Ministers braced as Mandelson document release will expose government working

Ministers braced as Mandelson document release will expose government workingJust nowShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleChris Mason,Political editorandHenry Zeffman,Chief political correspondentPA MediaThe appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK's ambassador to Washington is like a bad news boomerang for the government.Over and over again the prime minister's most consequential judgement in office circles back into ministers' airspace – and today it will do with gusto.It will be "another one of those weeks" one senior figure said, wearily.The scale of what is to come will be quite something: the largest government publication ever put before the Commons, and therefore us, other than the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War – and that was a 12 volume, 2.6 million word affair.It won't be on that scale, but it will run to over 1,000 pages. The first tranche, back in March, amounted to 147 pages. Printed and bound, the publication will be made up of three volumes. More than 160 of the pages are made up of Lord Mandelson's text messages and WhatsApps.The bundle will include a substantial explanation from the government of how much effort it took for officials to collate all the information parliament required the government to release, describing it as thousands of hours of work from officials.In big picture terms, the documents will offer a fascinating internal insight, at scale, into how government works: the private interactions, information flows and disagreements.Those with an understanding of how the embassy in Washington works describe it as being almost like a government department itself in size – and, crucially, with connections to so many aspects of the Whitehall government machine, given the importance of the UK-US relationship. This is particularly true on military and intelligence matters, much of which will likely be redacted from this document drop on national security grounds.But what could it tell us about arguments rela...