A man more spun against than spinning? Peter Mandelson came to the North in October 1999 with a formidable reputation as a media manipulator and master of the black arts of political persuasion.
But in dress and manner he proved to be quite conventional. Where his predecessor, Dr Mo Mowlam, had grated on unionist leaders but delighted the common folk with her touchy-feely, woman-of-the-people approach, Mr Mandelson's accent and style were rather closer to the grandee Sir Patrick Mayhew.
His appointment was foreshadowed by David Trimble at a press briefing the previous June. Thus, he was supposed to be the unionists' man. There was certainly a pragmatic reason for putting in someone more acceptable to Glengall Street, given the poor state of relations between Dr Mowlam and the UUP.
Mr Mandelson's job was to sweet-talk, cajole and persuade the unionists to accept the implementation of an agreement they had reluctantly signed on Good Friday but never learnt to love.
His finest hour, perhaps, was his performance when, a mere month after he took office, the UUP dithered and balked and seemed about to flee in terror from the package agreed between the parties in the Mitchell Review.
Mr Mandelson was seen on local television, ostensibly in an unguarded moment, making the point that if republicans failed to live up to the commitments they had made in the review, then the unionists could simply walk away. When it seemed as if a recalcitrant majority in the party was calling the shots, Mr Mandelson moved in and saved the day.
There was a greater challenge to come. The unionists agreed to form an Executive including Sinn Fein but with post-dated letters of resignation which would come into effect if the IRA failed to move on decommissioning. Although necessary to save Mr Trimble's leadership, the caveat caught most by surprise and created an enormous headache for the two governments.
Mr Mandelson's first priority was to save Mr Trimble because there was no other unionist leader on the horizon who could be relied on to implement the Good Friday pact. He got little support from republicans who cared little for Mr Trimble's fate and, besides, were having great difficulty with the concept that anything at all should be done about weapons other than leaving them in the ground.
Mr Mandelson was in a difficult situation. Republicans were never going to do him any favours but it was unfortunate that he failed to form a united front with Dublin so that any action would be taken on a joint basis, rather than unilaterally by himself and the British government. Caught between republican intransigence and unionist threats, he and Tony Blair decided to suspend the institutions at the 11th hour and shortly before Mr Trimble was due to face another, and possibly terminal, meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council.
Naturally, Mr Mandelson incurred the odium of republicans and nationalists, although his supporters continued to argue that there was no alternative. There were now persistent reports of a bad relationship between himself and Sinn Fein, and right to the end it was impossible to find a republican with a good word to say about him. While he may have been seen as a friend of the unionists, there was little evidence of any unionist ideology in his pronouncements. He had inherited the unhelpful "Washington Three" policy as a legacy from the Tories, requiring partial IRA decommissioning in advance of Sinn Fein participation in the political process.
However, in a series of statements and comments over a period of weeks, he quietly and almost imperceptibly shifted the British government's ground until the question of weapons became far more pragmatic. By this stage, however, it appeared that the republicans were taking a leaf out of the unionist book by making Mr Blair the focus of their aspirations. The UUP had taken a similar approach in Dr Mowlam's time.
Not everyone in the SDLP was a great admirer either and at least one senior figure at Stormont freely expressed his annoyance and frustration with the Northern Secretary at regular intervals. There was tension between Mr Mandelson and the main nationalist party on the policing issue: his apparent attempt to put pressure on the SLDP in recent weeks was not appreciated.
Dublin sources said they treated Mr Mandelson with kid gloves. He was touchy and sensitive and needed careful handling. Despite his reputation as a master of the media universe, he could be surprisingly thin-skinned about news coverage.
There is a view that a Northern Secretary who is widely popular cannot be doing his or her job and, by that criterion, Mr Mandelson was an unqualified success.
The minimum one could say at the end of his tenure was that the ceasefires remained in place, the Executive was functioning more or less and hope still remained that the agreement would still be fully implemented.
Not a stunning success but not a disaster either and he might well have gone on to become Foreign Secretary. But a day is a long time in politics.