PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address - 3 June 2026 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Government’s response to the House’s humble Address of 4 February 2026.

On 4 February I came before the House to debate the Humble Address motion. I said at the time that it was in the national interest to be transparent and to act as quickly as we could, and with the second publication of documents earlier this week on Monday, the Government have done so. Today’s debate is a further opportunity for Members to put questions and, indeed, debate the content of the documents. My right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, who is alongside me on the Front Bench, will listen to the debate and close it in due course.

As we debate these issues today, we should ensure that we keep Jeffrey Epstein’s victims at the forefront of our minds. What Epstein did was abhorrent and unforgivable. He was a vile, evil paedophile, and I denounce him and his actions as strongly today as I did on 4 February when I came to the Dispatch Box.

The Prime Minister has taken responsibility for appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States. He has said that if he knew then what he knows now, he would never have appointed him, and he has apologised.

I think it is worth setting out the process that was followed in order to publish such a large volume of material on Monday.

As the right hon. Gentleman is going to talk about process, I would be very grateful if he could clear up one matter. I have a high regard for the right hon. Gentleman’s integrity, and so I hope he will not dance around this subject, as has been done by others in the past.

In the first tranche of documents there were a number of notes sent by private secretaries to the Prime Minister. If I were allowed to use a prop, I would open the documents to pages 3 and 8, where Members would see notes discussing the situation as regards how to appoint the ambassador, Peter Mandelson and so forth. Under those notes are big boxes headed “Prime Minister Comments”. The normal course of action when a Prime Minister receives a document of that sort is that he notes down his response to it. These boxes are totally blank. My simple question to the right hon. Gentleman is this: are they blank because the Prime Minister made no notes whatsoever or because any notes that the Prime Minister made have been redacted and removed? The Intelligence and Security Committee deals routinely with even more sensitive material, and every time there is a redaction in a publication, there are three asterisks to show that the redaction has taken place. Have there been redactions of the Prime Minister’s notes on these memorandums that were sent to him for decision?

The answer is that they are blank now because they were blank then. The formal decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as the ambassador was conveyed by the Prime Minister’s then principal private secretary in a letter to the Foreign Office. I know that the right hon. Gentleman is referring to the empty box notes, and the reason that they are empty is that there was nothing to redact. I hope that is a sufficiently clear answer.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, because I want to ask about the process of the appointment, rather than the process of the release of the papers, which I think he is about to move on to.

I have previously spoken in this House about the process in the future, and I think the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), has made not-dissimilar comments. Whether we have a future Conservative Government—hopefully—or another Government, we should have pre-appointment scrutiny of senior posts, both ambassadorial appointments and, I would argue, permanent secretaries of Departments. That would be a safer way of doing things.

On senior appointments to the ISC—there are lots of current ISC members present in the Chamber, as well as former members such as myself—the Paymaster General will know that the appointment is made by the Prime Minister, but the double-lock mechanism ensures that the House has a say and can veto appointments if necessary. I am not necessarily asking for that mechanism, but certainly the relevant Select Committee should carry out pre-scrutiny for senior appointments of ambassadors and other senior officials, whether they are political appointees or not. I think that would help the whole House, whatever our politics.

I am not hiding from the fact that we have to make changes to the appointments process. Indeed, the Government have changed the process for all direct ministerial appointments to make sure that due diligence and national security vetting have to take place prior to appointment. It is absolutely right that that change was made.

Let me turn to the process. The process that was followed was obviously a significant one in order to publish such a large volume of material. When I was at the Dispatch Box on 4 February, I committed to publishing material in scope of the motion—bar that which the Intelligence and Security Committee agreed would be prejudicial to national security and international relations.

At this point, I want to put on record my thanks to the Committee. Members who were in the House that day might recall that even as I was speaking in the Chamber I was making the case for the involvement of the Intelligence and Security Committee. I know that it was not a small undertaking for the Committee. A huge amount of time has been spent on this, and I am very grateful to the Committee’s members for their very careful and—it looks to me—painstaking work in going through the volume of documentation.

On 4 February, and indeed since, Members have raised a range of issues, and it is absolutely right that the Government are held to account on those. As Members will have seen from the material that was published on Monday, the Government have acted on the House’s request for transparency to an extraordinary extent.

On Monday, I asked a question to the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister about the fact that it is extraordinary that there appeared to be no WhatsApp or text messages from the Prime Minister—that was the information available to us at the time. We now know that there are no text messages from the Prime Minister to Mandelson after a few days after the general election, and the WhatsApp messages have totally disappeared.

The answer I got on Monday from the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister was slightly disingenuous, I have to say. He said that Prime Ministers do not operate in this way. Rather like Mr Gladstone, they sit at the Cabinet table and men in frock coats bring them papers. It is complete rubbish. We know that the Prime Minister must have been using WhatsApp all the time. To use disappearing WhatsApp messages is contrary to what the covid inquiry suggested, and it is quite contrary to transparency.

I say to the Paymaster General that these scandals are made much worse by any hint of a cover-up. Everybody knows that a mistake was made, and people are very forgiving of the Prime Minister if he has made a mistake. What they are not forgiving of is some sort of cover-up, where numerous text messages and WhatsApp messages have suddenly vanished.

I think some Conservative Members would be quite happy to have Gladstonian principles in government.

I really do reject the point about a cover-up, and I reject it for this reason: this process was quite rightly driven by and led by officials without political interference, working with the Intelligence and Security Committee—a cross-party Committee that is very well respected across this House. Not a single redaction in those documents came about because of a ministerial decision, and that is simply because we have not played that part in the process—and neither should we have done, so I completely reject the idea of a cover-up.

On the subject of someone who might be keen on Gladstone, I will give way.

The right hon. Gentleman knows me well, and he knows of my disdain for Gladstone and my deep admiration for his rival Benjamin Disraeli, who in my judgment was the greatest ever Prime Minister by far.

The key thing about the ISC, on which I sit—I am grateful for the Minister’s comments about its work—is that the House took the view that the ISC should see the whole of the information. Whether that was the right view or whether the Humble Address was too permissive is an open question, but the House took the view that we should see all matters relating to international relations or national security.

An executive decision was taken—I do not know whether it was endorsed by Ministers; it was certainly endorsed subsequently by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister—not to make the UK Security Vetting file available to the ISC. That is not what the Humble Address says. Subsequently, that has been legitimised by the argument, which I do not buy, that it would have a chilling effect on the whole vetting process. However, the Minister—and by the way, I share the respect of my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) for him—knows that the ISC’s seeing material is not the same as disclosing it. This is about scrutiny, not disclosure, so why was an executive decision made not to make that information available to the ISC? Who made it, and when? Was it made by officials? Was it made by Ministers? Will he explain how he can square that with the remark he just made?

It was an official-led process. Let me just make that clear, because the right hon. Gentleman points towards a pretty important issue. We had the Humble Address and its wording—hon. Members can read that wording—with the quite extensive list drafted by the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart). At the end, it said:

“except papers prejudicial to UK national security or international relations which shall instead be referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee”.

What the Government have done, and indeed were entitled to do so, is take into account the precedents set by previous responses to Humble Addresses—under the Government whom the right hon. Gentleman supported, indeed. The Prime Minister has written to the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee on precisely that point.

There were a number of Humble Addresses during the 2017-19 Parliament when I was in opposition. I would not say that they were a constitutional innovation, because they have quite an ancient origin, but I personally played some part in their re-emergence. It is obviously the case that, as those Humble Addresses have been replied to—now by a number of parties in government—principles have been used in approaching them which come from things such as the Freedom of Information Act, the duty of Ministers under the ministerial code, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the general data protection regulation. Those are based on precedents for responses to Humble Addresses.

The Minister is being incredibly generous with his time. As an aside, I think many hon. Members in this place—those on the Conservative Benches at least—would like to go back to the 19th century.

It is clear that officials have done a huge amount of work with regard to this process. Will the Minister say a little bit about the independent King’s Counsel, and what assurances it has provided that the Government are complying with the Humble Address?

That was another important part of what was done, and the House should also take reassurance from that. I made the point about precedents to the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), and the Government also sought to take that independent legal advice on their interpretation of complying with the Humble Address.

I will take an intervention from the right hon. Gentleman, but then I need to make a bit more progress.

I want to clear up the point about precedents. It may be that I am wrong about this, but I do not think there is any precedent for the House deciding that the Intelligence and Security Committee specifically should look at material that was to be redacted before it went to the public. The Intelligence and Security Committee, as the Minister well knows, was founded in 1994. Since that time, there has never been even one leak from the Committee. So there is no comparison between making things available to the Intelligence and Security Committee—the only parliamentary body entitled to see highly classified material, and one which never leaks—and to any other body. While he says, “This is all led by officials. It is okay for the officials to see it, but not to release it to anyone else,” the reason the ISC was chosen for the motion is that it is within the ring of secrecy, and that is unaffected by any precedents regarding bodies that do not have that special status.

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. It is just that if he looks at the wording of the Humble Address, he will see that it lists a series of classes of documents, and then it says, “except papers”—those that were referred to the ISC. That is our compliance with the motion.

Let me turn back to the process, which, as I said, was undertaken by officials. They sought returns from all Government Departments, including material, as has been referred to, on non-corporate communication channels. There were multiple rounds of discovery to ensure that searches returned material relevant to the full scope of the motion. Some documents were assessed as likely prejudicial to national security or international relations—the point I was just making—and, as I committed to the House in February, they were then referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee.

Due to the wide scope of the motion and the significant volume of material that needed to be located and reviewed, the first publication, on 11 March, was focused on the parts of the motion that were of most urgent interest to the House: Peter Mandelson’s appointment, his withdrawal and the severance. The second tranche, which was published on Monday, contains material relevant to the parts of the motion that cover communications and documents concerning Peter Mandelson’s appointment and vetting, and messages between Peter Mandelson and Ministers, special advisers and senior civil servants in the months prior to and throughout his tenure as ambassador. All documents held by the Government have now been disclosed, save those that are being withheld on the request of the Metropolitan police.

On the point of communication between Peter Mandelson and Ministers, the fact remains that the more documents that are released, the more questions emerge about Peter Mandelson’s reach across Government. Will the Minister tell the House whether Lord Mandelson had any discussions whatsoever with Ministers, officials or advisers about Palantir? Will further documentation with regards to that be released?

On Palantir, I refer my hon. Friend to the methodology statement at the start of each of the three volumes, where it is made absolutely clear that there is a recognition that Palantir is a matter of interest to the House; indeed, there are references to Palantir within the documents. As I am sure the House will understand, I will not speculate on the contents of the documents that remain with the Metropolitan police, but certainly I invite everyone to look at the references to Palantir in the tranche of documents before the House—indeed, the public can do so as well.

I am interested in the mitigations, which are the reason we have this great gap between what would seem to be a security threat and Peter Mandelson being appointed. I cannot find any documents about that, but I have found that in written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2025—after the appointment, and when it was about to be withdrawn—Ian Collard said that he had requested a copy of the vetting summary. He made some notes based on the summary as an aide-mémoire, in case it was needed, and submitted them for the Humble Address. I am interested in seeing what the notes are of the mitigations: the man responsible for the mitigations took a note—presumably of what he had seen—and put it in for the Humble Address, yet it is not in the papers.

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Officials leading the process will have heard the exchange—and this exchange—in relation to that specific point about Ian Collard. As the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister set out in his statement on Monday, the documents with the Metropolitan police fall into several categories: internal correspondence relating to Peter Mandelson, and documents in relation to conflict of interest and national security vetting. I appreciate the point that my right hon. Friend makes and officials will have heard the exchange between her and me.

I want to make it clear that the document I referred to is not part of the original decision making; it is an aide-mémoire that Ian Collard made. If I cannot see the original documents, can I at least see that later one?

As ever, my right hon. Friend makes her case forcefully. I am treading carefully in my language because this process has been led by officials working with the ISC. The officials working on it will have heard the request that she just made.

I will take up the point that the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) raised about mitigation later in the debate—should I catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, which is not a given. Will the Minister address the issue of when the Metropolitan police asked for information on UK vetting? We will not know the granular detail because the executive decision based on precedent was made, although my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) has challenged the precedent. However, there was an assumption that some information on vetting would be made available, perhaps in a redacted form having been considered first by the ISC—I will say no more than that. We now hear that no information on vetting will be made available until the Metropolitan police has finished its work, when it will come back through the ISC according to the process agreed as part of the Humble Address. When did the Metropolitan police begin to take an interest in the vetting part of all this, and why?

To the right hon. Gentleman’s direct question, I have not been part of the process or been given precise dates for when the Metropolitan police said what. However, I will say this: the documents with the Metropolitan police have been viewed by the chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), so within the confines of not wishing to undermine the ongoing investigation we have tried to be as transparent as we can be with Parliament at this stage. In addition, the summary document of the vetting has been shared with the Intelligence and Security Committee, so to the extent that we have been able to share documents, we have. The request in this debate from the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury, will no doubt have been heard as well.

Let me turn to the issue of redactions, which I started to develop in earlier answers to interventions. I will not repeat what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said on Monday, nor the methodological note that is available for right hon. and hon. Members to look at, but I want to clarify some issues so that there is no doubt about the process that was followed. As I have said, no material was redacted on grounds of prejudice to national security or international relations without the ISC’s approval. The redactions agreed with the ISC are all triple-asterisked throughout the publication. When you see the three asterisks, that material was agreed with the ISC to be redacted.

On my point about precedent in the earlier exchange with the right hon. Member for New Forest East, the redactions were limited to the names of junior officials, contact details such as telephone numbers and email addresses, the personal or commercially sensitive data of third parties not relevant to the motion, and some cases where there was legal professional privilege. That is in line with the process that has been followed by successive Administrations in relation to Humble Address motions. Those redactions are clearly labelled in the publication. To reconfirm, no Government Minister or special adviser has determined any of the redactions; that was done by the official-led process. I echo the comments made by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister on Monday in thanking the Chair of the PACAC, the hon. Member for North Dorset, who is not in his place, for reviewing our approach to the third-party redactions and the material withheld, so as not to prejudice the ongoing police investigations and to ensure that we are being transparent with Parliament, as we should be.

Let me turn to the specific point about the Metropolitan police. Everyone across the House will appreciate the need not to prejudice the investigation, and will understand that I am unable to answer questions about certain documents that have been withheld. They include questions to Peter Mandelson by the Prime Minister’s then chief of staff and Peter Mandelson’s responses. The remaining documents, as I said a moment or two ago, fall broadly into the following categories: national security vetting material, conflict of interest process material and relevant internal correspondence with Peter Mandelson. Such information will be published in due course, either at the conclusion of the investigation, or at a point, if there were one, at which publication would no longer be prejudicial to the police investigation.

