Poking fun: The Mirror, hours before the second resignation

There was suspicion of the slick image - including the substitution of the red flag for the red rose - which he introduced to the party.

But that was nothing to the reaction he got when his mammoth rebranding reached its desired outcome in the New Labour election victory of 1997.

Spinning

From the outset newspapers were suspicious of his "media manipulation" earning him nicknames like the Prince of Darkness.

Ann Leslie wrote the following in the Daily Mail in December 1997: "Surprisingly, for someone so skilled in the black arts of the media, he is usually disastrously cold and sneering on television where, like some Galapagos lizard, his prehensile tongue will suddenly whip out and zap some innocent interlocutor."

On Radio 4's World at One in August 1997, he launched a bitter attack on presenter Martha Kearney, accusing her and the programme of ignoring policy issues.

"You're not interested in talking about this because you're interested in talking about yourselves and the media," he said.

That earned him the Evening Standard headline: "Mandelson blows his top".

Fishy business

Fancy a jar?

Also in August 1997, on a visit to the River Thames, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott held up a crab in a jar, and jokingly told the assembled journalists it was called Peter. Grist to the papers' mill.

"PINCER DARKNESS" said The Mirror.

When Mr Mandelson beat Tony Blair to get his picture in the National Portrait Gallery, the Independent ran the headline: "Some might say hanging's too good for him."

The Dome

In January 1998, while Mr Mandelson was still in charge of the Millennium Dome, the Sunday Telegraph ran an interview with the project's disaffected creative director Stephen Bayley.

Mr Mandelson ran the project "like a dictator", he said, and "the whole way it is being run is pure East Germany". Mr Mandelson denied the claims.

Resignation Number One

It was the Guardian which revealed the home loan scandal, in which he had not declared a �373,000 loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson.

But it took the tabloids to lay it on really thick.

When the truth came out, the papers were apoplectic, as copies from the time show.

'Puffed up with his own importance'

The Mirror shouted that Mr Mandelson was "Puffed up with his own importance".

He resigned the same day.

That led to a characteristically caustic Sun front page. The paper superimposed his head onto a Christmas turkey, under the headline "STUFFED!"

Reinstatement

Ten months later the shamed ex-minister was back in the cabinet, this time as Northern Ireland secretary.

Not surprisingly, the press didn't unanimously approve.

The Daily Mail called the appointment by Mr Blair "the most spectacular gamble in recent political history - and one that the Prime Minister could yet live to regret".

Bruce Anderson, writing in the same paper, branded the MP for Hartlepool a "monumentally cynical spin doctor".

Peter Simple in the Daily Telegraph was none too charitable either.

"Peter Mandelson's appointment as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland will delight all connoisseurs of the grotesque," he wrote.

"The plain people of Ulster are lumbered instead with the epitome of modish, metropolitan sophistication."

Even the left-leaning Mirror will not have ingratiated itself with Mr Mandelson with the headline "That's just so dandy, Mandy".

He is known to dislike his nickname intensely.

Memoirs

And almost two years after his first resignation, new rumours surfaced with the publication of Geoffrey Robinson's memoirs.

Mr Robinson was said to have left out several "killer facts" concerning his relationship with Mr Mandelson, said the Mail on Sunday last October.

"There's plenty more that could yet come out and may well do so unless Mandelson stops causing trouble," a "friend" of Mr Robinson's said ominously.

Following his second resignation, one thing is for certain - Fleet Street editors will be refining their prose to a razor sharpness for Thursday's papers.