These are words I never thought I’d write, but I felt a pang of sympathy for Peter Mandelson when it was confirmed this week that he is under investigation, and could face a £300 fine, after he was caught on camera relieving himself against a wall in a London street.

God knows, I’m no fan of the man we all used to refer to, when I was a political correspondent at Westminster, as the ‘Prince of Darkness’.

Indeed, I reckon that as one of the architects of New Labour – Dr Frankenstein to his monster, Tony Blair – his Lordship bears a heavy responsibility for the damage wrought to our country when his party took a wrecking-ball to the constitution, politicised the civil service and the judiciary and threw open our borders to all comers.

Nor do I have anything but contempt for the many young men who make a habit of treating our streets as public conveniences after pub closing time, when they’ve drunk a pint or eight too many.

Horrified

But where an urgent and unpredictable call of nature is concerned, I feel that we seventysomething chaps with unreliable waterworks have a duty to speak up for each other.

Mind you, if I’m to judge by Mrs U’s expression of horrified disgust when I told her what I was planning to write this week, I suspect many women feel considerably less understanding than I do.

But then women – by whom I mean people who were born female (you can’t be too careful what you say, these days, when a word out of place can get you cancelled) – are not burdened with that irritating design fault in the anatomy of the human male, the prostate gland.

Now, I can’t claim to know anything about the dimensions of Lord Mandelson’s prostate, and nor do I wish to. But if my guess is right, his, like those of a great many men of our age (he turned 72 in October, which makes him almost exactly one month my senior) is somewhat enlarged.

I write with some knowledge of the condition, since I suffer from it myself. It means not only that I often have to get up in the night to relieve myself, but that I sometimes hear the call of nature when I least expect it, within as little as half an hour of the last one.

It’s all very humiliating for a bloke like me, who used to pride himself on having a cast-iron bladder that could handle almost any quantity of booze for hours on end, without any need for a visit to the gents.

Which brings me back to Lord Mandelson, and his unfortunate experience at shortly before 11pm the other night, after he had spent the evening at the Notting Hill home of George Osborne, the former Conservative Chancellor.

Offering his ‘profuse apologies’, he said: ‘I was stood up by two Uber drivers and kept waiting in the street for half an hour and was bursting. There is no disguising my embarrassment.’

Strictly speaking, yes, he appears to be guilty of the offence of ‘disorderly behaviour’ under the Public Order Act, 1986, while others say he could be stung with a fixed penalty notice under the Environment Protection Act.

And yes, again, of course he should have made use of Mr Osborne’s facilities before he left the house (though for all we know, he did) – or at least he should have found somewhere more discreet for his business, if the urge didn’t come upon him too suddenly as he waited for his cab.

But then just you try finding a public convenience at short notice in London these days – particularly one that’s open until 11pm.

Compassion

I notice, by the way, that our local one is now up for sale to a private buyer, after the council closed it years ago – though heaven knows who would wish to buy a Victorian underground loo.

One possibility, I suppose, is that one of the big coffee shop chains may be interested, since these never seem to think they have quite enough branches.

I can’t help thinking this would be appropriate, since most of them purvey much the same liquid as has flowed in that building since Victoria’s day.

But where was I? Ah, yes, taking all these mitigating factors into consideration, together with the culprit’s extreme mortification and the fact that it was dark, aren’t there powerful grounds for compassion in Lord Mandelson’s case? Or are the people at Kensington and Chelsea council, on whose patch the offence was committed, too stony-hearted to extend mercy to a victim of one of the many humiliations of ageing?

Speaking for myself, I curse the day years ago when Mrs U instructed builders to demolish our downstairs loo, so that she could expand her empire of the kitchen.

It means that I constantly have to trudge up and down the stairs, which itself becomes more of an effort with every passing year.

It’s the same with my increasing struggle to get in and out of the car, which has all but killed off my love affair with the low-slung Mercedes I bought myself to celebrate my semi-retirement seven years ago next week.

At this rate, it won’t be long before I’ll need a winch to accomplish the feat.

But worse even than these physical humiliations, I find, are the mental kind. I’m thinking of my increasing forgetfulness, and my need to consult Google countless times a day, when I’m groping for a name or a fact that was once firmly imprinted on my memory.

Distorting

Meanwhile, I find myself ever more irritated by the smallest things, which in the past would hardly have bothered me at all: English people who pronounce ‘contribute’ in the American way, with the stress on the CONT instead of the TRIB; those utterly unfunny, endlessly repeated sketches on The Chase, plugging the show’s sponsors, Gala Bingo (fellow addicts of The Chase will understand me when I say that every time I hear the words ‘seventy-nine, one more time’, I want to scream).

As for Clive Myrie’s insufferably smug advertisement for BBC News (‘the fight for truth is on’) it makes me feel like hurling crockery at the telly whenever it appears. God knows how Auntie has the gall to keep showing it, after Panorama was caught outrageously distorting Donald Trump’s speech before the Capitol riot in 2021.

Then there’s the way BBC bigwigs keep referring to ‘Our BBC’, a trick they’ve picked up from the infuriating way politicians always speak of ‘Our NHS’.

Well, Mr Myrie and Co may regard the Corporation as theirs. But I can tell them it doesn’t feel much like mine – and I suspect the same goes for millions of others who are forced to finance their fat salaries and biased preaching, whether they tune into the BBC or not.

But I’m rambling again, and this increasingly grumpy old man must stop now.

Nature calls.