On 4 February, the House made its will clear.

It may be that I am just lacking in imagination, but I do not understand why the police would not allow us to see the letter from the Foreign Office to Peter Mandelson saying, “You are given this job subject to not having anything to do with x, y and z”, or whatever the mitigations were. At the moment, we just do not have anything at all and so it is very difficult to understand why he was appointed. We are told that we need to wait for some time in the future—there is no date by which that will be disclosed—and at that stage all will become clear. It is as if the central point of the investigation and all these thousands of pages do not amount to anything until the police eventually decide to give us those crucial documents.

It is, quite rightly, for the police and not for Ministers to determine the way in which they want their investigation to proceed and to identify documents that they feel are reasonable lines of inquiry. However, to give the House reassurance, even that class of documents was viewed by the Chair of PACAC—obviously, under particular controlled circumstances —because we wanted for Parliament the level of transparency that we could provide at that stage, despite the ongoing investigation.

The Government have discharged their duty to the House in complying with the Humble Address motion, aside from that small amount of information that will be subsequently published in a final tranche. As Members will have seen, Monday’s publication complies with the spirit and the letter of the motion, as well as being one of the largest ever publications laid in this House. Members have had some time to consider the document—certainly, since Monday—and I am grateful to the Leader of the House for making further time to debate the issue today. I know that throughout the course of the debate, Members will be conscious of not prejudicing the ongoing criminal investigation. I am grateful to the House for understanding the position the Government have taken and my position on answering questions on that.

I look forward to the debate before the House. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will close and respond to points made during the debate. I commend the motion to the—

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I will, just.

I was trying not to interrupt his flow—[Interruption.] Until I did.

Throughout the files there are mentions of Palantir and Peter Mandelson, including a memo in which he tries to introduce Peter Thiel to No. 10 staff in June last year. Even though Mr Louis Mosley has written to me today suggesting that Peter Mandelson was not intervening regarding Palantir business with the Government, does the Minister agree that he still was doing so?

I reject the suggestion that there is any wrongdoing, as regards Palantir contracts being renewed—I think one was renewed by the Ministry of Defence—in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests. I reject that absolutely. On the meeting between the Prime Minister and Peter Thiel, to be clear, that did not happen.

We have set off a surge of interventions. I will give way to the hon. Lady and then the right hon. Gentleman, and that is it.

I do not expect that to happen, but of course if it did, we would consider it. I will finally give way to the right hon. Member for Islington North.

I thank the Minister for giving way; he is being very generous with his time. Is he able to confirm whether Peter Mandelson had divested himself of all his financial interests in companies, including peripheries or actuality of Palantir, while he was ambassador in Washington?

That of course strays into the conflict of interests class of documents, which is still one of the classes that is with the Metropolitan police.

I conclude by saying again that it is very important that the House has this debate today. From the debate in February to today, I have certainly taken my duties, and indeed the Government’s duties, to the House very seriously, as has my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister—I think today is his eleventh appearance in the House on this matter. He will, of course, close the debate and answer any further questions. I commend the motion to the House.

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I thank the Paymaster General for his remarks and look forward to hearing what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister has to say at the end of the debate.

As we made clear earlier in the week, we are not entirely happy with the way this has come together. However, just because, in the way that these debates take place, it is not automatic that we will get to ask Ministers questions if they decline to take interventions, I am very encouraged by how the Paymaster General has handled that, although Hansard should know that he said that nobody could follow the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn)—he shut down everyone else—and I know that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will want to follow his good lead.

I hope that the Paymaster General will accept my sympathies on the loss of his mobile phone. I mean that genuinely, and it is very unfortunate that it was stolen five days after the phone of the former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was stolen. This, I believe, is an indication of how dangerous life is in Labour-run London, and I hope those responsible for looking after the Met police are listening to this. I say that genuinely because a lot of us have friends and colleagues who have experienced the same thing and it is a serious matter.

The Paymaster General referred to his resurrection of the Humble Address as a political tool, and I hope that he is still proud of that achievement and that he does not rue it or regret it and that he is enjoying being on the other end of it. I remember this coming up in one of those Brexit years, I forget exactly which one, and I was reminded of it because he spoke about precedent and the Humble Address, and the truth is that his Humble Address breached precedent in a very serious way. It had been the case in “Erskine May” throughout the ages that Humble Addresses would not be used in order to take the opinions of Law Officers of the Crown and present them to the House. That was specifically carved out, yet his Humble Address struck right through it.

When we talk about precedent and Humble Addresses, we must be very careful and be very clear that the instruction given by the House to the Government is sacrosanct. It is more important than anything, and it is not for the Government to redefine what the House has asked them to do. It is simply the Government’s job to comply in order to treat the House with respect, but also to avoid falling into contempt. So I will say again that the idea that potentially large classes of document should be retained and kept away from the House because the Metropolitan police are using them may be desirable, but that should not be done automatically without the agreement of the House.

If the Government wish to change the terms of the motion that was presented to them, they can come back to the House and do that. A dangerous precedent is set when the Government decide they will reinterpret what the House has said, because maybe this has not been convenient for the Government, but it might be for a future Government, so we must be very careful with precedent and very careful with setting new precedent.

My hon. Friend’s point is about the relationship between this House and the Executive and, more than that, the relationship between Ministers and officials. It is time that this House asserted its authority in that respect, and the Humble Address does exactly that—it is an assertion of the House’s authority—and that Ministers use their authority, given their appointment by the Crown, to insist on what officials do and do not do. While it is right that this process has been driven at a logistical level by officials, in the end it is up to Ministers and then this House to make a judgment about what is published, where and how.

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely right: there is no higher authority than Parliament and consequently the Government should bear that in mind when delivering not just on this Humble Address but any future Humble Address.

I do not wish to go over all of the ground that we have already covered, but there are clearly some discrepancies between what has been said in public and what has appeared in the Humble Address. There may be good reasons for some of that, but some is much harder to explain.

I shall start with the information that appeared in The Guardian last week regarding the contents of the ISC’s summary document. Obviously that has not appeared in this return, as the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), and my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who sits on the ISC, have pointed out. We now have a situation in which the readership of The Guardian has been privy to the information that a document contained concerns about Mandelson’s relationships with at least four individuals: a Chinese Minister; Oleg Deripaska; a former Israeli Minister; and an unnamed man with whom Mandelson is said to have had “a relationship”. This information has come out of what, by the Government’s own definition, is a highly secure document, which we were previously told very few people had seen. I suggest that if this is so secure, first, that information should not have come out in any form and, secondly, given that it has, there really ought to be a leak inquiry because this is nationally sensitive information. I hope we can get confirmation later on from the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister that that is what is happening. [Interruption.] I hear that from across on the Treasury Bench, but it would be good to have it formally on the record later.

I turn now to the central element that has featured in all of our debates: the Prime Minister’s role and judgment in the process of the appointment of Peter Mandelson. The Opposition established after the first release of documents that the Prime Minister was shown a due diligence document in which he was told that Mandelson had maintained an unhealthy relationship with Epstein after Epstein had been sent to prison. We have often in this House rightly paid tribute to the victims and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, stating that they should always be in our thoughts, but the Prime Minister’s thoughts were not with the victims and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein after he had read that due diligence document, and I think we should put that clearly on the record.

I think it is worth just putting on the record the actual words from that due diligence note, which can be found on page 11 of the first volume. It talks about a 2019 report commissioned by JPMorgan:

“The report cited Epstein’s personal records which showed contact beginning in 2002 and continuing throughout the 2000s.

After Epstein was first convicted of procuring an underage girl in 2008, their relationship continued across 2009-2011, beginning when Lord Mandelson was business minister and continuing after the end of the Labour government. Mandelson reportedly stayed in Epstein’s House while he was in jail in June 2009.”

That is from a document which it is not in doubt the Prime Minister saw, yet he went ahead with making this appointment.

I thank my right hon. Friend for that timely spelling out of exactly what the Prime Minister read—and yet he went ahead and made the appointment anyway. I take the remarks of the Paymaster General and other Ministers totally at face value and totally sincerely, but it is clear that the Prime Minister was not thinking in that way.

On that particular point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), what is not clear, however, is the relationship between the due diligence process, particularly in relation to Epstein, and the vetting process. It is pretty hard to believe that the UK vetting process would not have taken account of what my right hon. Friend just referred to, but we will never know that because the Government have decided not to make that available for scrutiny, even to the ISC. It is surely inconceivable that that would not have been part of the vetting process.

I also find that very difficult to believe.

We have these comments about the due diligence documents, and we have these comments about Epstein. We also have the comments about Mandelson’s directorship of a Russian company that owned a defence company that supplied Putin’s war effort in Crimea, and about his business relationships in China, to name but a few things in the due diligence document. It can be no accident that on the same day that the due diligence document was given to the Prime Minister, the then Cabinet Secretary said to the Prime Minister, “If you’re going to appoint this man, get the security vetting done first. Make sure that you have done the security vetting and had his disclosure of interests before you confirm his appointment.” But the Prime Minister went ahead and did it anyway. This was an enormous, historic and really terrible error of judgment.

What we then witnessed in September 2025, when the Mandelson appointment had completely fallen apart and he had been fired, was that the civil service scrabbled to try to retrofit a justification for what had happened. Chris Wormald, the then Cabinet Secretary, did not do a bad job, but it was clearly inaccurate because we have in black and white what Simon Case had set down. We now have the due diligence document and the fact that the security vetting happened after the appointment.

We also now know, thanks to the second return, that in January 2025, Mandelson was sitting in Washington looking at “highly classified” documents—the phrase “highly classified” is used in an email from January 2025— despite not having any security vetting and despite not having special treatment and restricted access procedures, or STRAP, clearance. This is a massive error of judgment and of government. It goes right to the heart of why the Conservative party has been fighting for transparency on this issue: to expose the failings of the senior people in the Labour party at that time.

If we look at the second return, and at document 36 released on Monday, we can see that people such as Sir Olly Robbins were saying, while Chris Wormald was writing his note in September 2025, that they could not comment because they had not seen the relevant documentation. That makes one wonder who else had not seen the relevant documentation, because the relevant documentation is not in this release. Had Chris Wormald seen the relevant documentation, or was he just doing what a Cabinet Secretary in a crisis might do, which was trying to protect the Prime Minister?

What we do know, again from document 36, is that No. 10 itself signed off Chris Wormald’s note. No. 10 itself approved—and had been given an opportunity to edit—the Cabinet Secretary’s note. Again, this feels wrong. It feels as though the process was very obviously being commissioned by No. 10 and interfered with by No. 10 in order to give the answer that No. 10 wanted, rather than the truth. It was a bogus process. It was designed to get the Prime Minister off the hook, but transparency shows that he was very clearly on the hook.

Turning to the broader material, we have some things that have appeared and some things that we can deduce have been retained by the police. We have some things that we know have been destroyed and some things that may have gone missing. I hope that, during the course of this debate, we can get to the bottom of which documents may fall into which category.

In April this year, the Foreign Affairs Committee had Morgan McSweeney before it, and the Chair and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) asked him a number of questions about his messages. This was some time after the theft of his phone in October 2025. In question 970, the Chair said:

“Are any of your text messages to Peter Mandelson—or not—going to be available in the Humble Address?”

Morgan McSweeney said, “Yes.”

In question 1117, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon, fearing that the theft of the phone might mean that information had been lost, asked:

“Can we take it that your phone would have contained quite a lot of communications, either with Peter Mandelson or about Peter Mandelson’s appointment?”

Morgan McSweeney replied:

“Probably not much about his appointment that hasn’t already been available to No. 10, because when he was sacked, No. 10 did its own—I don’t want to say investigation, but its own research on what happened and why it happened and, as part of that process, I was asked to share messages and emails about the appointment and also to be interviewed”.

So we know that, in April of this year, those messages still existed, that they were not affected by the theft of McSweeney’s phone and that they must have been available to the Government, but they are not in this this tranche of releases. We must therefore conclude that this is because they have been retained by the police, so let us assume that the McSweeney emails fall into that category, unless the Minister wishes to tell us that he has received any subsequent information to say that those messages were irretrievable.

We then have the messages from the Prime Minister—or rather, we do not have any messages from the Prime Minister. It seems highly unlikely that the Prime Minister did not exchange any messages with Peter Mandelson at all, at any point. In fact, we must strongly suspect that he did, because there was a report in April in The Spectator by Tim Shipman, which quoted from some of those messages. We might think that those messages would have ended up being retained by the police, but when we look at the quotes that Tim Shipman had, they are incredibly anodyne. It is very unlikely that those messages would have been kept on grounds of national security or because they would be useful to a police investigation. Shipman says that

“there is a text message which Keir Starmer sent the night before he made the announcement. ‘You’ll be brilliant in challenging circumstances,’ he told Mandelson. ‘And after many years of our discussions, we get to work together side by side. I really look forward to that.’”

That did not age well.

The hon. Lady makes a good point. It may be because it was on a group message and somebody else had retained their phone, so he provided it. We have to assume that Morgan McSweeney’s messages have, in some part, been retained by the police. I suspect that we will not know why for some time.

In the case of the Prime Minister’s messages, however, it is hard to understand why the police or the Government would block the publication of simple messages of praise, even though they fall within the scope of the Humble Address. We really do need further reassurances from the Government about their approach to disclosure.

The hon. Gentleman gives me an opportunity to say that in the documents, those who may have had disappearing messages or who deleted their messages are listed almost as nil returns. I was one of those people who was asked for my messages and had an actual nil return. It would be good to have more transparency about those whose messages were lost and those of us who have very clearly never spoken to Peter Mandelson. The hon. Gentleman also gives me the opportunity to say that if there was a gender split of Ministers who had never had contact with Peter Mandelson, I imagine it would skew one way.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on taking the opportunity to put that on the record.

This is information that the House deserves to have. In what cases are we dealing with messages that never existed because no messages were sent, as in the hon. Lady’s case? In what cases was there auto-delete, which we know the Prime Minister had, because it was disclosed in the lobby briefing for journalists yesterday? In what cases have phones gone missing and back-ups were not done? In what cases has information been held by the police? It really ought to be possible to know that.

I know that the police and the Government are, to a certain extent, understandably being sensitive about the police investigation. However, it really ought to be possible to say to the House, “X number of messages from the Prime Minister are being held by the police, as well as Y number of emails and Z number of text messages.” There is no way that any of that could possibly interfere with any police investigation, if we know roughly what the police know. We started to move in the right direction on that on Monday, when the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister told us the categories of document that we have, but there must be other ways of giving some guidance to the House on what is being held.

