TONY Blair and Peter Mandelson were on a “vainglorious quest to satisfy their own egos” during the rise of New Labour, outgoing Liverpool Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle said last night.

He said he first realised Tony Blair – the man he helped rise to the leadership of the Labour party – would use politics “as a platform for his own highly-personal ambitions” when he “lied to him” over Mr Mandelson’s involvement in the leadership race campaign.

The revelation came in an interview to mark the launch of the Daily Post’s online literary festival, in the week his book, Labour Pains: How The Party I Love Lost Its Soul, is published.

Mr Kilfoyle said he was dismayed to see the “demographic shift that was to change the very nature of the Labour Party and give us “the corruption that was New Labour”.

He described how his first impressions of Mr Blair were that he was “a presentable and photogenic blank sheet, with one soundbite to his name – ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.”

He said: “Mistakenly, I believed he could be moulded.”

Mr Kilfoyle called Mr Mandelson “a dread” and “full of froth and bubble”, a figure who would be a key driver of the transition towards “substituting presentation for substance”.

Reminded of his own key role in helping Mr Blair into the leadership following the death of John Smith in 1994, Mr Kilfoyle said with a smile: “We all make mistakes and regret those mistakes.”

He added: “I thought I understood better than I did not only what he [Mr Blair] was about, but what could be achieved, even when he was erring in the years between his election as leader to the actual election.

“If you can put enough pressure on you can nudge this thing we call the Labour party in the right direction, but it was not to be.”

He said the first wrench in his relationship with Mr Blair came “the first time he lied to me over Peter Mandelson”.