But you are not likely to find in Brighton this week many who do not glow with satisfaction at the work Herbert Morrison's grandson has put into repackaging the party.

Image making is crucially a matter partly of neutralising an unfavourable press. Since this former Weekend World producer is expected to be about to apply his tonsorial skills to his own image in anticipation of a safe seat and a Cabinet post in the next Labour government, it is instructive to glimpse how a political press officer operates.

Mandelson agreed to take as text a sensational item on the BBC's 9 O'Clock News on May 25 which informed the public that the reason why Mrs Thatcher had recently expelled 11 Soviet diplomats was that they had been attempting to blackmail Labour MP's.

This not only extended Mrs Thatcher's repertoire of performances of public compassion to include a decidedly unwilling patient, the Labour Party, it also replanted the Red Flag painfully in its body politic.

'What precisely were you doing the moment you heard this?' I asked.

'It was an ordinary Thursday evening and I am sitting in Neil Kinnock's room in the Commons,' Mandelson began in uncharacteristic Runyonesque style for such a suave fellow. 'I turn on the 9 o'clock news and there is this incredible story.'

Mandelson was doubly furious because contrary to usual practice the BBC had not given the Labour Party the opportunity of making an instant denial or of offering what is known in the business as 'an offsetting' quote.

'The smear was out, what could you do?'

'It was my job to contain it. I had to make a statement within minutes. But Neil was down in Wales and I did not know if perhaps there had been some communication received by him from the Foreign Secretary or from No 10 or the Director of the Security Services .. Perhaps there was some truth in it?'

In his office by the Elephant and Castle Mandelson tilted his chair back and brooded on this dilemma. At 35, with a dapper, perhaps slightly anachronistic moustache, he looks like any other youngish executive you would see going home on the Thameslink; the kind who like to take off their jackets and sit in their striped shirts, riffling through documents on a hard attache case balanced on their knees, not yet having nerve enough to use a cellular telephone in a crowded commuter train.

A highly articulate and essentially nervy man (he can be very spiky in defence of his Party at Press Conferences) noted by some for his arrogance, Mandelson has worked on restraining a personality which at Oxford ground down intellectual inferiors with finely honed sarcasm.

He has also necessarily abandoned a tendency to go around crying: 'PM for PM!'

'I had to say something to play it down,' he pointed out. 'The report was very damaging for the Labour Party. My task was to do everything I could to stop others reporting it, so I set about carefully rubbishing it. But at the back of my mind I knew the formulation of words had to be such that if subsequently I discovered it was true I had kept a chink open.'

'So you couldn't, at this stage, say: 'There is absolutely no foundation for this report?.'

'No. What I immediately do in these cases is get out a piece of paper and work out a line to take and start writing it down.'

'And in this case the line was?'

'Something like: 'This is an incredible story for which no evidence has been provided whatsoever and which, at face value, has no credence at all.'

'Knowing that 'incredible' just means something hard to believe?.'

Mandelson nodded in agreement. He also drew attention to the merits of 'no evidence provided' and 'at face value.'

'But at the end of the evening when I got hold of Neil and he said it was a load of ... I can't use that word,' he said hurriedly.

'I don't mind using it.'

'No. Nononono,' he said crossly. 'I withdraw it.'

(No doubt the Director of Communications recalled a distressing episode, the media made a meal of, in which his Leader had used fruity language with a Radio 4 journalist. Mandelson's solicitude for his Leader is legendary).

'The next step would be?'

'Neil tells me there is no truth in it. Now I harden my words...'

'You get hold of journalists?'

'Yes, and really go to town on it'

(With some success. News at Ten did not carry the story, nor did the BBC's own Newsnight. But it went out on BBC radio at midnight.) What happened then?

'There was a private communication between Neil and the Foreign Secretary.'

Geoffrey Howe behaved like a gent. Within 24 hours he had released for publication a letter to the Leader of the Labour Party declaring categorically there was no truth in the story. Later Mr William Waldegrave, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, revealed he had spoken to a BBC reporter but claimed the BBC had got it all wrong.

'So now there was another issue?'

Peter Mandelson nodded. 'The BBC,' he agreed, darkly.

This was tricky. Mandelson had to make up his mind about an activity which could be interpreted as BBC bashing, not popular with the media; he was also aware that turnips donate blood more readily than the BBC provides retractions. He then had his own image to consider; 'It would be wrong to think I am a sort of trigger-happy guy, shooting his way around the Press Gallery,' he said.