We obviously have a huge amount of material that has been justifiably redacted for reasons of national security and international relations, but that does not mean that we do not have the headings. We often have email headings that say, “There was an email sent on this date from this person to that person.” We cannot see the subject, but we know that the email existed. Why can we not have the same thing for the messages that the Prime Minister sent to Peter Mandelson on this date, that date and the other date? We cannot see them, because they are part of a police investigation or subject to national security concerns. We have a discrepancy between different types of approaches to the disclosure of information.

In the context of disappearing messages, is my hon. Friend troubled by the fact that in March 2023, the Cabinet Office issued very clear guidance about the use of non-corporate communications channels by Ministers, special advisers and others? It said that disappearing messages should be used sparingly and that the use of disappearing messages does not in any way supersede the record-keeping obligations of Ministers to communicate to their private office a record of anything on their personal devices that is pertinent to the conduct of Government business.

That is entirely true. I believe that the ISC said as much in one of its responses to Government disclosure, saying it was very troubled by the fact that this guidance, which all Ministers are supposed to obey, was routinely being broken.

My right hon. Friend and I were both Ministers at the time when that guidance was brought in, and it was brought in for a very good reason. It was to reflect the fact that there are new communications channels and Ministers will want to use them—some of them are very useful for Ministers—but to make it clear that that should not get in the way of the fact that the system needs to retain a record of how decisions are made and what the decisions are. That has clearly not been done in many cases here, not least, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) pointed out, in the fact that we have a lot of empty boxes and no record of the Prime Minister assenting to the appointment of Peter Mandelson, even though we know that he did.

My hon. Friend is right that that was highlighted in the ISC’s statement on these matters, and that is an issue to which it may return. It is not for me to prejudge that, but it is a matter of considerable concern. It was raised during the period of the last Government, actually, so it is not unique to this Government. Indeed, we had issues in that regard with previous Secretaries of State and Ministers—I will say no more than that. My hon. Friend is right that it is entirely unsuitable that Ministers are using insecure means to communicate very sensitive information.

May I press my hon. Friend to challenge a little further in respect of Peter Mandelson? We understand that Mandelson’s own messages have not been disclosed. Will my hon. Friend press the Government on the point at which they became aware—prior to, during or subsequent to Mandelson’s appointment—that Mandelson was withholding information of the electronic kind to which my hon. Friend draws the House’s attention, particularly given that the Humble Address specifically deals with the issue of electronic communications?

My right hon. Friend is right. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will have heard his remarks, and I hope he will respond to them.

Further to what my right hon. Friend said, the Humble Address was in February, but it was not until March that the Government asked Peter Mandelson for his phone, and Peter Mandelson then refused. As I and other Members said on Monday, the Government should seek to go after Peter Mandelson’s exit payment if he denies co-operation with the Humble Address. It is totally unacceptable that the House should be denied this critical information. We have some information that is retained, some information that appears to have been destroyed and some information that appears to have gone missing.

I wish to turn to some remarks that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister made on Monday about his own messages, as he brought them up. I think that will be a useful case study. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said:

“I do recall having some limited exchanges with Peter Mandelson over WhatsApp, including those I have already discussed…but these conversations did not involve transacting Government business and were in line with official guidance on the use of non-corporate communications channels at the time.”—[Official Report, 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 853.]

That is all well and good, but who decided that those messages fell into that category? Did the right hon. Gentleman decide that himself? Did he show them to officials, who then decided? Did he show them to the police? Who made the decision? Again, we must ask these questions of all Ministers who were asked to disclose information. Where is it that people have self-edited? Where is it that people have had auto-deletion on their phones? Where is it that people have refused to hand things over? We deserve to know.

Something that I believe is missing throughout the three volumes we received on Monday is photos, videos, voice notes and, more significantly, attachments. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s explanation for the Government’s approach to those types of document. Let me draw attention in particular to document 33, from 15 September 2025. The email explicitly refers to an attachment, which is pertinent to the subject of the Humble Address, but that document is not available. I could have been led to believe that that document may have been retained by the police, were it not for the fact that all attachments seem to be missing and all photos, voicemails and videos are also missing. I cannot help but feel that it has accidentally fallen out of the full disclosure. May we have some clarity on that?

Let me turn to Peter Mandelson’s declarations of interest, which are one of the most important classes of document; they are perhaps the most important class of document that we are yet to see. We now know that something definitely does exist—first, because the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister told us on Monday, and secondly, because there are references to a back-and-forth about Mandelson’s contacts in the release. Mandelson pushed back on a number of occasions, saying, “I know a lot of foreign people. I have a lot of contacts. I cannot be expected to disclose everything. There was a suggestion from one official not to worry about it too much, just to get on with it and give them a list.”

We appear also to be seeing an absence of documents, such as the mitigations that the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury, referred to—Collard’s document. If we add it all together—the absence of the declaration of interests, the absence of the mitigations designed perhaps to handle Mandelson’s relationships with his business contacts when in office, the fact that the documents of certain members of the Cabinet are entirely absent, and the business interests that we know Mandelson had—I think we can reasonably hypothesise about what the police are looking at. That would be—this is speculation—an abuse of his position in Washington to support the interests of his business relations. It is very unfortunate that we will not see that information for some time, because it goes to the heart of one of the problems with the appointment of Mandelson in the first place. [Interruption.] I think Madam Deputy Speaker is encouraging me to wind up, so that I will do. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I can understand why the Government do not want me to ask them any more questions.

In conclusion, there are a number of things that we need of the Government. Most importantly, we need a slightly fresh approach to disclosure where we are told a bit more about what the police have: how many documents in each category, how many WhatsApps and emails of the Prime Minister, Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, and so on. It is important that the House understands where things have gone missing and can start to put that picture together in its head. I say to the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that, once the police investigations are complete, it would be interesting for the police officers involved to come before the Select Committee—it may fall to another Committee as well—to discuss what their approach has been and why, and what lessons might be learned for future disclosures to Parliament.

I end by turning, rather unfortunately, to the last speech that Peter Mandelson ever made in the Lords, where he said:

“I feel very deeply that there will not be anything like the systematic undermining of the Civil Service that we have seen in recent years…when government policy was conducted by private WhatsApp, rather than on properly considered Civil Service advice.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 28 November 2024; Vol. 841, c. 830.]

This scandal has taken the jobs of the ambassador to Washington, of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, of the Cabinet Secretary and of the chief official in the Foreign Office—and, ultimately, it will take the job of the Prime Minister.

I will now announce the result of today’s deferred division on the draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2026. The Ayes were 302 and the Noes were 153, so the Ayes have it.

I call the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

We are a very long way from one of the original aspects of this scandal, which was an allegation that the Prime Minister knew when appointing Peter Mandelson that he had failed his developed vetting. We have moved a long way from that, but one thing we have not moved away from is that the man who was appointed was a “best pal” of the world’s most notorious paedophile, that he remained his “best pal” when he was in prison, and that he stayed in his house. Personally, I found it so profoundly shocking when I heard that was what happened. It is a matter of good character to stand by friends when they are in trouble, but when they are convicted of a terrible crime like that, you do not stand with them, you do not stay in their house and they should not be your “best pal”. It is not just that: we have also learned that Peter Mandelson was friends with Russian oligarchs, Chinese Finance Ministers and former Israeli security chiefs; he had a loan of £1 million from an unknown source, which he used to buy shares in a secretive Israeli company; and, of course, there are all the issues in relation to his business dealings.

Given that it is the job of the Foreign Affairs Committee to try to ensure that the Foreign Office is as good as it possibly can be, the Committee has tried to remain focused on why it was that a man like that—when it came to developed vetting, it was decided that he was a case of high concern and that his clearance for vetting should be denied—was nevertheless appointed. There is a lot of gossip and other stuff, the tittle-tattle and things that obviously the Westminster village loves, but the serious point is: how could we have got it so wrong and how did this happen?

At the beginning of her speech, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee said most powerfully that what happened in relation to Epstein should alone have been a sufficient bar for anything to go further, but even if that had not happened, it was already in the due diligence document, purely on foreign policy grounds: the Prime Minister was told that Mandelson gave a speech at the University of Hong Kong where he claimed that the rule of law and independence of the judiciary remain intact there. In November 2024, I personally challenged the proposed appointment on the grounds that Mandelson had said in a radio interview that the basis for a settlement with Ukraine would be that Ukraine should give up to Russia all the land that Russia had so far occupied, and that Ukraine should give up any hope of ever belonging to the NATO alliance. These were political grounds that should have ruled him out. The Prime Minister knew about them, but nothing seemed to prevent him from following through on his intent to appoint such an unsuitable individual.

The right hon. Gentleman tempts me down a path that I was not going to go down, although I have gone down it for quite some length in the Committee hearings. It seems to me that all these papers tend to show one thing: the Prime Minister was not particularly interested in the appointment of the ambassador to the United States. He was certainly not a good friend of his: there is no correspondence between them, there are no chatty messages and there is no attempt to get the Prime Minister to vote for Mandelson when he was standing for chancellor of the University of Oxford—I mean, there is not a friendship at all.

The criticism that I make, and I make openly, is that I think the decision was subcontracted to others who were close to Mandelson. The criticism that one can level at the Prime Minister is that he delegated and he did not watch sufficiently what was going on, essentially giving power to others who then abused it—I think that is central. That is not very flattering to the Prime Minister, but it is an honest assessment of the evidence that I have heard. I think the appointment was being pushed and I think that it was being pushed by his then chief of staff, who has a style—and that style is, “When I want to do something, I will go for it hard, I will go for it fast and I will push everybody out of the way.” Once Mandelson had not been elected chancellor at Oxford, someone who should have been a marginal candidate—and had been, as I understand it, just in November 2024—suddenly, within two weeks, moved from being a borderline candidate to being the main person in the frame.

The right hon. Lady persuades us that there is a good hypothesis, as she has described, for how this has happened, although we will never know—only the Prime Minister will know. However, does she accept that there is another hypothesis: that the Prime Minister was convinced early that this was the right thing to do, that the system accepted that that was his judgment, and that nobody sought sufficiently strongly to try to persuade him otherwise, until the appointment was finally confirmed?

We may be talking about the same thing. Another way of putting it is that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff had taken responsibility for it on his behalf and was pushing it, and the power that the chief of staff had was because he was the chief of staff to the Prime Minister. It is borderline one way or the other.

I disagree with the right hon. Lady’s analysis because the whole point of what we have been saying from the Opposition Benches is that the Prime Minister himself knew about these points: he knew what Mandelson had done in relation to Epstein; he knew what he had said in relation to justice in Hong Kong; and he knew what Mandelson had said in that radio interview because I had challenged him about it. I must say, although it may not meet the high standards of court litigation, that when the Prime Minister brushed aside my challenge to him on 21 November, he sat down with a very notable and ingratiating grin, and I turned to the person sitting next to me and said, “He’s definitely going to appoint Mandelson.” It was his decision.

I will move on, but before I do so, I will say something that I think any fair-minded person will know. Presumably the job of being Prime Minister means that there is so much on your desk, and if someone comes to you and says, “Don’t worry about this, I’ll take it and sort it”, there is a temptation to go, “Okay, you do that, because I have 7,000 other things that I have to deal with today.” I do not know—I have never been Prime Minister—but I would assume that that is the reality of the situation.

The question is how somebody who is so manifestly inappropriate gets appointed. It may be that those behaving in this way did so because they felt under huge amounts of political pressure, but how does someone whose case was of high concern and for whom it was recommended that clearance be denied become interpreted as a borderline case, leaning against? How do we bridge that gap? The only way that gap is bridged is through mitigations, so I spend my time looking for mitigations, and I cannot find any. Ian Collard, who was one of the security men speaking to Olly Robbins—who, at the time, was the permanent under-secretary—mentioned the importance of mitigations 10 times in his written evidence to us, and Olly Robbins talked about it six times. It is at the forefront of their evidence.

I have already referred to an aide-mémoire that Ian Collard made in September. He says that he looked again at the summary. He accepts that UKSV’s statement was

“‘this case presents as a high concern’ with a recommendation of ‘clearance denied or withdrawn’”,

and he

“noted that, as well as the tick boxes”—

red tick-boxes, which were ticked—

“UKSV stated in the final case assessment: ‘Overall, I believe that this is a very borderline case…If a clearance was awarded to the individual by the Department, it is recommended that a very robust risk management model is put in place’”.

I do not know whether that is just Ian Collard’s memory of what he may or may not have read—well, I know that he did not read it, because he says that he did not read it at that stage. I do not understand how the UKSV paper can say, “Don’t give him the job”, and then it can also be believed to be a very borderline case with robust risk management recommended. I suspect that the latter bit is an interpretation—a way in which, it was hoped, the difficulty that Mandelson was essentially being refused vetting could be slid over into “He can be given the job, so long as there are robust mitigations.”

But where are those mitigations? When Sir Olly gave evidence to our Committee, I said to him,

“I do not really follow why you would not know the contents of the UKSV document and their concerns or even that they said that there was high concern about Peter Mandelson. I do not understand how you can not know that if you are considering what the mitigations are. You cannot have the mitigations without knowing what the problem is.”

He said,

“The risks were explained to me, but I have not seen the underlying documentation. That is what I am saying. That obviously strikes members of the Committee as odd”—

well, it certainly did—

“but in all my years as a civil servant—many of them as a relatively senior one—I have never seen a UKSV document, other than the ones that I have filled in myself.”

It is ridiculous. If he is putting down mitigations in order to deal with legitimate concerns and a security threat, he needs to know what that security threat is, and to understand that UKSV is saying that it is very serious and that Mandelson should not be given the job—yet he says, “I didn’t know. I just thought it was borderline, leaning the other way.” I mean, this is Alice in Wonderland.

The right hon. Lady is making an important series of points. Does she not also think that the fact that the vetting was not done before Mandelson arrived in Washington, as we now know, means that somebody was in post in Washington seeing highly classified information which he was not fit to see, because there were no mitigations in place, even though the process subsequently threw up the fact that he would need them? Of course, as she is saying, he probably should not have had the job, given that the mitigations were warranted.

I really do not know. The Foreign Office got the UKSV clearance on 29 January 2025, and it says that it did something about it, but we cannot see what that is. An email on page 72 of part I is the nearest thing to mitigations I have been able to find, and Ian Collard referred to it in his evidence. It is an email he wrote on 30 January, and I think it is the mitigations, but I just do not think it is a robust set of mitigations to deal with serious security concerns. The email states:

“As part of the usual clearance policy process, UKSV identified some areas in his application for ESND to review”—

that is the security man.

“I understand that Lord Mandelson’s private sector engagements are being managed by HRD”—

that is human resources—

“and the Legal Directorate through the conflict of interest process.”

