The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, published in July 2010, is the memoir of Peter Mandelson

Peter Mandelson

Peter Benjamin Mandelson, Baron Mandelson, PC is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Hartlepool from 1992 to 2004, served in a number of Cabinet positions under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and was a European Commissioner...

, former senior government minister and confidant in the New Labour governments of both Tony Blair

Premiership of Tony Blair

The Premiership of Tony Blair began on 2 May 1997 and ended on 27 June 2007. While serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Blair concurrently served as the First Lord of the Treasury, the Minister for the Civil Service, the Leader of the Labour Party , and a Member of Parliament for the...

 (1997-2007) and Gordon Brown

Premiership of Gordon Brown

The Premiership of Gordon Brown began on 27 June 2007, when Brown accepted the Queen's invitation to form a government, replacing Tony Blair as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and ended with his resignation as Prime Minister on 11 May 2010...

 (2007-10).

It was reported that Tony Blair

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...

 was "livid" by some of the disclosures and in particular the claim in the book that he (Tony Blair) once called Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown

James Gordon Brown is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007...

 "mad, bad and dangerous".

In the week prior to publication extracts were serialised in The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

.