Robert Harris, a long-standing friend of the disgraced former minister Peter Mandelson, has given an interview in which he defends Mandelson, saying that the way in which he was forced out of office was "a fundamental miscarriage of justice", likening the episode to the infamous "trial" of French captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was convicted on the basis of a scrap of paper, retrieved from the wastebasket by a cleaning woman.

Ron Davies, who resigned as Welsh secretary after "a moment of madness" on Clapham Common, said that Mandelson was guilty of no more than a "moment of ebullience".