Who knows? It continues:

“With regard to personal conduct”—

I think that is hanging out with oligarchs, being friends with the Finance Minister, borrowing money and who knows what else—

“I understand that Lord Mandelson has received a letter from Mervyn Thomas, informing him of his responsibilities as an FCDO employee, including under the Diplomatic Service Regulations.”

Is that it? He got a letter from a man telling him to behave himself! We have not seen the letter, and I do not know what it is. The email continues:

“Matters pertaining to his overseas contacts will certainly be reviewed by the STRAP authorities.”

STRAP is another issue, and we should not be distracted by STRAP. Mandelson needed to follow the developed vetting before getting anywhere near the latest STRAP stuff.

It is important that we take these things in order. We have that email, which is about as pathetic as it can be. There might be something in the nine-page summary that some Members sitting in this Chamber have seen. It might be that that summary showing the security concerns has a page or so at the end—it is a blank page—asking the Foreign Office for its response. UKSV is giving a recommendation saying, “Mandelson should not be given the job, he is a security risk.” The process might be that the Foreign Office has to write something on that form saying, “We have read this. We don’t agree with you. We think he should be appointed, and we’re going to put in the following mitigations”, and then list them. It might be that the Foreign Office did not fill that in properly, and it might be that that bit of the form remains blank. I do not know whether anybody is in a position to be able to enlighten me one way or the other, or whether we will have to wait for the police to give us the document.

I do not think the right hon. Gentleman is one of the people I am referring to, but I give way.

Surely that information would be precisely the kind that could be safely entrusted to the ISC, and it ought to have been entrusted with it.

I suspect that the ISC may have been entrusted with it—that is what I am trying to say. I am hoping that if the form is blank, it is not necessarily the case that anything of particular security interest was being disclosed, and it is just a process issue, where the Foreign Office did not follow process as it should have and at least put on that form, “Yes, we have done these things.”

I am just trying to do my job, holding the Government to account. Why did Britain employ a man who was a security risk to this really important job? We did so because of the mitigations, but nobody will tell us the mitigations. After all these thousands of bits of paper, and after my poor right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West coming to the Chamber 11 times, we still cannot get to the root of it.

It would be entirely inappropriate for me, or for any other member of the ISC, to say what we have received, which has now been sent to the police, but given that following an urgent question just before the recess I challenged the Chief Secretary on the issue of mitigations, asking him whether there were mitigations in place and whether they would be made known to us, it would not be unreasonable for a diligent member of the House such as the right hon. Lady to conclude that I would not have asked that question if I had known the answer to it.

Well, that is very helpful; I thank the right hon. Gentleman very much.

Let us move on. Is there a record of the decision? When Sir Oliver Robbins appeared before the Committee, and indeed when other people appeared before it, I kept coming back to the same question: “Where is the record of your decision? What was the process that you went through before doing this? Why are there no notes? Why is there no record? How can we hold you to account if you really, genuinely are not making any notes at all?” Given that a decision was made to give Peter Mandelson the job subject to mitigations, where is the record of the decision? Do the police have it? Is it in the papers and I have missed it? I do not think so. Was there never a written record of the decision? Surely someone would have made a record of the action taken—or is that the email? Is that it? Is that the action that they took, or is there something else?

Surely there was a letter written to Peter Mandelson saying, “You have the job, but only if you do x, y and z.” This cannot be dealt with by way of a WhatsApp message or a phone call. This is very serious. This is about the security of our nation, and it should be in a letter. I certainly hope that the reason that I have not seen it is that it exists but the police have it, but I do not know one way or the other.

I know that others will be dealing with this later, and I want to draw my remarks to a close, but the Foreign Affairs Committee has been trying to do its job to the best of its ability to try to ensure that such a mistake does not happen again, and we have been doing that in good faith. It has been difficult. We have been “mandarined”; we have been given partial answers; we have been given nonsense by people believing that it is not for us to know. Well, it is for us to know, and it is for us to know because we are trying to make our Government better, and it is our job as Back Benchers to do that.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister reminded the House on Monday that he had given 10 updates on the Mandelson affair to Parliament, and, as the Paymaster General reminded us earlier, it will be 11 today. There are more than 1,500 pages of documents in this release alone—the largest Government response to a Humble Address in parliamentary history—but there is still one account that we have not received.

In April, I said in this Chamber that when the Prime Minister simply says that he should not have appointed Peter Mandelson to the UK’s most important diplomatic posting—that it was, in his words, an “error of judgment”—he gives a description of an outcome, not an account of his judgment. I used the analogy of a driver saying, “I should not have crashed the car”, without ever accounting for the actions that led to the crash. That matters if we are to understand properly what went wrong, it matters to preventing it from happening again, and it matters to judging whether the driver should still be behind the wheel.

If the House will indulge me, I will extend that analogy. These 1,500 pages give us the crash scene in more detail than Parliament has ever received on any comparable matter. We have the vehicle’s full mechanical history, we have the account of every passenger, we have what the bystanders observed from the pavement, and we have what the recovery team found when they arrived—but what we still do not have, after all that, is the driver’s account. What did the Prime Minister weigh in making his decision, what did he conclude, and where does he now think he went wrong in his reasoning?

The Prime Minister received the due diligence in December 2024, which documented Mandelson’s association with Epstein and that he had stayed in Epstein’s home while Epstein was serving a prison sentence for sexual offences against a minor. The document described that as a “reputational risk”—not a moral question about what it means to appoint someone who maintained such a friendship, not a question about what message it sends to the victims and survivors of Epstein’s crimes, just a reputational risk to be managed. Did the Prime Minister consider any of those questions? We do not know. All we know is that he proceeded anyway.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) said on Monday, in these 1,500 pages, Epstein’s victims are not mentioned once in any document dated before Mandelson’s appointment. The only reference to them seems to be in an email written after he was sacked. The victims were not just an afterthought; they were given no thought at all.

The published documents also highlight failures once Mandelson was in post. The due diligence was explicit: Global Counsel interests would have to cease on appointment. During Mandelson’s seven months as ambassador, from February to September 2025, he retained a substantial shareholding in Global Counsel. In February 2025, weeks into his ambassadorial role with that shareholding intact, he accompanied the Prime Minister on a visit to Palantir’s Washington headquarters. No formal minutes of that meeting were taken. In July 2025, he wrote to No. 10 suggesting that the Prime Minister should meet Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel while in London.

Palantir was a Global Counsel client. How was an ambassador who retained a commercial stake in a lobbying firm permitted to accompany the Prime Minister to a meeting with one of that firm’s clients, with no formal record of what was discussed, and then suggest a further meeting with the firm’s founder? The due diligence said those interests should cease. They had not. Nothing in the published documents suggests that anyone asked why.

The documents also reveal that in February 2025 Mandelson advised the then Technology Secretary to include

“more positive language about AI”

in a speech to the Munich security conference. The then Secretary of State replied that it was

“all v good advice which I’ll action”—

in text speak, obviously. This, again, was while Mandelson retained his shareholding in a firm that represented OpenAI and Palantir, and while he described OpenAI’s chief executive as his “chief AI buddy”. My hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) has today written to the independent adviser on ministers’ interests calling for an investigation into that, and she is right to do so.

Those are only the conflicts that Parliament can currently see. The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, asked on Monday, and again today, whether there is any written evidence of mitigations being put in place for the other conflicts identified in the due diligence. Those include the connections to the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska; to Lan Fo’an, China’s Minister of Finance; and to Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence. They also include a £1 million loan to invest in an Israeli start-up. The Chief Secretary’s response was that those documents are with the Metropolitan police, so Parliament cannot yet see whether those warnings were taken seriously or set to one side.

The Liberal Democrats have consistently called for the reforms that this affair has made unavoidable. Government by WhatsApp must end. These documents show exactly what happens when significant business is conducted through channels that are imperfectly preserved and impossible to scrutinise. One senior Minister told Mandelson in writing that a sensitive matter was:

“A convo for the phone.”

That Minister warned:

“There is a pattern we must get out of.”

The review of non-corporate communications must produce enforceable rules, not just guidance.

The lobbying register also needs root and branch reform. An ambassador retained a commercial stake in a lobbying firm throughout his tenure, arranging meetings between the Prime Minister and clients of that firm, and it seems that the system had no mechanism to prevent it. The ministerial code must be placed in statute. Having a code the Prime Minister can choose whether to enforce is not accountability, but it appears to be, which is more corrosive.

Ultimately, those reforms will only address the system around the decision. The Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), observed on Monday that the Prime Minister has almost no presence in the 1,500 pages, comparing him with “The Man Who Never Was”. The response of the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister was that

“Prime Ministers do not sit at computers, sending emails from Outlook. They have officials who action their decisions on their behalf”.—[Official Report, 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 860.]

That may be true, but officials action decisions; they do not make them. The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was the Prime Minister’s—his judgment, his decision and his error, as he acknowledges—but the House has never received his account of that decision.

After 10 updates and 1,500 pages, the House might begin to wonder about the reasons for that absence, and I think there are three possibilities. Perhaps the Prime Minister genuinely does not know why he made the decision, and cannot reconstruct the reasoning that led him, having read the due diligence, to proceed. If so, that is alarming. A judgment of this sensitivity—involving national security, a convicted sex offender’s associate and known commercial conflicts of interest—should not be one whose reasoning evaporates without trace.

Perhaps the Prime Minister knows why he proceeded, but believes an honest answer to this House would be embarrassing, and that explaining his reasoning would require him to acknowledge something he would prefer left unexamined. If so, that is a choice to protect himself at the expense of Parliament’s right to hold him to account. Perhaps the Prime Minister may genuinely believe that repeatedly saying, “I made an error of judgment,” constitutes an adequate account of his judgment. If so, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what accountability to Parliament actually requires. None of those three possibilities reflects well on a Prime Minister who promised that integrity and accountability would define his Government.

Before taking up his post, Peter Mandelson wrote to the then Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), that if appointed, he would make sure the Prime Minister never regretted it. The Prime Minister has now expressed regret, but regret without explanation is not accountability. This House, and Epstein’s victims, deserve more than that: they deserve an answer.

I think what has struck me most about this whole affair is not what has been said, but what has been missing. Over the past week, we have seen endless coverage of private messages, political embarrassment and Westminster intrigue. We have heard discussions about powerful people, powerful networks and powerful reputations. However, amid all this, we have heard far too little about the victims. For all the headlines that have been generated by this story, the people whose lives were devastated by Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have too often been reduced to a footnote, and that should concern every single one of us. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the disclosures is not simply who Ministers were meeting, but who they were not. While significant effort appears to have gone into cultivating relationships with influential figures in the tech world, victims were left feeling unheard and overlooked. That is the wrong way around.

I sought to use my position in Government to advocate for victims, but when we are forced to fight tooth and nail simply to have those voices heard, something is not working as it should. That is why I took the difficult but necessary decision to resign. But stepping down does not mean stepping back and that is why I will now voice Lisa’s words:

“My name is Lisa Phillips. I am a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s global paedophile trafficking and abuse network. I respectfully ask that MP Alex Davies-Jones be permitted to speak on my behalf and be my voice in Parliament today, when so many survivors’ voices still go unheard.

I met Prince Andrew on Epstein island on the night I was sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein. Like many of my survivor sisters, I was trafficked and abused over a number of years. I am seeking answers not only about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, but also about the powerful men who enabled, protected, or benefited from this abuse and trafficking.

This debate is about accountability. Jeffrey Epstein’s powerful network made many victims and survivors feel unable to come forward. When powerful people protect or turn a blind eye to abuse, justice becomes harder to achieve. That must change. Many UK survivors came forward to the Metropolitan police, yet they too were left without the answers and accountability they deserved.

As a survivor, I struggle to understand why Prime Minister Keir Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson when his association with Jeffrey Epstein had long been publicly known. For survivors, this raises serious questions about whether the lessons of the Epstein scandal have truly been learned. I have repeatedly requested the opportunity to meet with the Prime Minister, but those requests have been ignored. Must I now wait for the next Prime Minister to acknowledge me and my survivor sisters?

With respect, Prime Minister, your apology alone means little without meaningful action, so I ask you directly, Prime Minister: do you, and the Government you lead, support a full public inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and those who enabled, protected, participated in, or benefited from their crimes, including those on British soil? The answer is simple: yes or no. Regards, Lisa Phillips.”

The least Lisa, and the many other British brave survivors, deserve is an answer, yet they are being met with silence. Lisa’s testimony reminds us all that this debate cannot be confined to any one individual. It is about a culture: a culture where power protects power, and where influence and connections can matter more than accountability.

The disclosures made available to the House paint a troubling picture: a picture of senior figures discussing how to build relationships with powerful tech billionaires and silicon valley elites; and a picture of a Government seemingly preoccupied with winning over the likes of Elon Musk and maintaining close relationships with figures such as Sam Altman. That raises an important question: what was the priority?

At precisely the same time as those Ministers were discussing how to secure the approval of tech oligarchs, Ministers such as myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), along with campaigners, safeguarding experts and survivors, were all calling for stronger action on online harm. We were calling for action on violent pornography, action on misogynistic content, and action to better protect children online. Yet too often our voices were ignored, sidelined or dismissed. As people who have spent much of our careers campaigning to tackle violence against women and girls, my hon. Friend and I found that deeply frustrating to say the least. The role of Government should not be to seek approval from the world’s most powerful technology companies; it should be to stand up for the people we are sent here to serve.

When people look at these disclosures, they see a Government who appeared more interested in cultivating relationships with tech elites than listening to the warnings about harms being experienced by women, girls and young people every single day. That matters. The public increasingly feel that there is one set of rules for the powerful and another for everyone else. They see the same names, the same networks, the same circle of influence and the same men, and they see powerful institutions closing ranks when difficult questions are asked. That perception damages trust.

What concerns me almost as much as the disclosures themselves, however, is how they came into the public domain in the first place. It was not because the Government chose transparency or Ministers proactively provided answers, but because Parliament forced the issue—because Members in this place demanded scrutiny and this House insisted on accountability. That takes us to a much bigger question: why is transparency so often dragged out of institutions rather than being freely given? Why do victims, campaigners and Parliament so often have to fight for information that should be freely available from the outset?

Perhaps the most striking contradiction of all concerns transparency. While this Government have spoken passionately about the importance of openness, accountability and a duty of candour, the disclosures raise serious questions about whether those principles were being lived as well as preached. The public are entitled to ask how confidence and transparency can be maintained when disappearing messages were being used at the highest level of Government. They are entitled to ask why survivors have appeared to struggle to secure the same level of access and attention that was afforded to some of the most powerful figures in global technology. They are entitled to ask whether the voices that mattered most were truly being heard.

