Few voters had heard of Baroness Vadera until the low profile government minister yesterday repeated Norman Lamont's 1991 gaffe of claiming to spot green shoots of economic recovery, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – thousands of job losses the very day she was interviewed by ITV.

It's difficult to believe that Vadera was unaware of the huge embarrassment Lamont's comments caused John Major's government at the height of the last recession. Yet she fell into the trap ITV's interviewer set for her. 

Listening to BBC Radio 5 Live's Drive show covering the story at great length made me think the subject didn't deserve that much attention. For I was much more irritated by business secretary Peter Mandelson's total failure to answer two key questions in his interview with Radio 4's Today programme earlier the same day.

Interviewer Sarah Montague asked Mandelson why the government couldn't just tell partly state-owned banks like RBS to lend more to hard pressed small businesses, rather than spend yet more taxpayers' money on a loan scheme. Mandelson ploughed on with his own lengthy monologue rather than offer an answer. Montague was equally ineffective in allowing the minister to duck her query of his claim that each taxpayer will be £270 a year better off because of the Government's one year cut in the VAT rate. It's difficult to imagine John Humphrys allowing a politician to get away with that old trick. But as a voter, my view of slippery Mandelson slipped further.

PS: don't get the idea I felt sorry for Vadera as she was humiliated. This, after all, was the woman who pushed through the disastrous part privatisation of the London Underground.