McSweeney became the punch bag for everything that has gone wrong in the Labour party: it was ever harder to tell exactly when he was or wasn’t to blame. “I take full responsibility,” he says, for advising the disastrous Peter Mandelson appointment. As Mandelson’s protege, follower and third-way mimic, he tugged the party rightwards to chase votes for ever lost to Nigel Farage, when all the polls said go left, fetch back Green and Liberal Democrat supporters: the times had changed since his mentor’s hero days of 1997.