The words “general reputational risk”, peppered throughout the Cabinet Office’s brief summary of Mandelson’s inglorious career to date, are mandarin-speak for “don’t say we didn’t warn you”. Though the publicly available facts – chiefly but not only about his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – were bad enough, civil servants were signalling that they couldn’t rule out worse to come. That their verdict isn’t more emphatic may surprise some, but it reflects unelected officials working as they are designed to in a democracy: not blocking a potentially bad decision so much as listing all the ways it might go wrong, before leaving the final call to elected politicians.