When victims and survivors feel ignored while those with wealth, influence and power are actively courted, something has gone badly wrong. That is not the culture that the public expect from Government, and it is certainly not the culture that victims deserve. That is why this debate—this whole issue—should strengthen our resolve to deliver a genuine duty of candour. Not a slogan, a soundbite, or something invoked only when convenient, but a genuine legal and moral obligation on those exercising power to tell the truth, to preserve information, to be transparent, and to place accountability ahead of any self-protection.

Too often in this country, transparency is not volunteered; it is extracted—painfully. It comes only after leaks and investigations, and after victims’ families, campaigners and parliamentarians fight for information that should have been available from the outset, sometimes for decades. The disclosures before us did not emerge because the Government chose openness; they emerged because Parliament forced scrutiny through Standing Order No. 24. That should concern every Member of this House, because if transparency depends on being forced, then we do not yet have a culture of candour. Until we confront that honestly, we will continue to fail the very people that this House exists to serve—not with words but action; not with promises, but accountability.

It is a genuine privilege to follow the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones). Knowledgeable and passionate Ministers are a huge asset to any Government, and she is a significant loss to this one. If I may say, the same can be said of the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), who sits next to her. The hon. Member for Pontypridd makes important points about the victims of Epstein, which I will not repeat, and she has added considerably to this debate.

I also take the opportunity to join in the tributes that were made earlier to Alan Haselhurst, Madam Deputy Speaker, who occupied your Chair with immense dignity and considerable rigour, but did so with deep warmth and kindness. He will be missed in both Chambers of this place.

Turning to the motion, I will say something about the process that has led to the publication of the documents we are now considering, and then something about their contents. On the process, I start by offering thanks to the officials of the Cabinet Office and the staff of the Intelligence and Security Committee. The whole House will now be conscious of the sheer scale of the task that lay before both those groups of people and the immense work that they all had to put in to turn the process around as quickly as they did. The House will also now appreciate that, given their nature, it was inevitable that a large number of those documents raised questions of either national security or international relations.

On behalf of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I want to make it very clear, as I have before, first that we are very grateful for the words of the Paymaster General, and indeed the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister on previous occasions, on the work that we have done. Secondly, I want to reassure the House that throughout the process, we were rigorous in our view that Government embarrassment was not sufficient cause for redaction of these documents. I hope the House can now see that that is the case, as there is plenty of Government embarrassment left unredacted.

The prejudice that we sought to establish in relation to international relations or national security needed to be real prejudice, and not the vague possibility of that prejudice. That is the way in which we approached the task. I am confident in the redactions that we agreed to make, and indeed in the decisions we took not to support the redactions that we refused to consent to.

In the process that we undertook—I have spoken about this before—two issues of process have arisen. The first is the question of who checks proposed redactions for reasons other than national security or international relations. I am very glad that the Government have agreed that my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) should fulfil that role, as he has now done. The second concerns the grounds for redaction beyond the protection of national security or international relations. As many who have heard these conversations before know, I have been and remain critical of the way the Government have maintained the unilateral right to redact for other reasons. I do not propose to go through all those arguments again. I take that position not because I do not think the Government have a good case to do so, but because I think it is wrong for the Government to assume Parliament’s consent to that case.

For clarity, is the redaction done in Downing Street—in Government—and then sent to the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s Committee, or is it done by the Committee on grounds of national security and international relations?

I am happy to give the right hon. Gentleman that clarity. The documents that we received were unredacted documents marked with the proposed redactions the Government sought to make for reasons of protecting national security or international relations. Where we agreed with the Government, we agreed that those redactions should be made; where we disagreed, those redactions were not made. We saw all the documents unredacted, and we decided whether to accept the Government’s proposals for redaction or not. The House made it clear that it wanted the final word on those redactions—yes or no—to be ours as a Committee, and not the Government’s. I hope that is of assistance to the right hon. Gentleman.

For the sake of completeness, will my right hon. and learned Friend explain whether the Committee saw the third category of documents—those redacted or withheld because of the police inquiry—or whether the Committee labours under the same degree of ignorance as the rest of us?

I think we may have to wait for the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to explain the position from the Government’s perspective. I can say only that what was put in front of us did not, I think, include the documents that the police had sought to have withheld. I cannot say that that is the case in every instance, but we do not believe that there has been complete disclosure yet. We think there will be further documents put before us, which the police currently have in their possession, so it may well be that there is further work for the Committee to do. My right hon. Friend will recognise from his long experience that we will apply the same degree of rigour and impartiality to any further documents put before us as to the documents we have already seen.

The answer to the hon. Lady’s question is that we will have seen only the documents to which there were proposed redactions for the purposes of either national security or international relations. However, we may well also have seen other proposed redactions to the same documents. The reason that I have raised concerns in the past about the breadth of those proposed redactions for other reasons is that the Committee has seen some of those proposed redactions, but, of course, we have no way of knowing what proportion of such proposed redactions we have seen—if a document does not contain within it redactions that the Government have proposed for either international relations or national security reasons, the document would not have come before us at all.

Yes, I can—and this is an important point. The Intelligence and Security Committee wanted to be extremely clear that we took responsibility only for the redactions that we had considered and agreed. The Government, to be fair to them, have always accepted that those redactions that the Government made without the involvement of my Committee would appear on the documents differently, and they do. The House will be able to see exactly the difference when the documents are considered.

I need to make it clear that I am not an enthusiast for the use of Humble Addresses to demand disclosure of documents at all, whichever party may choose to use them. That is simply because I think it is inappropriate to involve the monarch in a political argument, but if we are to have them, or indeed any other motions that demand the disclosure of material, we should be clear about the grounds on which the Government are entitled to redact that material.

I have had the privilege of meeting some of the women who survived Epstein’s abuse, and I pay tribute to them and to those who are no longer with us. Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman agree that as we rightly discuss the processes that took place, we must also highlight the sheer bravery of those women, and that that should be front and centre in this debate? Does he agree that this appalling episode, in which the victims were overlooked and Mandelson was still appointed despite his links to Epstein, must lead to a fundamental change in political culture?

I do agree with the point that the hon. Lady makes, and I think that that argument was put very forcefully and eloquently by the hon. Member for Pontypridd, which she may have heard a moment ago.

I want to return to the grounds on which the Government are entitled to redact material under a Humble Address motion or similar motions. It seems to me not only that Parliament should have clarity about the grounds on which the Government seek to redact such material but that the proper time to have that clarity is when such a motion is first agreed, not as documents begin to be disclosed in response to it.

I want to make a suggestion, and I hope that the Government will see it as a helpful one, because it is genuinely meant as such. I suggest that this House agrees standard rules by which a Government may make a redaction and the reasons for it, and that those should be used in all similar situations in the future so that we have clarity. The Government have relied on a variety of legislative and common practice routes to support their right to redact, or in some cases even to withhold documents altogether, in relation to this Humble Address. I think that the process would benefit from consolidation of those reasons into a single document that the House can then endorse. It would save this argument being rerun, or at least limit it to a discussion of any specific grounds for redaction that the Government seek to rely on beyond the agreed reasons.

I will turn to the content of the documents and what they tell us. I have said very little about them so far in order to, I hope, preserve the integrity of the process that the ISC has been conducting at the House’s instruction. There is, of course, lots of interest in the documents—in how, for example, the ambassador to the United States steadfastly refused to stay in his lane as a diplomat and instead offered his advice on almost every aspect of the Government’s activity; in the fact that he was held in such high regard, not to say awe, by so many members of the Government; and in the slapdash approach to secure communications, to which the Government, and perhaps also my Committee, will return.

It is important to remember that this whole exercise, as I think the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee said, was supposed to be about interrogating how Lord Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador came to be made. It would be churlish not to accept that Lord Mandelson had successes in the role. That indicates that he had merits as a candidate for the job that the Prime Minister was entitled to consider, but considering someone for a role is very different from appointing them to it—especially someone who had such obvious and well known risks, and especially to an appointment of such evident importance and sensitivity. That is why I find the process of making the appointment so concerning and so surprising.

I accept that it is unfashionable or even heretical to say it these days, but I have a soft spot for the Prime Minister. I do not think it is just because I like the idea of lawyers with knighthoods being in charge, though I do; it is really because I am an enthusiast for good government. The question of whether one supports a Government’s policies is one thing, but we should all be in favour of good government none the less. I want to see responsible decision making, considered judgments, a preference for evidence over instinct, and flashy ideas properly tested to ensure that they will actually work. That is good government to me, and I thought that in this Prime Minister’s Administration I would see it, but good government requires that where a sensitive appointment carries considerable risk, extra work is done to understand that risk and mitigate it. These documents do not show that.

Peter Mandelson’s letter to the then Foreign Secretary—now Deputy Prime Minister—has become famous for his assurance that the Government would not regret his appointment, and ranks up there with “peace for our time” and Michael Fish’s pre-hurricane weather forecast in the pantheon of poor predictions. But there is something else interesting about it, and that is its date—18 November 2024—which makes it clear that Lord Mandelson was at the very least under serious consideration for the ambassador position in mid-November. The vetting process did not begin until late December, with everyone then being told—this is very clear—that it should be completed in time for Mandelson to begin work in January. There are several mentions in the documents of the urgency of that from officials. We know already that the National Security Adviser considered the process strangely rushed, and in the latest drop of documents, we see that in volume II, part I, page 21 it says:

“The SPAD work has shown just how slick this can be when needed.”

Page 66 says:

“We have had quite a bit of senior interest in the processing of this case (not the details merely that it goes smoothly)”.

If officials had been asked to start that work earlier, they could have taken longer over it, and surely more time and consideration would have been beneficial in this complex and controversial case.

Indeed, the haste with which things were being done was apparent elsewhere. In another document, an official points out that the Prime Minister had announced his choice for ambassador before agrément had been granted. In other words, the United States had not agreed to accept Lord Mandelson as ambassador at that point. That, the official says, should not have happened.

It is, and was, clear to everyone that this was a controversial appointment: perhaps high reward, but definitely high risk. There were substantial reasons to worry about it—we have heard several of them—and almost all of them were very public knowledge. That should have given everyone—perhaps especially the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office as the appointing Department—pause for thought, yet we know from page 106 of part III of this volume that UK Security Vetting informed the FCDO of its recommendation in the last week of January 2025 and the FCDO granted the developed vetting certificate on 29 January 2025. Not much pause for thought there. Worse still, as others have pointed out, we have not seen mitigations—ones that were clearly agreed to be necessary—evidenced anywhere. Good government this was not.

It has been said by many on the Government’s behalf that mistakes can be made, and that is of course true. When in opposition, the Prime Minister pointed out more than once that Prime Ministers are accountable for the tone and character of the Governments they lead and for how those Governments transact their business, and he was right. These documents show that in the making of this very important and sensitive decision, there was much wrong with the tone and character of this Government.

The latest Peter Mandelson scandal epitomises everything that my constituents in Liverpool West Derby detest about the political establishment and why so many are losing faith in this place. Here was a man who brought Government into disrepute on multiple occasions—a man who repeatedly placed personal interest and profit ahead of public service—yet instead of being consigned to political history, he was rehabilitated by senior figures in my own party and elevated through a position of extraordinary, unelected influence. Why? Because his value to the political establishment was never rooted in principle or public service; it was rooted in his history of brutal, factional manoeuvring, his network of powerful contacts and his ability to pull strings behind the scenes. Even his association with one of the world’s most notorious paedophiles was seemingly outweighed by the usefulness of those connections and—shamefully, for those responsible for his appointment—with no apparent regard for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for her speech, which outlined that so powerfully.

Though the latest documents reveal moments of embarrassing sycophancy, they tell us little that we did not already know. Mandelson’s fingerprints are all over this Government. His involvement stretched from Ministers and advisers to the very centre of power. Just yesterday evening, we learned that the Chancellor asked Mandelson to visit her at the Treasury to advise on trade matters while he was chair of the private lobbying firm Global Counsel. No record of the meeting was disclosed.

Mandelson’s influence, exercised through figures such as the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, was vast, unaccountable and entirely undemocratic. Based on the great lengths that McSweeney and others went to ensure that Mandelson was given the job as US ambassador, including by applying pressure on civil servants, it is very reasonable to conclude that Mandelson’s influential position was reward for his support of the Labour Together faction. The damage that organisation has done to my party and this Government cannot be ignored, so I once again reiterate my call to the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister for a full, transparent and independent inquiry into Labour Together and all those involved in the organisation.

The question many of my constituents are asking is: how could an unelected figure, whose public record is so controversial, wield such influence over the decisions of Government while facing so little scrutiny or accountability? That lack of accountability also helps to explain why the latest disclosures were not far more uncomfortable for Mandelson and those around him. As we know, despite requests to do so, he refused to hand over his personal phone as part of the evidence-gathering process. That speaks to a wider problem of culture in Westminster and Whitehall, and is exactly why we need a duty of candour that a Hillsborough law would introduce. There can be no more exemptions from transparency for the powerful; there can be no special rules for those at the top. Public confidence depends on accountability applied equally to everyone.

I, like many others, await Government actions on the progress of that crucial piece of legislation, and I hope that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister can shed some light on its stalled progress when he winds up the debate. The ongoing police investigation means that Mandelson may yet face further scrutiny. However, the absence of so much correspondence, together with the significant redactions in material already published, means the true extent of his influence over Government decision making may never be fully known.

My particular concern centres on the relationship between this Government and the US technology firm Palantir, a former client of Global Counsel. The documents reveal that Mandelson arranged meetings with Palantir’s founder Peter Thiel—historically a supporter of Donald Trump—and Louis Mosley, the company’s UK head. Those meetings followed the Prime Minister’s visit to Palantir’s Washington headquarters in February—a meeting reportedly brokered by Mandelson, for which no official minutes or transcript were produced.

Following this, later in the year, in September, during the state visit of Donald Trump, there was a pledge by Palantir to expand its work with the Ministry of Defence to a value of £750 million over five years. I and many others in this place and beyond do not believe a company associated with military operations in Gaza and the facilitation of aggressive immigration enforcement in the United States should be entrusted with expanding influence over any public services in this country.

My greatest concern is Palantir’s growing role within our national health service—a matter that the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee today described as

“an unacceptable point of weakness”,

which could leave our data “at the mercy” of hostile actors. I first raised concerns about this company in 2023 when the federated data platform contract was awarded. Since then, I have repeatedly called on the current and the last Governments to exercise the 2027 break clause and end this relationship. Yet despite widespread concerns from parliamentarians, healthcare professionals and members of the public, for some reason Palantir’s presence within our NHS and access to patient data has only continued to grow.

