained a rather bland trot through the potential of community and modernisation, public and private partnership, everyone pulling together (shades of Gordon Brown this week), pragmatic delivery, that sort of thing.

“Banal, pretentious and risibly inadequate”, pounced Roy Hattersley in an instant review; Mandelson and his co-author Roger Liddle had reduced Labour's big ideas to “vague generalities”.

What really had the political class wrinkling its brow in confusion was this: there was no hidden agenda. Indeed, the central theme of The Blair Revolution - let's ditch the dogma and pull together to make the world a better place - was illustrated by an embarrassingly trite series of vignettes.

There was Eileen with a dodgy hip, her single-mum daughter Tracy and criminal son Peter; Ben and Laura, in their comfortable South London home, who had to send their kids to private school and take out private medical insurance: what would the future hold for all of them? At the end of the book, the Tories had regained power in 2005 - Ben and Laura fled London, the streets were full of mobs, houses were torched and the middle classes now lived in gated estates travelling to London on expensive, exclusive toll roads.

Lord Hattersley was spot on about the banality. But what he missed was the naivety. There is something childlike about Lord Mandelson. From his tantrums and sulks to his honesty and his spark, even his love of dressing up, this is no Machiavelli. There is no secret manipulation, no dark arts. Mandelson is Westminster's wysiwyg: what you see is what you get.

Much of the hostility that the new peer attracts is down to his transparency - if he doesn't like you, he tells you. And how. If you offend him, he sulks. For years. There are not many ministers who spit their real feelings at journalists or colleagues. Lord Mandelson, of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the County of Durham, lacks the guile necessary to be a politician popular with the media.

Lord of what and what? Two titles? Yes, unfortunately: like a child in a sweetie shop, you see.

I know, I know. Public life is not a sweetie shop and our newest member of the House of Lords has had an unfortunate tendency to enjoy too openly the trappings of office, the access to rich and powerful people. He has stuck his hand in a lot of open jars. But he has been more silly than corrupt, opportunist not dishonest. The expert manipulator of other people's images never was any good at managing his own; the spin-doctor unwilling to take his own medicine. And yes, there is an archness there: why should I?

It counts for something that he still has the respect and loyalty of his civil servants, all those years later - witness the spontaneous cheers at the (much diminished) Business Department when he returned. Mandelson was a good minister.

Now he is terrified. He was sacked once, remember, for doing nothing wrong. So when, barely days into his new job, people start asking questions about whether there was something wrong in his staying on the yacht of a Russian aluminium tycoon last summer, he panics. He stalls, he is evasive, he hedges.

While he wins plaudits for the Prime Minister by focusing the Government on what matters, his own press is terrible: yachts and parties, large payoffs from the EU. Mandelson knew that it would be bad, but he has been shocked by how bad.

Who honestly believes that a night's kip in a yacht could persuade him to cut aluminium import duties? It's as silly as that ridiculous claim two years ago that John Prescott might have given someone permission to turn the Dome into a supercasino because they put him up for the night and gave him a stetson.

Friends say that Mandelson has mellowed in the years in Brussels, become wiser and more tolerant. I wonder how long that can last.

There's always his sexuality to focus on as well. The depth and extent of homophobia displayed by public and media has been staggering: Mandy, Princess of Darkness, a “poisonous, hissing Queen”. That latter was the most printable among a torrent of comments sent to the Times website that we did not print.

Not that we need be shy, as our media colleagues are quite capable of heaping on the abuse themselves. Reporting on Lord Mandelson's enrobement in the Daily Mail yesterday, Quentin Letts seemed strangely interested in his “clenched” bottom and his lips “drawn primly together”. The peer was “wreathed by a cologne cloud of delight”, he added in a further flight of fancy.

Richard Littlejohn, predictably, was worse, getting in a tortured allusion to a gay sex act before adding a completely extraneous reference to some visit that Mandelson had made to a sausage manufacturer in Italy. “There's a headline for you: Mandy and the Sausage Merchant. You really couldn't make this stuff up.” Well you could, but most of us wouldn't want to.

It's a level of personal abuse and innuendo that would not be tolerated if it were aimed at a black person, a woman, even another gay man - anybody in public life, in fact, except Mandelson. He may have another issue to contend with too: one member of the House of Lords overheard another referring to Mandelson on the day that he was ennobled as a “quintessential Jew” - whatever that means. Someone else is spreading a false rumour that he has Aids.

Britain was meant to turn out nicer than this. In an alternative vignette offered at the end of The Blair Revolution, new Labour is still in office! Hurray! Eileen is having her hip fixed, Peter has been mentored into starting his own business, Tracy is in a nice new house. Ben's business is booming, the Tube has been revamped, a government grant has helped a youngster into work for Ben's firm. The streets are clean, and Ben is “pretty impressed” by what community can mean in practice.

“There seems to be a sense of solidarity, even pride, among people,” the authors concluded. “Ben hadn't been able to quite put his finger on it, but Laura had said it felt as if we had become a young country again.”

See? Naive. Britain is still quite old, and very nasty indeed.

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