Lord Mandelson lost his job twice, once in 1998 for not declaring a loan he was given to buy a house, and once in 2001 for trying to arrange a passport for an Indian businessman who had given £1,000,000 to the Labour Party. He later made a speech claiming to have "inner steel".
After Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, he made Mandelson a Life Peer, and some newspapers have called him "the most powerful man in the Labour Party".
Mandelson is gay (he was outed in 1998 by openly gay journalist Matthew Parris),[1] which led some to claim the UK was being run by a gay mafia.