That expansion comes despite significant concerns being raised elsewhere. NYC Health + Hospitals withdrew from its contract with Palantir earlier this year, while a proposed Metropolitan police contract was blocked last month. Those decisions reflected principled leadership and a recognition that public trust must come before corporate influence, and I thank Mayor Khan for showing that desperately needed leadership, which is a real example to others. The concerns that were acted on are shared by many NHS staff and many of my constituents, who are deeply uneasy about the growing role of Palantir in managing sensitive personal data. That is why I was particularly concerned when the former Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), ruled out ending Palantir’s contract earlier this year, citing efficiency gains, despite evidence that many NHS trusts using the platform had not reported clear benefits of the software.

For me, it is here that the missing documents become extremely significant. Just months after Mandelson sought a meeting with Palantir UK’s Louis Mosley, the former Health Secretary, who we know was in regular contact with Mandelson, held a private meeting with Mosley himself, as reported by The Guardian among others. A legitimate question arises: did Mandelson facilitate that meeting in the same way he appeared to broker discussions between Palantir and the Prime Minister?

While many in Westminster are preoccupied with the gossip, personal exchanges and political intrigue contained within these documents, I am far more concerned by what is absent: the gaps, the redactions, the missing correspondence that may never come to light because relevant material was withheld or “phones were stolen”. Those missing pieces would not simply demonstrate that Peter Mandelson was embedded within the machinery of government; they would reveal the consequences of that influence. They would show how decisions affecting our public services, our NHS and our democracy may have been shaped by unelected power, corporate interests and private relationships operating beyond public scrutiny. Until there is full transparency and genuine accountability for how decisions of national importance are made, public trust in this place will continue to erode, and that is a very dangerous place to be going.

That principle should have applied to Peter Mandelson, but it clearly did not, and what a catastrophic mistake that was and continues to be. Moving forward, it must also apply to all those currently exercising power within this Government and anybody seeking to lead this Government in the years ahead.

This House stands tall when those across it find common cause in speaking for the people. Our authority is derived from just that. There is immense wisdom present in the House today, and probably even greater wisdom that is not present, but that is not the essence of the root of our authority which is derived from our election, and when the House finds its feet in the way personified by the speech of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), the message broadcast from this place more broadly is that MPs do not merely dance to the tune composed and conducted by the Treasury Bench, or indeed the Opposition Front Bench, but are capable of making judgments of the kind that she epitomised in making her contribution earlier.

I have been part of this process. I will not say that I have sweated blood, but I have certainly spent a great deal of time on it, as has my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright). Over the past weeks, I have seen more of my fellow members of the Intelligence and Security Committee than I have of my own family, as we have trawled through immense numbers of documents.

Following that process, I want to make five points. The first is that the Humble Address—there is a debate to be had about the appropriateness of Humble Addresses; we have rehearsed parts of that debate today—was absolutely explicit in its instructions to the ISC. It empowered the ISC in a unique and unprecedented way to examine those documents concerning international relations and national security pertaining to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the ambassador in America. I do not accept the arguments about the withdrawal of documents and about precedent, because this particular Humble Address empowered the ISC in an unprecedented way.

It did so on 4 February, in expansive terms. There is a case to be made that the Humble Address was too permissive, but that is not for us to debate now, for that was the debate that took place then. For example, it talks about all “electronic communications”, yet we have seen nothing of the videos, recorded messages or other kinds of electronic communications that clearly might be salient to our consideration of whether Peter Mandelson should have been appointed at all, and why he was appointed.

The Humble Address gave the ISC that instruction, and so it is important to make it crystal clear that the ISC is a Committee of Parliament with unique and special legal powers, and those legal powers extend beyond any other Committee of the House and enable the Committee to look at the most sensitive matters of all, such as STRAP documents. I would argue that such documents are as sensitive as, and in many cases more so than, anything that we might have been offered as a result of the Humble Address providing that instruction to us, yet the Government took the decision not to make available to the ISC the vetting file associated with Peter Mandelson. The argument used was that if they did so, it would have a chilling effect on the whole vetting process.

I regard that as specious because it confuses scrutiny with disclosure. The ISC was never going to disclose any of that material—a point made by its former Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). It was a matter for the Government to have faith in the ISC—as the House clearly did—or at least for the Government to reflect the faith of the House in providing all the relevant material to the ISC. But let us leave that to one side.

The Minister might want to come back to this, because my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam, who sits on the ISC with me—indeed, he is the deputy Chairman of that Committee—came to the House with an urgent question, explicitly requesting that the Government return to the subject of the Humble Address to see whether they wished to amend it, to legitimise their decision not to provide that information. The Government chose not to do that. In other words, they chose not to ask the House for consent. That is a highly questionable decision and, frankly, I think the Government will come to regret not coming back to obtain that consent.

Let us move on to my second point. I will not say too much about this, but it is now known—it is in the public domain—that the ISC did receive a summary document. Indeed, some of that summary document has found its way into the public realm by means of a national newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, which clearly had access to information. We heard earlier that there may be an inquiry into how that information found its way into the press, but we were told that that information would not be available in the second tranche of information, even in redacted form, because it was required by the police. However, we do not know when the police made that inquiry or when they decided that the information was vital to their investigations, and we have been given no rationale as to why they might have come to that decision so late in the process. Had they made the decision earlier, we would have saved a lot of time, and the expectation that we might have seen more about vetting would not have been fixed in the minds of Members of this House.

It is important that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is crystal clear about when that request from the Metropolitan police was made, and it would be helpful if he could give us some indication of why. Clearly he could not compromise the investigation or any subsequent legal action, but giving the House some indication of when and why the police changed their tune, as it were, in respect of the summary of the vetting file would be highly desirable.

Let me move on to my third point, which concerns mitigation. I said that there were five points, and I know you are counting them, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I am.

Indeed, you will chastise me if I do not stick to my chronology precisely, Madam Deputy Speaker.

As the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) said, there is some confusion about the character of mitigation. We certainly know that nothing has been provided in respect of mitigation or about the reaction to the flags about Mandelson’s associations with senior figures in foreign states or his personal circumstances, yet Sir Oliver Robbins gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee in April—its Chair has made this clear—in which he said that clearance could be approved if

“risks identified as of highest concern…could be managed and/or mitigated.”

Such mitigations were meant to have been noted in an email from Ian Collard, the Foreign Office head of security, noting the decision to grant Mandelson’s clearance. According to Sir Oliver Robbins, that email recorded

“the ways in which we would manage”

Mandelson’s clearance and “the mitigations”. Sir Oliver Robbins’s claim was supported by the top official in charge of gathering the Humble Address material, Cat Little. She told MPs that she had seen an email that

“sets out the decision to grant DV and some mitigations.”

There was certainly a stated need to manage the risks associated with Peter Mandelson’s appointment and an acknowledgment that that might be done through some process of mitigation, but we have heard no more. It may be that no detailed mitigation plan was drawn up. It is perfectly possible that that might have happened, for the very reason that these risks were so great that they could not have been mitigated. However, even if that were the case, surely there would have been box notes or communications in emails making all that clear between the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office, between UKSV and the Cabinet Office, and between Ministers and officials, yet we have seen nothing.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, in addition to the concern he has expressed that there is no evidence of mitigations being put in place, there is a concern that there was not much time to do those mitigations between the point at which UKSV recommendations were received and the decision by the Foreign Office to grant vetting? There really was not much time for mitigations, as well as very little evidence that they were provided.

That is true. Indeed, that might have been reflected in some of the messages that I have suggested to the Department that it might, even at this late stage, make available to our Committee—perhaps that is the most sensible thing given the terms of the Humble Address—and subsequently, in a redacted form, more widely. Even if it were true that because of the pace of the appointment, a full plan could not be drawn up, I find it inconceivable and—I would go as far as to say—unbelievable that there were no communications of any kind associated with the measures referred to by Sir Olly Robbins and Ian Collard.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way—I hope this is helpful. In the written evidence that Collard gave to us, on point 6 in answer to the question, “When was the report received by the department?” he said that they had

“received an email from UKSV at 1.52pm on 29 January informing PST that the report was ready for the FCDO to review.”

That was the date he heard about the developed vetting. The email, which is the nearest thing we have to anything that has any mitigations, is dated 30 January at 10.12 am.

The right hon. Lady will know furthermore that Ian Collard, through a letter sent on his behalf to the Foreign Office, told MPs that he had sent an email

“recording the fact of the decision (but not any of the underlying discussions or reasons for doing so) and mitigations”.

She is absolutely right, and when she said earlier that she was unknowing of why this had occurred, I think the whole House would share her view. None of us quite know why on earth that material does not exist or, if it does exist, why it is not being made available.

My fourth point—I am coming to my exciting conclusion; I know you will be pleased to hear that, Madam Deputy Speaker—concerns the declaration of interests form. We know from the first tranche of documents that were relayed to the House that a blank template on declaration of interests for Peter Mandelson to complete was made available, but the completed declaration of interests, from which presumably detailed actions could be derived, has never been made known. I understand that this is another document that may have found its way into the hands of the Metropolitan police. If so, when did that occur, when did the Metropolitan police request it and, again, why? Greater clarity from the Government on the declaration of interests would be most welcome.

Finally, thanks to the learning of the Paymaster General, we were able to speak a little earlier of Gladstone and Disraeli. I carry a picture of Benjamin Disraeli with me at all times. Many people carry pictures of their children or grandchildren; I carry a picture of Disraeli—

Should I carry a picture of Gladstone?

I would not recommend it.

Order. Regardless of whichever picture Mr Martin would wish to carry, it is always decent for Members to ensure that they are in the Chamber long enough before intervening on someone who is giving a speech.

I will say no more except this: Disraeli said that circumstances are beyond our control, but we all have control of our conduct. Of course it is true that the context in which the appointment of Peter Mandelson was made was beyond the control of the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister who is responding to the debate, but the conduct of the Government, as described by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam, is a matter for which he and other members of the Treasury Bench are answerable. The conduct of this affair seems to me to be, at best, highly questionable and, at worst, something much more serious.

I simply say to the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister: there is still a chance to put to rights some of these wrongs in what happens next. Some of the questions posed from across the House, as it found its feet earlier today, can and still should be answered. We will not get the full detail until the Metropolitan police have conducted their own inquiries and I understand that, but there is much that can be done to provide further explanation about the things we have not seen and why.

I start, as I must, with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for raising the testimony of Lisa Phillips and naming one of Epstein’s victims. Those victims have names, they may be listening to the debate and they will find this whole process retraumatising and painful again and again.

Everything that has happened seems to have been because of an ultimate boys’ club situation: a boys’ club that surrounded Epstein, a boys’ club that surrounded Mandelson and a boys’ club that was in No. 10. Even today we have been drawn into its vortex. I do not like the fact that we are still having to be part of it and still saying his name when he did such dreadful things to so many people. I also pay tribute to the women and girls who were abused and exploited by him and his associates. They deserve truth and accountability, and to know that public institutions have learned lessons. Their bravery in speaking out is why this House keeps returning to questions of standards, judgment and transparency.

I ask the House to stand back a bit and look at the Humble Address process. As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I have been following the process very closely. I join the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) in saying that I am not an enthusiast for the Humble Address process. I think that it should be used but I have questions about it.

I have been very critical of the appointment of Peter Mandelson from the moment that appointing him was even thought about—it should never have gone further than that—through the due diligence process, the vetting process and the final decision. My constituents expect Ministers to be held to the highest standards and when those standards fall short, they expect answers.

Some areas about which I have particular concerns have already been raised by Members during the debate. There need to be changes to the appointment system. This process tested that system to the limit. It was an extreme circumstance, with a new Government, a high-profile position, an appointment made very quickly and a rare political appointment to an ambassador role, but a system needs to be tested to the utmost for such a situation. In future, I hope the Foreign Affairs Committee will be given the opportunity to meet candidates who are being considered for political appointment. There may never be any more political appointments after this one, but if there are, they need to be made differently and we need to hear that that will happen.

I have questions about the due diligence process. I have asked officials whether it is a pass or fail process. Due diligence is just a part of the process and it cannot be failed, and I think that should be looked at. If there are enough red flags in the due diligence process, why would we go ahead with vetting? In this case, there were a couple of red flags: Epstein, and Russia and China. To me, those are pretty big red flags, so that part of the process should be looked at.

The Humble Address process is an important tool for the Opposition to gain transparency. It is an appeal to the King over the Heads of Government, once used for ceremonial messages but now more commonly used as a tool to gain information. In February, the Humble Address process was used for the publication of papers relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. When in opposition, the Labour party unsuccessfully requested Humble Addresses on the cost of the Rwanda plan and the asylum system and on the safety of school buildings, for example, and successfully asked for Humble Addresses on Brexit in 2018 and on Lebedev in 2022. It is a useful tool, but seeking answers is not the same as backing any process regardless of cost or consequence, and so far in this debate, there has been no mention of the cost—the financial cost, and the time cost to civil servants.

I would argue that this Humble Address has not been a good process—it has been disproportionate. The Humble Address was drafted so widely that it has become a catch-all, not a focused request for information, which is why many of us are finding the process very frustrating.

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, and I agree with the case she is making. She is right that wide Humble Addresses are deleterious, both because there is an opportunity cost—while civil servants are looking at that, they are not looking at something else—and a real financial cost. However, does she agree that the right moment to push back on an excessively broad Humble Address is when it is being decided on? The Government have a majority; it is there so that the Government can get their way. Would it not have been better for them to have said on 4 February, “This is too broad. We will only agree to something narrower”?

I will come to that point later in my argument. I hope that my speech today will be something we can learn from, to learn the lessons from this Humble Address and try to make future ones better.

Following on from the point made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), I would add, “or later”. He is right that the Government could have said, “This is too broad,” at the outset, but they were provoked—encouraged—to look at it again several times later. Even later on, it would have been wise to have amended the Humble Address in exactly the way that my right hon. and learned Friend and the hon. Lady have suggested.

This Humble Address has been worked on by Ministers and civil servants very diligently, independently and scrupulously, but that has led to some huge costs, which I am going to outline. Maybe that is a lesson that should be learned for future Humble Addresses. As the Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), said earlier in the week, £1 million has been spent by the Cabinet Office alone. A further £1 million has been spent by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and there have been further costs, including the cost of the independent King’s Counsel; the 16 to 20 civil servants entirely dedicated to this role; the time that the Intelligence and Security Committee has spent on this matter; and the many other civil servants from all the Departments involved in this. Those are huge costs.

