Deputy dogged

Alumni to be proud of nos 129 and 130 suggest that not so much has changed in British politics as we'd like to think. Three-quarters of a century ago, cartoonist David Low portrayed Lloyd George's coalition government as a double-headed horse, condemned by its duality to wander round in circles.

Today's double act of John Prescott and Peter "crab in a bottle" Mandelson turns out to have a university in common. Mandelson, as befits a scion of the Old Labour aristocracy, read politics, philosophy and economics at St Catherine's College, Oxford, while Prescott's Seamen's Union activities took him to Ruskin College. He followed with an economics degree at Hull University. As Labour's deputy leader he follows both another Hull alumnus, Roy Hattersley, and Mandelson's grandfather Herbert Morrison as winner of one Britain's less enticing runners-up prizes...