Plenty 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.
