The role of a Member of Parliament has many parts to it.

In Westminster, MPs are asked to attend many events and to sit on various committees, as well as managing correspondence and meetings on legislation.

This is largely why the House of Commons Chamber is rarely full.

One of the most unusual Parliamentary committees is the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC), of which I have been a member for several years and deputy chairman since the last general election.

The ISC consists of nine members drawn from both Houses of Parliament and from different political parties and, unlike most parliamentary committees which are elected, those members are appointed with the consent of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and must be security-cleared to a high level.

This is because the ISC's primary role is to oversee the activities of the intelligence agencies – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – and other parts of the broader intelligence community. For obvious reasons, the ISC meets in private and its reports are often redacted to conceal classified material.

We are engaged at the moment though in an unusual task.

Given his relationship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK's ambassador to the United States has been a matter of huge public and political interest.

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On 4 February, the House of Commons passed a motion to require the government to disclose to parliament a wide range of documents and communications relating to Lord Mandelson's appointment, to his time as ambassador, and to some aspects of his departure from that office when dismissed by the prime minister.

The motion also provided however that material which was judged to be prejudicial to national security or to international relations would be disclosed not to parliament as a whole, but only to the ISC, which would then review that material and decide whether it should be disclosed more widely, in whole or with redactions.

That is the exercise which the ISC is now undertaking, and there are hundreds of documents to review.

As you might imagine, there are many documents which a serving ambassador writes or sees making frank assessments of the policies, and the leadership, of other countries.

The potential impact on relationships with those countries of making all of that public is obvious. Balanced against that however is Parliament's determination, accepted by the government, that it should see the material in question in order to be able to hold government to account effectively on this issue of huge public interest.

The ISC's job here is to protect national security and international relations where disclosure would genuinely prejudice either, not to protect anyone from embarrassment or political trouble.

It is a challenging but vital balance to strike, and the ISC is considering each document carefully in order to achieve that. Most of them have multiple different redactions which the Government wishes to make.

As a result, this has been a time-consuming task, and has taken several weeks already, with more to do.

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It is a task which has to be undertaken in secure premises away from the parliamentary estate, so eagle-eyed constituents will have noticed that my voting record has suffered somewhat.

It is however a really important part of the scrutiny role which Members of Parliament ought to carry out in our democracy, and needs doing if parliament as a whole is to do its job properly.