HERE'S a horrible tale. Last Friday I walked down to our parish church of St Michael's, happily contemplating the festival I was about to celebrate: the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.

All through the service I was distracted by a young woman near the back of church. She was agitated, now and then unable to control her tears. When the rest of the congregation had left, I went to where she was still sitting in the pew and she told me her sorry tale. She was being bullied at work. Colleagues were talking about her behind her back, spreading untruths, gossiping, and generally making her life a misery.

The odd thing about this is that it was by no means the first case I had met of people being bullied at work. I've been a parish priest in London for just over two years and that woman must be the fifth or sixth person to come to me in tears with a similar story. And two of the victims were men. What's it all about? Is it an evil exclusive to London? Certainly, I never came across it when I was a country parson in Yorkshire, or vicar in industrial Lancashire. All the people who complained to me that they were being bullied were well-dressed, educated, nicely spoken twenty-somethings in good office jobs. Maybe, people bully out of envy or jealousy? Perhaps workplace bullying is a new a fashion, a sort of virus or epidemic like mobile phones or wind chimes? Is it something people learn from the television soap operas?

I almost laughed at one of the blokes being bullied. He was so tall I nearly had to stand on a chair to talk to him, and he was built like a second row rugby forward. His boss - a woman - was doing the bullying! What advice can anyone offer? I was in new territory here. I said the victims should try to confront the bullies, ask precisely why they were behaving in the way they were. That policy worked in only one of the cases. All the others eventually resigned. I found the whole thing unnerving and I was sad because I couldn't seem to do much for the people concerned.

I suppose Peter Mandelson's protests since he "resigned" amount to a complaint that he was bullied into going by Alistair Campbell and the Prime Minister.

Well, Peter, if you choose friends like those two, what do you expect? What I find irritating about Mandelson is not his vaulting ambition but the banality of it. Aristotle said that a statesman should have taste; he should be at ease with himself, not lusting after worldly things; a superior, rounded human being and above the sordid scramble for perishable prizes.

Mandelson's ambitions seemed so tawdry. What did he really want? Eventually, to retire from office with a sense of pride, perhaps - after the style of Churchill, perhaps or Gladstone? No, the peak of Mandelson's aspirations seems to have been to live in a stylish house among the Notting Hill trendies, to be seen wearing suits by the approved designer and to hang around the restaurants and parties favoured by super-rich, empty-headed celebrities. I can't imagine his distinguished ancestor Herbert Morrison having time for that sort of lotus eating.

I've no time for Mandelson or for anything to do with the Blair project, but I can't help - believe me, I've tried - feeling some sympathy for him. I'm glad that Mandelson is still guarded by the two policemen who looked after him when he was Secretary for Northern Ireland. Not that I suspect either the unreal IRA or the Real IRA would bother to try to kill him. No, but he surely goes in danger of having his face scratched by his former cronies in New Labour.

l Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange

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