Reporter tried to hide loan scandal

PETER MANDELSON'S unofficial biographer claimed last night that he had decided not to publish details of the home loan that led to the former cabinet minister's resignation but they were leaked from a draft copy of the book.

Paul Routledge, a journalist with The Mirror, said he had already told his publisher to remove the story of the pounds 373,000 loan from his book.

"I feared that revealing Mandy's guilty secret would give Premier Tony Blair the perfect excuse to sack my friend Charlie Whelan, Chancellor Gordon Brown's brilliant Press Secretary," he wrote in today's Mirror. "I knew that Mandelson, who has the ear of the Prime Minister, would blame Charlie for the leak, even though it had nothing to do with him."

Mr Routledge also claimed that the former secretary of state for trade and industry, who resigned over the loan from Geoffrey Robinson, the former paymaster-general, leaked the story himself when he found out it was in the draft.

Mr Routledge, The Mirror's chief political commentator, said the story emerged after page proofs of his book, sent to him at the House of Commons, were seen by someone else before they reached him. Today's Mirror says Mr Mandelson was alerted to the story and then leaked it himself in an attempt to limit the damage.

Mr Mandelson resigned on 23 December after the disclosure in The Guardian that he borrowed the money from Mr Robinson - who resigned on the same day as paymaster-general - to go towards buying a pounds 475,000 house in west London.

Mr Routledge added: "His act of political suicide was completely pointless."

He said that someone broke open a parcel containing the 300-page book proof which was sent to him on 2 December, the day that William Hague sacked his leader in the Lords, Viscount Cranborne. The parcel was sent by Mr Routledge's publisher to Westminster that evening. But the journalist did not receive it until the next day.

"It had been wrenched open by a person or persons unknown. The heavy- duty tape was torn away and the bag ripped almost in two," he said. "From the messy state of the manuscript it was clear that someone had rifled through the text. It could have even been photocopied because the parcel had been in transit for more than 12 hours."

The person then removed details of the deal and leaked them to Mr Mandelson, Mr Routledge said. Mr Mandelson decided to launch a pre-emptive strike against the revelation to "spin" himself out of trouble, he added, but Mr Mandelson miscalculated the sense of public outrage and was forced to quit.

Mr Routledge added: "I had known about the loan for nearly a year, from a quite different source, whose name I shall never reveal."

Mr Routledge's book, Mandy - The Unauthorised Biography, will be serialised in The Mirror from Monday.

The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, denied last night that Mr Mandelson was the source of the story.