Chris Mason: Mandelson saga is a messy palaver - and the questions continue to swirl

Mandelson saga is a messy palaver - and the questions continue to swirl7 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleChris MasonPolitical EditorCarl Court/PA WirePlenty in Westminster knew the Lord Mandelson saga was going to cause the prime minister more grief.But no one, outside a very select few in the bowels of government, we now know, could have predicted this.The expectation was No 10's next appointment with Mandelson related anguish would be the next deluge of documents Parliament has demanded and which are expected to be published soon.They are still to come, but it was the collection and processing of the bits of paper associated with that exercise that has prompted this extraordinary 24 hours.As the Cabinet Office pulled together this information, the Guardian revealed that a row broke out internally about whether this crucial detail about Lord Mandelson's vetting should be included in the cache.In other words, there was the prospect it might not be, and not long later it did then see the light of day via the newspaper's investigations team.What has followed might be best described as a messy, noisy palaver.A prime minister not noted for hyperbolic or emotive language in public has unleashed a volley of vitriol - a chain of events "staggering," "shocking," "unforgivable," he claims.And yet a friend of Sir Olly Robbins, the defenestrated lead civil servant in the Foreign Office, said the soon to be former mandarin was being unfairly traduced.Prof Ciaran Martin, who has worked in government himself and so is schooled in the protocols of Whitehall, told The World at One on Radio 4 that Sir Olly was a stickler for exactly those precedents and was right not to tell Sir Keir Starmer, given how inevitably prying and personal the vetting process is.And yet privately from many others there is a sense that the current public accounts of what happened are literally incredible.Why was the prime minister so apparently lack...