This is The Guardian.

You see Peter Mandelson

operating at the peak of his kind of Machiavellian powers.

This has some really uncomfortable material in it.

There is no doubt that we are going to be hearing about it again and again and again. It feels like the obituary for this government was already being written.

There are big gaps still in what we know and I'm sure there is a lot more still to find out.

From The Guardians today on Focus, this is the latest with me, Lucy Hoff.

Well, Archie Bland, our head of national news, we've had now a few more hours to go through

the 1500 pages of Mandelson files that dropped yesterday. Have you read them all in full?

No. It's important, though. What percentage would you say you've read? I'm going to put it at

35%. So I think

it's safe to say from what we have been able to get across. I mean, obviously there is much more

that will come out as journalists have an opportunity to read them in their fullest capacity. But

this sense that it's less a smoking gun on the appointment of Mandelson, Peter Mandelson as

US ambassador, and more just

this very excruciating peek behind the curtain on how this government operates. I think that's right.

That's partly because the Guardian's excellent reporting means that many of the smoking guns are

already in the open and indeed the morning of the publication of this tranche of documents.

We reported there is no reference to the mitigations that were supposedly made on the

Mandelson appointment in them. So some of the smoking guns, as it were, are things that are not

present as well as the things that are. So these mitigations being the fact that the security

vesting process has said, actually, this is a borderline case, there are some stuff that's been thrown up and we're going to need to put some mitigations in place to ensure that there's no risk in national security or potential conflicts of interest. It seems there's no evidence of those existing.

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