My constituents in Putney want Government money to be spent on making their lives better, so we should always question whether this inquiry is making their lives better. When we use parliamentary powers, we have a duty to use public money responsibly and proportionately. I want full transparency, but full transparency must be smart, targeted and proportionate. A Humble Address should be a power of last resort, not a blunt instrument. Because this one was drafted on the hoof and without limits, it is taking up huge resource and time, and in doing so risks making future scrutiny harder, not easier. Most Humble Addresses ask for papers relating to a specific decision; this one asked for

“all papers relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment…including but not confined to”

nine wide-ranging categories spanning from pre-appointment to post-departure, plus all electronic comms and minutes. The breadth of that request is why the Government said:

“Given the breadth of the motion, this process will clearly take some time”—[Official Report, 23 February 2026; Vol. 781, c. 41.]

It will obviously take even more time because of the police investigation. Meanwhile, the cost is now £2 million and rising.

I reiterate the need to be able to use Humble Addresses as an Opposition tool. Maybe one day, Labour will be in opposition, and we will want to be able to use it. I absolutely agree with that, but I think that some guardrails should be put in place. I ask the Procedure Committee, alongside the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, to review how Humble Addresses are used.

My hon. Friend is making an important and well-thought-out speech. She has talked about guardrails, and my constituents in Harlow will feel the same as hers about the time this process is taking and the amount of Government resources that are being used. It is really important that we get transparency, but does my hon. Friend agree that one of those guardrails should be to protect minor officials? That is what the redactions—which, of course, there has been some discussion about—are seeking to do. What should happen in this process is that those who are guilty should be punished, but those who are innocent should not be.

My hon. Friend raises another good point. The rules around redactions were mentioned earlier, and we should ensure that they are consistent between inquiries. We can learn many things from this, and we should build in those things for the future.

I will make three points—only three. First, we need scope and limits. Motions should set out the subject, the time period and the type of documents sought much more rigorously than this Humble Address did. Secondly, we need a proportionality check. When we voted on this Humble Address, we were not given financial information. Before the House votes, we should have an estimate from the Government of the likely cost, staff time involved and how long compliance will take. That should be part of our measured judgment. We can weigh that against the public interest and use that information when voting. Thirdly, we should use the right tool for the job. There are Select Committees, as we well know—the Foreign Affairs Committee has been rigorously looking at this issue—as well as written questions, freedom of information requests, police investigations, as there are in this case, and evidence under oath. There are other routes to transparency, too. I am not saying we should have used those things in this case—this is the right one for this matter—but we should be prepared to check with future Humble Addresses whether those other routes should not be used.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her thoughtful and important contribution. We need to ensure that if we use a Humble Address again, we use it as effectively as we can. We have talked about the amount of money, but will she also highlight the opportunity costs? We heard in the Committee from the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office about the amount of time that civil servants were spending on this. One particular gentleman had come back from Iran and was an expert on that, but he was spending his time on this issue, rather than being able to give the right sort of assistance to the Foreign Office on what we should be doing on Iran.

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Foreign affairs money is being spent on this, when it could have been spent on humanitarian aid or ensuring that our systems and processes are supporting those worldwide to make sure that we are all safer. The Intelligence and Security Committee has been looking at this issue a lot, but we face many other intelligence and security issues in the world. Huge amounts of senior civil servant time has been spent on the Humble Address, too, and those people have been reflecting on the process. I am sharing some of the frustrations that they are feeling, because they have had to look through an enormous amount of papers that are well outside the focused questions we are asking, such as, “Why was Peter Mandelson ever employed in the first place?” We should be looking at that with a laser-like intensity, but we have wide-ranging other bits of paper. I accept that we can never know what we do not know until we have looked at it all, but the civil servants—the ones in the middle of the process—have seen that there could be a far better process.

My hon. Friend is making an important contribution about the effort, time and amount of documentation involved. She has also spoken about the cost and suggested a number of things that the money could have paid for. Does she agree that one thing could have been an inquiry? That is what the victims and survivors are calling for, and reams of information could have been included in that that would not necessarily have been included in this Humble Address, as they would not necessarily be relevant to the appointment of Mandelson as the ambassador to the US.

I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend talked about the inquiry during her speech, and I thought exactly that: should there not be one so that, with all this money being spent, we can look at the victims and the necessary justice?

In my constituency, I am working the victims of the PIP breast implant scandal. Some 47,000 women are affected, and they have never had any amount of parliamentary money spent on any inquiry. They would look at what we are doing here and want us to look at the proportionality. I always like to raise their case, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I hope you will allow me to do so. We have to have those comparisons in our mind all the time, and as constituency MPs, we do.

Moving on from my three points about the Humble Address, which I hope the Procedure Committee will take up, I will briefly address the idea of publishing the full internal vetting document. I understand why Opposition Members want it published, and I share their frustration about the way in which the appointment was handled, but I must emphasise that I cannot support the publication of the raw vetting documents, because it would do lasting damage to our vetting process.

I do not think that anyone wants to publish that document. The point is that it was a document that could have been made available to the ISC not for publication, not for disclosure, but for scrutiny, because it might have informed our understanding of the whole process.

I thank the right hon. Member for that pushback, but, having spoken to those who carry out the vetting process, I know that understanding that anything you say may be disclosed to a parliamentary Committee is itself a hugely chilling factor. Vetting only works if civil servants can give the frankest, most professional advice without fearing that anything they say will be published or shared with Committees.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way again. She could still develop her case if she talked about parliamentary Committees in general, but I chaired the ISC for four years, and, as I said in an earlier intervention, the ISC has been in existence since 1994. The ISC never leaks. If it did leak, the person who leaked anything would be criminally prosecuted. There is no question, if these vetting documents were shown to the ISC, of its having a chilling effect on anything, because the ISC is hermetically sealed. It does not leak about far more important things than the miserable private life of Peter Mandelson.

I thank the right hon. Member for his comment about the ISC. I will continue to take advice from that vetting process: it needs to be even more hermetically sealed. We need to take real care over this. Any over-sharing will have an effect on everyone who is asked to sit down and give the frankest and most private information, and we need to make sure that they are doing that so that their potential risk to our security as a country is very well known. We cannot allow self-censoring because of this process. We do not need those far-reaching unintended consequences.

Is there not another argument? Certain people are thinking again about applying for jobs for which they may need to undergo developed vetting. Those people may well be women, people from ethnic minorities or people who are gay, for whom any disclosure would be so profoundly embarrassing that they would rather just not get the job.

My right hon. Friend has made the point very well. There are minority groups. There are people who do not know whether what they are worried about in respect of their past will be an issue, and they will not share that. They will not even go for the developed vetting, which means that they cannot rise within the Foreign Office. They may not even go for the job for fear of it.

We cannot allow that to be the unintended consequence of this process today. We cannot hear about it in 10 years’ time. There have been other issues that may have compromised our national security because they have not been shared, or have robbed us of serious talent and opportunity from across the country because people have not joined the ranks of our civil servants because of the things that we are sharing or not sharing within this process. It is not about more transparency; it is about less. It could potentially leave Ministers with less honest advice. It could potentially weaken accountability, and put unfair pressure on civil servants who serve Governments of all colours with impartiality. What the public need is the outcome of the vetting.

I agree with the hon. Lady, as someone who has been through the vetting process repeatedly in the past. Those who attend a vetting interview are told, “The information that you are going to give me is between you and me”—between the subject of the interview and the vetting officer. Of course the ISC is hermetically sealed, but if the person going through the process knows that the information will be given to anyone other than the vetting officer, it makes that person think, “Should I be giving this information?” and that compromises the entire vetting system.

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention—it is helpful to understand what happens inside the process. It has to be between the person and the vetting officer, and they must not think that it will be shared further. That is absolutely at the heart of it.

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I give way for the last time.

I am extremely grateful; the hon. Lady is being very generous with her time. I want to develop the point from a slightly different angle. What we are really interested in are the conclusions of the vetting process, not the material that leads to the conclusions. It is therefore entirely possible that we could give all the reassurances that she and the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) have made clear are important to those who contribute to the vetting process, but also make sure that, in the interests of disclosure on occasions such as this, the House can be clear about the conclusions of the vetting process without being told the raw information on which those conclusions are based.

I thank the right hon. and learned Member. I have honestly enjoyed these interventions and I appreciate the spirit of dialogue in the House today. We are tackling a very difficult issue and we want to get it right.

I agree that the public need the outcome of the vetting: who was consulted, what risks were identified, what decisions were taken, whether a proper process was followed, and what on earth the mitigations were. The Cabinet Secretary or relevant permanent secretary can be called to a Select Committee to answer those questions directly, as the Foreign Affairs Committee has done. That is scrutiny, but publishing the raw documents is counterproductive.

To conclude, I remain appalled by, and very critical of, the Mandelson appointment. My constituents deserve full answers, and I await the documents being released by the Metropolitan police after its investigation, but we need to review this process that has cost so much, financially and in the opportunity cost. We also need to put some guardrails around the use of the Humble Address for any future requests, so that they stay focused on the issues that are meant to be investigated. We must make sure that when we demand accountability, we do it in a way that is effective, responsible and sustainable.

I entirely agree with what the hon. Lady is saying. Does she agree with me about this? We have established clearly that those blank boxes, in which the Prime Minister could have made a comment when he was given the crucial information and the options leading up to the appointment of Mandelson, were intentionally blank. They are there precisely for the Prime Minister to record his response and, indeed, his decision. The fact that they were not redacted, but were genuinely blank, suggests to me—I cannot think of any other explanation—that the Prime Minister did not want to fill them in because he knew that there was something shameful about the appointment he was about to approve, and he did not want it on the record.

I originally thought that a large number of Members would want to attend this debate, because it goes to the heart of so much about the political system of this country, and the power and influence of very wealthy people around the world. I am sure that this is not the only time we will debate the issue, and I hope there will be a more thorough public inquiry into it later down the line.

We should also thank the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for what she said in her speech, the way she put it, and the way she placed centre stage the victims—some of whom are nameless—of the depravity of Jeffrey Epstein and the whole golden circle surrounding him, as well as the fact that one of those victims took her own life as a result.

The victims were young women who were trafficked and exploited by very wealthy men who felt that they could get away with it. Even after Epstein’s initial conviction, those men carried on gravitating towards his golden light, the money and influence he exuded, and the way he made his money, which was all about helping the super-rich in the United States avoid paying tax by relocating their resources to the US Virgin Islands. The millions that Epstein made, and the millions that were not paid in tax by those very rich people, are millions not spent on health, housing, education and all the other things that working-class communities need.

Somewhere along the line, Epstein was apparently almost forgiven for his crimes, and then they came back much later on. We can now begin to see the whole, horrible story unravelling. Surely there is an object lesson here about unaccountable power, unbelievable levels of arrogance, supreme levels of wealth, and the way in which politicians—probably less wealthy than Epstein and some of his mates—were seduced by the super-yacht, the private island, the private jet, the big dinner, and so on. All of that is a corruption of our political system.

Unless we do something about the influence of big business, super-wealth and money in politics, then everything that Bernie Sanders says about the USA having the best democracy that money can buy will soon apply to this country as well. We have got to be much stronger about needing a purer form of democracy and accountability within our society.

This is a debate on Peter Mandelson. I remember, when Mandelson first appeared in this building as the media director of the Labour party, discussing him with Tony Benn in the Tea Room. Tony had met him at the meeting of the national executive, where he was introduced to the Labour party. I saw Tony that evening and asked him, “What was it like?”, and he said, “Well, this guy Mandelson is going to give us all a lot of trouble.” He then wrote in his diaries that evening:

“I find Mandelson a threatening figure for the future of the Party.”

Tony recognised that Mandelson’s whole objective was a political one: to take the Labour party away from its roots—away from its trade union connections and the working-class communities—and to turn it into a party of business. As the hon. Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) and others pointed out earlier, that eventually ended up with Labour Together and the huge amounts of money it spent trying again to subvert the whole principle behind the Labour party.

The results of all that are being paid for day in, day out—in hospitals spending 15% of their expenditure on private finance initiatives, in schools having to pay debts related to Building Schools for the Future and so on. The whole idea was that the state should become an arm of business rather than providing services that are necessary for the people of our society. Mandelson was successful in many ways in turning things away from their original purpose. All the contracts that are now being agreed upon are a consequence of that sort of philosophy and those sorts of political dealings that went on.

In an earlier debate on this subject, I said that there has to be a serious and open public inquiry into the influence of business, money and corruption on our political system. I understand the limitations of the Intelligence and Security Committee and its work, which is why I intervened on the deputy Chair, the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), earlier on. I am sure—he may well agree with me—that this will not be done and dusted by his Committee and that it will actually go on for a very long time, because it goes to the heart of democracy within our society.

I hope that at the end of this, we do have an open public debate about money and politics, and a serious open inquiry that will get to the heart of everything that is going on, because if we do not, we will all be the weaker for it. As the hon. Member for Pontypridd pointed out, the victims here are known to be those young women who had such a terrible experience and terrible time at the hands of the rich and powerful. If we do not have such an inquiry and debate, there will be other victims of the rich and powerful further down the line.

I know that time is of the essence, so I will just talk briefly about Palantir. On 22 July 2025—less than a year ago—Peter Mandelson sent an email to Morgan McSweeney. The subject was a name: Peter Thiel. Mandelson wrote:

“This celebrated techie is in London til Aug 9. I don’t know whether you have been approached already,”

saying it would be good for the PM to meet him—so the ambassador to Washington starts trying to set up meetings with a tech entrepreneur who happens to be a friend and supporter of Donald Trump. Contained in the second tranche of the so-called Mandelson files laid before Parliament, the email is one of a series in which Mandelson personally connected the UK Government to Palantir, the data analytics and surveillance firm co-founded by Thiel, and to the wider network of investors around it, at a time when his own consultancy firm, Global Counsel, still counted Palantir among its clients. Is that corrupt or what? The ambassador to Washington owned a company whose client he was trying to introduce to the head of the British Government via a series of private emails using connections that he had obviously obtained through the Labour party over a very long time. Mandelson did not divest himself of his significant financial stake in 2024 despite official advice that he should do so before taking up his appointment. That advice stated:

“the retained role and interest in Global Counsel would have to cease”,

if Mandelson were appointed His Majesty’s ambassador. But it did not. Mandelson carried on with that, as we well know.

We also know that the Prime Minister met representatives of the firm with Peter Mandelson in Washington. That was the mysterious meeting that apparently nobody was at, although it did happen; of which there is no record, and yet everybody was there; and during which no discussion went on because nothing was reported, and yet we all know that it took place because they were filmed going into it. That took place only a fortnight after Mandelson had started the job.

Days later, on 5 March 2025, a partner in the silicon valley venture firm 137 Ventures—an investor in both Palantir and the defence company Anduril—emailed an invitation for Mandelson to attend the Hill and Valley Forum, a Washington gathering that brings together defence technology executives and Congress. The sender’s name was redacted, but the file notes that Mandelson was attending “with Louis”, who we understand to be Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir’s UK business. And so, this very tight connection of people goes on.