'In these cases,' he said, 'I have to make a judgement about whether I am entitled to complain. I spend my time fending off MPs who say: 'Ring up the Director General there; write to an editor here'. Seven out of ten times I don't do it. I don't necessarily say I'm not going to do it.'

'You don't?'

'I don't. But now I become angry,' he said. 'Not such that I become irrational, but because I think my party is being badly treated.'

IN THEORY he had a short cut to the BBC: to John Birt, Deputy Director General one time his superior at London Weekend Television.

'I would have phoned him but he was on a walking tour of the Pennine Way and could not be contacted,' Mandelson said. Later, as his remembered frustration with the BBC increased, 'Pennine Way' was gradually transformed into a epithet of scorn, although Mandelson himself has a country cottage in Herefordshire to which he frequently retires - with a cellular telephone, it is true.

Mandelson then wrote to the Editor of News and Current Affairs 'to get the BBC's explanation on record.'

'Writing can be a trap. They could say the correspondence was confidential and you can't use it?'

'Tony Hall (Editor News and Current Affairs) did try to make it confidential, but I told him: 'Your report on the 9 o'clock news was not confidential.' My job is to protect the interests of the Party, and I will take the most appropriate measures. Since the smear had gone out and the BBC was not satisfactorily correcting the story - so far as I know the BBC did not go to anyone to corroborate that story - I felt justified in making the letter available to journalists.'

Mandelson then trudged through a thicket of BBC executives, ENCA's and POLED'S and MENCAs and there was a spoiled lunch, (previously arranged) between the DG and Kinnock. But even when JB, the DDG, came down off the Pennine Way he could not get an apology.

'Birt came to see Neil. I'm at the meeting,' Mandelson continued. 'Birt gives a wholly unsatisfactory justification. We agree to differ. Birt goes his way. The breach is still not entirely healed.'

There was general public condemnation of the BBC by the Labour Party. 'How is your stalking of the BBC different from Norman Tebbit's?' I asked.

'Tebbit's was a cynical exercise in intimidation. His motivation was quite different. Kate Adie was the occasion not the real purpose; the real purpose was to do over the BBC before the election.'

Bernard Ingham also manipulates the press for the Tory party; how are your tactics cleaner than his?

'I don't have the power,' Mandelson said. 'He has government information which is centralised and controlled to an extent unimaginable in our country before. Ingham operates on the principle that if you don't want to be completely IN you are completely OUT. 'It's not a la carte' is his favourite expression. And I don't have a thousand press officers who are operating like policemen and secret agents all over Whitehall,' Mandelson said indignantly. 'I have a staff of six. The critical thing you have to understand about the relationship between Bernard Ingham and broadcasters is that for the past three years the BBC has been living in fear of its institutional life. ITN is not assured of its place within the ITV structure of schedules; the BBC is being threatened with being dismembered. In those circumstances your institutional relationship with the Government gets mixed up with the editorial, journalistic relationship.'

Warming to his theme Mandelson said: 'I was talking about this to the Editor of ITN yesterday and he said you don't want to offend Ministers over some item on News at Ten when they are putting the finishing touches to the broadcasting White Paper that can mean life or death for your future.'

WE FIRST meet Mandelson as a schoolboy calling in at the Jewish Chronicle to visit his father, Tony, a well known Fleet St character who died last year, then the paper's Director of Advertising. The Chronicle's present Director of Advertising, Alan Rubenstein, remembers Peter as 'a very pleasant young man, very polite and sociable'; quite unlike his brother, Myles, (now a psychologist. ) They knew Peter would go far because of his talent for lively debate.

Young Peter argued politics hotly with his father, a life-time Labour voter; they argued about the young LPYS miliants. His father would always say: 'They are young; they must be given their head.' Peter's hostility to the the Far Left already mature, would say severely: 'People are not simply 'youth and let us give them their head'; there are people who have less in common with the Labour Party than others who are not in the Party.'

Politics also entered the family with the Sunday visits to their Hampstead Garden home of grandfather Morrison, Labour Deputy Prime Minister in the Forties. Blind in one eye from birth, soon to go completely blind, Morrison was in the sad decline of his career. But with his napkin tucked in under his chin eating the Sunday roast, he still carried with him the aura of great political days; a figure of fascination and affection for Peter.

