A fight between Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson? A difficult one to call, really. Like a war between Pakistan and Turkey: you kind of want both sides to suffer unimaginable losses. It happened fairly often, though, in that uniquely dysfunctional Blair government and before, when his cabal of liars and smarmers were preparing for power. Here’s Campbell on the subject: ‘He started to leave, then came back over, pushed at me, then threw a punch, then another. I grabbed his lapels to disable his arms and T.B. [Tony Blair] was by now moving in to separate us and P.M. just lunged at him, then looked back at me and shouted, “I hate this. I’m going back to London.”’

Stamp, stamp, stamp went those dainty little feet, probably clad in moccasins. The row was about whether or not Blair should wear a suit to address some young socialists, or a nice pair of cords. Mandy was for the cords, since you asked. But the truth is you cannot underestimate how deranged that administration was, the bile and the seething hatreds, the manic depressives, such as Campbell, chucking up in the toilet, Blair upstairs telling God what he ought to do about stuff, Mandelson sucking up to the rich and powerful and slithering around, the one sliver of ideology he retained from his days in the Young Communist League being that the end justified the means, even if the end had been forgotten.

He adored people with wonga and it didn’t much bother him how that wealth had been acquired

Whenever Mandelson was appointed to a government role I would tell people, either in print or anyone within earshot, such as the cleaner, that it would all end in tears. And so, ineluctably, it did. Blair’s two great friends, and two of the most important people in the country for way too long, were both fatally flawed. Campbell, once an average political correspondent, then later basically a lying thug, was utterly in thrall to The Powerful Man. First Robert Maxwell, later Tony Blair, and he defended them with an amoral and in the end futile absolutism, a little like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, who continues his belligerence even when both of his arms and legs have been chopped off.

And Mandy? In thrall to money, and the people who have lots of it. He adored people with wonga and it didn’t much bother him how that wealth had been acquired, so long as the yacht had a comfortable berth. And he has a certain history of poncing large amounts of dosh from the rich, hasn’t he? Or, at the least, simpering around them. The Hinduja brothers, Geoffrey Robinson, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the ghastly Bernie Ecclestone and then more latterly the financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Both for Campbell and Mandelson, the truth held little appeal and in Mandelson’s case anyone with large amounts of wealth was worth cultivating in the hope that there might be a bit of a, you know, trickle-down effect. And quite often there was.

I had intended this column to be about how I’m definitely right regarding some issues, but got waylaid by Mandy. Being right about Mandelson coming a cropper as a consequence of his own character is about as prescient as suggesting that Wolves might get relegated this year, and his appointment as the UK’s ambassador to Washington is surely the most gob-smackingly stupid appointment since… since… um, well I suppose, David Lammy being made foreign secretary.

So let me move on to another issue where I am confident that I will be proved right, in time. It’s this: one day soon, drag artists will be about as politically acceptable as the Black and White Minstrels are today. Right now, you cannot turn on your TV without being assailed by some hideous gurning goon in a garish dress and ludicrous make-up lampooning the female sex – the BBC, in particular, seems obsessed with drag queens. They are even invited into our schools to disseminate filth masquerading as sex education to kids.

For some reason, a reason hard to comprehend, the objections made about ‘blacking up’ do not apply to drag artists. They are, of course, two sides of the same coin, or perhaps the same side of the coin. Drag artists are not paying homage to women, they are parodying and belittling them for the purposes of humour. They dress in the manner of slappers and tarts, with short skirts and fishnets and vast, bulbous cleavages perpetually on display. Their names are usually a parody, too, of women’s names: they are rarely called Anne or Sarah, but more usually Roxanne or something similar which denotes, somehow, a comedic and perhaps repellent sexual voracity.

The Black and White Minstrels were castigated for being a cruel parody of blackness – and indeed that white make-up around the eyes and the mouth is a little weird and demeaning. But compared to the appearance of the drag queen, the Minstrels were an object lesson in respect and even reverence. With both the drag queens and the notion of ‘blacking up’, it is a case of a tranche within society which has power mocking a tranche within society which does not. That, at least, is the Marxist way of analysing it and it is certainly why nobody blacks up any more.

So why do we still tolerate the ghastly parade of blokes dressed as women? I suppose it has something to do with the – now mercifully declining – growth of the transgender movement: grotesque they may be, but drag queens still look slightly more like real women than some of the trans women you’re likely to bump into. Or is it that a hefty proportion of drag queens are ‘gay’ and one mustn’t diss homosexual culture?

Of course, I could be wrong and in the sunlit upland which is the future, black people will no longer worry about a few sad old whiteys wearing boot polish and singing ‘Mammy’, and women will continue to tolerate hideous parodies of themselves. But that, I think, is probably a stretch too far.