Peter Mandelson: Mandy Meets His Maker

A rather waspish interview with Peter Mandelson in the Daily Telegraph by Matthew Norman today.
Norman comes out about having coined Mandelson's nickname "Mandy".
I've always found it interesting how this name gained such currency - even though it always seemed far from neutral.
It's the kind of mocking moniker a gay man might give another, but context is all and seeing it taken up so enthusiastically by the press had a faint whiff of homophobia.
Matthew Norman recalls; "With the Wildean wit of the four-year-old in the playground, I gave him the nickname that drove him berserk. But you didn’t genuinely think it was homophobic, did you? “No. Well, perhaps I did then,” – he railed to my then editor about the “agony” for a gay man of being called Mandy – “although I don’t think that now. But you were vile to me.”"
One is thus led to presume that the pun in the opening paragraph about Peter and a certain Soho restaurant frequented by leading Labourites was intentional; "I haven’t been here for 25 years,” he murmurs on entering the Gay Hussar in Soho. “It feels like coming home.”
'It isn’t just this wonderful old Hungarian restaurant’s name that makes it such a perfect venue for our lunch, though that helps. “We won’t go there, I think,” he murmurs when I raise the image of the high camp cavalryman riding to Gordon Brown’s rescue with that surreal Cabinet return in 2008. “Let’s give all the gay stuff a wide berth, shall we?”
Norman also manages to slip in references and/or comparisons to Lord Byron, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, Captain Jack, Pet Shop Boys and Graham Norton.
And after giving Peter Mandelson such a titillating entrance, Matthew Norman makes sure there's a grand finale.
“It’s not the end of my world,” says the Gloria Gaynor of British politics laconically, as his taxi draws to its halt. “I will survive.”