Peter easily got an Oxford scholarship (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) from Hendon Grammar school. But after A Levels he took a year off and with the assistance of Bishop Trevor Huddleston got a post in Tanzania working in a field hospital and later in a missionary school. He was l8 at the time. From this experience he developed a socialism which, he says, is 'more moral than Marxist.'

Oxford's primrose paths to political and social advantage did not appeal to him. He was not prominent in the usual societies, preferring to commute to London working for the UN and raising £12,000 for a jeep for SWAPO. He also managed to get a grant from Cadbury to do a six weeks fact-finding tour of the Middle East.

Here was a youth, having barely attained his majority, going around the world quizzing international politicians and journalists in an insatiable will to familiarise himself with the realities of politics.

On coming down from Oxford he joined the TUC as an administrative assistant in the economics department. But Len Murray obliged him to leave when he was re-elected Chairman of the British Youth Council because of the TUC's stuffy policy which denied employees the right to engage in political activity outside office hours.

The British Youth Council helped to hold together a group of extraordinarily disparate interests. David Aaronovitch, a BBC producer, then secretary of the National Union of Students, had frequent dealings with young Mandelson at the time. 'He was the oldest young person I had ever met,' he said. 'He was adept at committee skills quite outside his age. He did an amazing straddling act with the Youth Council, convincing communists and Girl Guides they had something in common.'

In 1980 Mandelson went on to work in the Commons as a researcher for Albert Booth, former Opposition Spokesman on Transport. Here those skills of persuasion and shrewd judgement of people were very apparent.

'He always knew the right person to go to to get what he wanted,' Booth said. 'He helped me with the Party's transport policy document and managed to get 98 per cent unanimity from the transport unions, something unheard of.'

In l982 Mandelson applied for a job on the highly cerebral Weekend World. He was rejected at the first LWT interview, considered to be too emotionally biased in favour of Palestine. 'Peter is a Socialist first and a Jew after,' a friend commented. But he was snapped up by LWT's London Programme and eventually became a producer on Weekend World with responsibility for Ireland. Admired by his bosses. he was detested by many of his researchers because of his arrogance.

Nowhere is Mandelson's unwavering committment to a political career better illustrated than in his relationship to television. Colleagues were astonished that such a brilliant mind should show not the slightest interest in film making. His reasons for enjoying the work on Weekend World are transparently those of a trainee politician rather than a trainee producer.

'I loved the immersion in policy analysis,' he said. 'Sorting out views; explaining and identifying options. It was wonderful to have the most tremendous resources; the opportunity to go into any area of policy and see anyone you liked.'

During the period when Weekend World was off the air, Charles Clarke, Kinnock's chief of staff, arranged for Mandelson to have direct experience of politics working, on the Brecon and Radnor by-election. Mandelson acted as 'minder' to a particularily nervous candidate, Richard Willey, who was defeated.

In 1985 the job of Director of Communications in the newly restructured Walworth Road headquarters was on offer, and when it came time for the interview Kinnock made it plain that he favoured Mandelson.

Now began Mandelson's spectacular career in political PR. The Labour Party, demoralised by repeated defeat and at war with its 'looney' Left, had by this time all the gruesome appeal of a family of losers addicted to domestic squabbling. But modernisation was sweeping through the Party: put in simple terms Bryan Gould supplied the new thinking and Mandelson the pictures.

Even his admirers say that Mandelson does not appear to have any strong, personal ideology. 'He is a technician,' a friend said.

Did he not feel there was a lack of substance in his remodelling of the Labour Party?

'No,' he said. 'Why then did you say some time ago: 'Substance has now caught up with style'?' 'Journalists had to find ways of explaining why we had this brilliant campaign yet we lost so badly. So people explained it presentationally. Perhaps what was wrong was the policies?'

I suggested it might not have been such a brilliant campaign since it only gained Labour three per cent more of the votes than it got in the disastrous 1983 election?

'Nearly four per cent,' Mandelson said. 'But I won't quibble.' There are those, principally on the Left, made uneasy by the glossiness and calculation of it all, who feel that Kinnock and Mandelson are far down the road towards fulfilling the prophecy contained in the old parody of the Red Flag where the Party elite goes for the foreman's job leaving the worker in the rear, engaged in unappetising obsequiousness.

