In the smoke-filled working men's clubs, they are using tabloid photos of Mandy in target practice for their dart-throwing. The regulars trade jokes about Reinaldo, shirt-lifters and men in tights. They can't hide their delight in Peter Mandelson's fall, for he came to represent everything they loathed about the newfangled Labour Party, with its posh accents and la-di-da airs and obvious embarrassment at its cloth-capped core voters.

With their nemesis gone, the men hope that their party will stop being the salon of the moneyed, camp elite and revert to being the lounge for folk like them.

Mandelson's rise had outraged the men; his continued success threatened to blow the covers off a cultural war that pitted them against the party's top brass.

This cultural divide predates the internecine rift between new and old Labour that eventually saw new Labour triumph. As early as 1989, the New Statesman's own John Lloyd had warned, in a Chatto CounterBlast pamphlet, that if Labour endorsed an agenda of "extreme social liberalism", it would alienate the rank and file. Neil Kinnock, he wrote, should beware "the very great salience given to sexual rights, to anti-racism and at least to an implicit critique of much routine working-class and middle-class behaviour". The bohemian morals that might play well in Hampstead would not go down well in Hartlepool.

Those were the wilderness years, however, when even the most socially conservative party members were prepared to paper over the cracks of the cultural divide. The goal was to get in; if this meant extending the so-called tent to include feminists, gays and a host of Hampstead liberals who you wouldn't find dead in a working men's club, so be it. There would be plenty of time, once in power, to set things straight.

It hasn't quite turned out that way. Tony Blair's lot have shown the morals if not of an alley cat, then certainly of the luvvy pack - those West End weirdos who always clung to the party's coat-tails.

New Labour will not allow 16-year-olds to buy a packet of fags, yet will let them have gay sex. It pays lip-service to the importance of the family, but removes the marriage tax allowance. It castrates the unions, yet its leaders pant after big business and roll on their backs for the fat cats.

This is an agenda set to upset the rank and file, who view gays, cohabitation and filthy lucre with equal suspicion. Their view of the world remains essentially a nonconformist one, with the same strong puritanical streak that was obvious at the birth of the Labour Party.

It is a view at loggerheads with the live-and-let-live hedonism that Mandelson personified - with his Brazilian babe, Notting Hill mansion and celebrity chums.

Meanwhile the farmers, the one constituency that felt at home in the working men's club - indeed, some clubs in the more rural areas are playing host to Countryside Alliance meetings - have been roundly abused by new Labour. Soil toilers, like miners, are just the kind of overworked, underpaid victims of the system who would once have earned Labour's sympathies; but to a party that promoted the effete, metropolitan Mandelson, a farmer smells of manure, not roses.

The cloth-capped working-class man in Preston may not share the views of the blue-rinsed Tory lady in Tunbridge Wells, but both find plenty to outrage them in the priorities of Mandy-style politics. Labour can afford to let the ladies stew - indeed, when their champion Ann Widdecombe screeches, it makes for an own goal.

But with an election drawing closer, Labour can less easily afford to maintain a distance between itself and its core voters.

In between the dart-throwing, the regulars at the working men's clubs must be hoping that Mandy's fall will restore their party to them.