Mandelson occasionally performs like a Hollywood Press Agent, notably when he is inviting you to share his emotion on first viewing Hugh Hudson's party broadcast in which the hills were alive to the sound of Glynis and Neil.

There is also uneasiness about the ruthlessness with which unwelcome voices from the floor are dealt with at the great Kinnock rallies.

'I wouldn't say it was the main feature of those rallies. It was not a thing that preoccupied me terribly at the time,' Mandelson said coolly.

The response to all this criticism is a reminder that in l986, after the SDP triumph at the Greenwich by-election, the polls were showing Labour sinking to third place. 'Heading for volcanic extinction,' said Pat Hewitt, Kinnock's former Press Secretary and now Senior Fellow with the Policy Research Insitute.

IF THERE is little criticism of Mandelson's tactics in the inner circles of the Party, there is some scratching in the wainscotting at Walworth Road about the distribution of credit. Some see Mandelson scoffing all the credit for himself, although he is careful to refer to the contribution of those about him when talking to journalists.

The idea of setting up a Shadow Communications Group, made up principally of hotshot media people giving their services voluntarily; of transforming the dreary old Party Political Broadcast; the canonisation of Kinnock, the choice of the Rose symbol have somehow come to be credited to Mandelson.

But there are those anxious to point out that in l983 Pat Hewitt, Bob Wooster, Chairman of MORI, and Chris Powell, an advertising executive, had already set up a communications group know as 'the breakfast group'. It was they who first transformed the party broadcasts by getting John Gau, a BBC current affairs producer to make a PPB modelled on the BBC's Nationwide magazine programme. This was also the first Kinnock personality piece. They even used the Brahms which now ushers Kinnock into his ecstatic rallies. (This was the music Kinnock was playing in his car when he escaped death in the M4 accident in l983.)

Indeed they say Mandelson was essentially hired to carry out some of this group's strategies. 'Mandelson is the tip of a communications operation,' Pat Hewitt declared. 'The iceberg needs Peter, but Peter needs the iceberg.'

ANOTHER uneasiness is that an unelected officer should have Mandelson's influence on the Leader. That complaint will be out of date when Mandelson heads for Parliament.

'He will make his constituents famous,' Pat Hewitt said, referring to Mandelson's gift for publicity. 'By and large it will be good for the voters,' she added sweetly.

'I think I have always been more churned up and more stimulated by individual cases,' Peter Mandelson ruminated in his Walworth Road office. 'I'd much rather deal with a case; a person, a family ..'

This rehearsal for an encounter with a constituency selection committee seemed like a good moment to put a direct question. 'Do you want to become an MP at the next election?' I asked. (Mandelson is believed already to have made soundings in safe seats at Hartlepool and Stoke-on-Trent).

There is a comical contradiction in the man seeking public office who behaves as if he must go about it secretively; yet most politicans must go through this charade in a country where ambition can be made to seem disgraceful. It takes time for even the most sophisticated to settle on a becoming posture; Mandelson, in his new role of apprentice politican, wriggled through the classic stages of evasion, followed by humble acquiescence to Fate.

'My primary desire,' he began guardedly, 'is to work in some capacity in the Party. I'm moored very firmly to the Labour Party.'

His critics say there was a time when he nearly slipped anchor. It was about seven years ago when he was a Lambeth councillor fighting militant Ted Knight every inch of the way.

At one stage he seriously discussed joining the SDP and is said to have even accepted an enrolment form. The recruiting officer was Roger Liddle, then SDP group leader in Lambeth Council. From his holiday inn in Italy last week, Roger Liddle, a close friend of Mandelson said: 'I cannot confirm that. I cannot comment on that story,' and went back somewhat agitated, to his pasta.

'I am not saying to you I preclude a desire to go into Parliament,' Mandelson continued. 'The reason I am being reticent is I am a bit of a fatalist; I have not followed a career path; there is no life plan which I am implementing. What happened to me were things I never knew would happen.'

'That cannot be true about Tanzania,' I pointed out. 'You told me earlier that you were so determined to get to Tanzania you wrote 50 letters to every influential person connected with Tanzania you could think of, including the President, and then contacted Bishop Huddleston after you saw him speak about Tanzania on television.'

Mandelson's eyes became expressionless.

'To be a Member of Parliament is for me the pinnacle of public service.' he continued after a moment.' 'I think we gain points with the electorate over the Conservatives who come across as a bunch of poodles swaying with every turn that their leader takes.'