According to Ethan Shone of openDemocracy, Mandelson’s security “mitigations” forbade such one-to-one meetings with former clients like Palantir—a restriction which, like divestment from Global Counsel, the former ambassador assiduously ignored. He did not fulfil the requirements to divest himself and not to follow up those connections, and, as others in the debate have pointed out, he was very generous and free with his email advice to just about everybody, trying to set things up all the time.

There are many ironies surrounding Peter Mandelson. The most useful thing he ever said was that he hated me, wanted nothing to do with me and woke up every morning trying to get rid of me when I was leader of the Labour party. I take that as a badge of honour, actually, because I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him and the politics that went with him.

Mandelson managed to land a deal for Palantir. That was his achievement, and in his farewell letter to embassy staff, he singled out that one achievement. He wrote that the UK leaves the relationship with the United States

“in a really good condition, with a magnificent state visit and the new US-UK technology partnership—my personal pride and joy that will help write the next chapter of the special relationship—set for next week.”

Obviously the visit went ahead without him.

Palantir confirmed that it would invest £1.5 billion in the UK and expand its Ministry of Defence contract to £750 million over five years, replacing a £75 million, three-year arrangement. The deal was folded into the technology prosperity deal that Trump and the Prime Minister signed at Chequers the next day. In only a short time as ambassador, he embroiled us in all this stuff with Palantir and set up this technology agreement with the USA.

As we all know, because we hear it from our constituents, people who use the NHS are alarmed that Palantir will get hold of their medical records. They are concerned that the company will get hold of the entirety of the NHS and social security records—in other words, crucial personal information on every single person that has lived or died in this country since 1948.

Are we seriously saying that we, as a society and country, are incapable of setting up our own technology arrangement? I do want data sharing within the NHS. I want it to be the case that when someone goes to the doctor, they can access that person’s records quickly and sort out what is wrong with them. I want that technology in place for A&E departments, but I do not want those records to be shared with a company that is busy advising Israel on how it will go about its bombardment of Gaza and trying to get hold of other contracts all around the world

Do we have to mortgage ourselves to an American multinational that will have control of and access to vast amounts of data? Surely to goodness, we have enough ambition and ability to develop our own systems within the NHS. We are all proud of the NHS, but let us not destroy it by handing it over to the private sector. Let us not destroy the whole philosophy behind it by giving it over to those who will make money out of it rather than deal with the obvious health issues that so many people face.

I hope that the lesson from all this is that when the political system becomes corrupted by lack of principle and the amounts of money made available to people—the private donations that are still made by private health interests and others to Members and the parties represented in this House—we are all the losers; democracy is the loser, and ultimately the price is paid by the poorest and most vulnerable people within our society.

It is a great pleasure to be the last Back-Bench contributor. I actually mean that, because unlike some debates which we have all been in, this one has been characterised by knowledge and a really serious approach to the subject in hand. I have learned a lot, and I am grateful for many of the contributions made.

The right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) made quite a good point when he said that he was surprised there were not more people in the Chamber to take part in the debate. Perhaps one of the reasons why the Chamber is relatively sparsely populated is that this feels like old news. It is easy to lose the sense of wonder and shock at the seriousness of the allegations that led to the Humble Address.

It is old news that Peter Mandelson was grossly unfit for public office—we have known that for decades. Tony Blair knew it, because he sacked him for dishonesty not once but twice. We have known for years that Peter Mandelson was a byword for double-dealing—after all, his nickname was the Prince of Darkness, and that did not come from nowhere. We have known for years, unfortunately, of his continued friendship with his best pal, Mr Epstein—that they were such close friends, and that Mandelson was so on Epstein’s side that he stayed in Epstein’s house even when Epstein was in prison for child sexual offences. We say that too often without stopping to realise what it actually means. It is an extraordinary statement. We knew that. The Prime Minister appointed Mandelson despite knowing those things and despite having advice on vetting from his then Cabinet Secretary. He ignored that advice. This, of course, is the Prime Minister who famously said that he was going to put “country before party”. On this occasion, he appeared to put party before national security. It is pretty serious.

Some months ago, we had the unedifying spectacle of the Government attempting through obfuscation to cover up this scandal. They whipped their Back Benchers to vote down the release of relevant documents, which was such a grubby move that it fomented such revolt among Labour Members that the Government were forced into a climbdown.

Then there were not one but two stolen phones. I accept that perhaps that happened, but there were also no messages from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no messages from the Deputy Prime Minister—although we know that no one tells him anything, so perhaps we have not missed anything there—and no messages from the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, either. We also had the use of disappearing messages, with no record kept by the Prime Minister, in direct contradiction of Cabinet Office guidance for the retention of records. All that was found out drip by drip, one painful and damning piece of evidence after another, as a result of the Conservative-led Humble Address.

Yet we are still not at the end. It is clear from the documents that have been released that there are obvious continuing gaps in disclosure. Messages have been leaked to the press, including The Guardian and The Spectator, which are not included in the release to Parliament, even though they were ordered to be. The Intelligence and Security Committee—an organisation of eminent Members of the House from across the parties—has given its opinion that the Government are interpreting exclusion of material on the grounds of prejudice to national security or international relations “far too broadly”.

I am sorry to say this, but it feels that the Government are still at it, because they are withholding documents. We have talked a lot about the vetting file. If that file is too difficult to disclose, at least its conclusions should be shared with the ISC, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) suggested. It is important that the Government have no legal authority to take decisions not to disclose. As the Intelligence and Security Committee said,

“while Government may believe that there is good reason to withhold certain documents, it does not currently have the authority to so do.”

It is not for officials to decide what is released to Parliament; Parliament decides. If the instruction—a direction from the high court of Parliament to officials—is thought by officials to be too widely framed, it is the responsibility of Ministers to come to this House and persuade Parliament to change its mind. They have not done so.

One of the things that really worries me about this Administration is that officials appear to think that they can decide what is and is not supplied to Parliament. That undermines the administration of this country by democracy. Parliament is where decisions are taken; we are the people who decide what authority is granted to the Executive. For officials to then decide, perhaps for good reason, that they will not comply with the direction of the high court of Parliament undermines our entire democratic process. They do not have the legal authority to make that decision. It is for the Government to stand up for Parliament, and if they think that Parliament has made too wide a direction, they must come and persuade us of that, and they will no doubt get a vote to correct it.

The hon. Member will recall that the Conservative Humble Address motion required the sharing of all communications

“between ministers and Lord Mandelson, in the six months prior to his appointment”,

and all communications among

“ministers, Government officials and special advisers during his time as Ambassador”.

That was a hugely broad scope. Does the hon. Member think that when the Government amended that and proposed to exclude any of those things subject or prejudicial to national security and international relations, they were serious in wanting all that information to be shared with the ISC? Or does he think that the Government were trying to be too smart and too clever by half, suggesting that His Majesty’s Opposition were acting against national security and international relations?

I would never accuse the Government of being too clever by half, and I am unable to put myself in their heads. However, I hear the hon. Member’s concern.

We have this drip, drip, drip: the failed cover-up, the partial disclosure, the embarrassing exposures and the continued unauthorised retention. When will the Government realise that this is not going to stop and that this painful, weeping sore will remain open until they finally deliver what the Humble Address requires of them?

That brings us to the Front-Bench contributions. I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I open my remarks by paying tribute to Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, who we learned had passed away during this debate. He was an incredible public servant who gave an enormous amount to his country. He was incredibly wise and generous, and I know that everyone in this House will miss him very much.

In all these parliamentary encounters, we have been talking about a seeping of a great poison. The evil of Epstein seeped into his relationship with Peter Mandelson, which seeped into Mandelson’s influence on Government, which is still seeping into the way in which the Government have allowed themselves to behave. It is time for that to stop. Although we are approaching the point when we might be able to draw a line, that point is still quite a long way away, because we are dependent on the police releasing their documents.

With that in mind, I ask the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to try a new approach: for us to build on what has already happened and go further, so that the House can be more reassured about what it is and is not being given sight of. As far as anyone can see, there is no good reason why the Government cannot tell the House more at the high level. As I said earlier, on Monday the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister gave us something more high-level in the four categories, but we can go further.

There is no good reason why the information that has been given to the police cannot be given to the ISC. The Government could unilaterally decide to do that; they do not need to ask anyone’s permission. As has been raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) who used to be Chair of the Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who is not in his place, who is a current member of the Committee, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who is still on the Committee, this House has complete trust in the ISC. It entrusts it with the most confidential material that the state has on offer—STRAP-level material—so I do not think anyone here would believe that sharing the material given to the police with the ISC would in any way run the risk of prejudicing a trial. Consequently, I genuinely invite the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to give the House that.

All of us, even those who are not members of the ISC, should be entitled to know a bit more. We should be entitled to know about the number of messages being withheld. We should be given a degree of detail, because there is no reason why that would prejudice an investigation or a trial. I will go through a few points and then I will sit down and let the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister respond.

I want to return to the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister’s own messages, not because I think he has done anything wrong—I do not believe he has—but because he disclosed to us the other day that he had messages that he did not feel were relevant and I wonder if he could tell us about them. They are obviously not in the returns, but because the Humble Address required the disclosure of messages between Ministers and Peter Mandelson, we need to know the process that was gone through with messages that were not in the Humble Address returns. Were they deleted? Were they deleted after they had been shown to officials? Were they shown to officials and it was decided they were not to be disclosed? It would be very good to have clarity, because it might give us insight into how other such messages were treated.

Secondly, on the question of Morgan McSweeney’s messages, which we know still existed in April this year when he talked to the Foreign Affairs Committee about them and said that they were already in the possession of the Government because of the inquiry that Wormald had done in September last year, will the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister confirm that the process discovered those messages and consequently that Morgan McSweeney was telling the truth to that Committee? Do those messages exist? I do not think it prejudices an investigation or trial to know that those messages exist.

Similarly, with Morgan McSweeney’s messages, the Prime Minister’s messages, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s messages, and so on, we deserve to know how many messages are being withheld. There is nothing in that data that would prejudice an investigation or a trial. That is what we care about—I know that is what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister cares about—and if the Government were to co-operate in that way, it would show a willingness and a transparency that we have not previously had.

Related to that is the issue that I and several Back Benchers raised about other forms of electronic communication, particularly pictures, videos, voice recordings and attachments, none of which have made their way into the Humble Address returns. It seems very unlikely that all of them have been retained by the police, particularly when the messages they are related to are in the Humble Address returns. It feels like they have slipped through the net. Can the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister tell us a bit more about that?

Lastly, to return to the point made by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and by my right hon. Friends, during the course of this debate I believe we have ascertained that the ISC did not see the mitigations. The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has not been able to detect any mitigations. I think we deserve to know whether there were any mitigations. Even if we cannot be told what they were, and even if we are told that they are being retained by the police, there is no good reason why we should not be told whether or not they exist. There is nothing in that information that would prejudice an investigation or a trial.

It is time for the Government to take us to the next level of transparency. I very much hope that that is what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister wants to do, because ultimately, all of this will come out in due course. If it does, and it turns out that the Government were unnecessarily withholding information, the scandal will continue again and again and it will infect more and more people. It does not need to do that. Let’s clear this up now.

I thank Members from across the House for their contributions this afternoon and for sharing the condolences expressed by the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), on the news that we learned during the debate that Sir Alex Younger, the former director general of MI6, had passed.

As I have said to the House before, while it is right for Members to discuss process and how the Government have responded to the Humble Address, we must not neglect to remember the women and girls who are at the very heart of this matter. Their suffering cannot be forgotten in this pursuit of justice—a pursuit that has been denied to them for too long. On that point, I want to start by paying particular thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for her powerful speech this afternoon and to take this opportunity to thank her for the work she carried out so diligently as part of this Government as the Minister for Victims.

The accounts that my hon. Friend has shared with this House this afternoon from victims such as Lisa are harrowing and should remind us of the anger and suffering that they rightly continue to feel each time we have one of these debates. But my hon. Friend’s speech has made me think that just reading the words on this page alone feels insufficient in the context of the cultural challenges that she raised, and with your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to take a moment to take this opportunity to ask myself questions about my relationship with Peter Mandelson.

Did I consciously ignore the stories that followed Peter Mandelson, or indeed know about many of them, from many, many years ago? I do not think that I did. Did I ever ignore warnings that were put to me about Peter Mandelson? I did not receive any, to do so. But as I reflected on my hon. Friend’s speech, it made me think: did I at best subconsciously treat Peter Mandelson differently because I believed him to have influence and power within the Labour party? I think the answer to that question is yes, I did. Have I benefited from that relationship in the time I have been an elected politician? I think in part the answer to that question is yes, I did. For that I would like to apologise to the House, to the victims, to Lisa, and commit to then doing something about it.

In the first instance, I hear my hon. Friend’s request for a meeting with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. I know that there is a request with No. 10 for the Prime Minister to do so, but if she thinks it appropriate, I make myself available for that meeting to discuss the issues that she has raised. I know that she will continue to be a strong advocate from the Back Benches for the action this Government are taking to halve violence against women and girls, as well as to pursue the duty of candour on which I know she worked so hard, and I look forward to continuing my work with her on these important issues.

The Minister has shown once again what a decent man he is, and he is doing a very difficult job in defence of somebody who knew a lot more than he did. He was not chief of staff at the time that the Mandelson appointment was being carried out. On page 8 of the first bundle, we have the note from the private secretary to the Prime Minister, which says:

“We have sought a due diligence review…and your Chief of Staff”—

Morgan McSweeney at the time—

“has discussed Peter’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein which we will go through with you, but your Director of Communications is satisfied with his responses to questions about contact.”

However, we also know from earlier in the bundle that the Prime Minister specifically knew that Mandelson had stayed in Epstein’s flat while Epstein was in in jail for the abuse of an under-age girl. The Prime Minister knew all that at the time. What is the purpose of having a box at the end marked for the Prime Minister’s comments on the alternatives he has been given when in fact, as we now know and as has been clearly explained by the Paymaster General, there has been no redaction—the Prime Minister did not comment? Why did the Prime Minister withhold any remarks on this highly contentious matter? Where did he comment? Where did he give his decision? He certainly did not do it in the place that he was supposed to do it.

In relation to the first part of the right hon. Gentleman’s question, he will know, because I have confirmed it to the House at the Dispatch Box previously, that questions were put by the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff to Peter Mandelson following the due diligence report to seek further information about the stories reported in the newspaper. He will also know that Peter Mandelson replied to those questions, and that information was then considered by those in No. 10.

As I have confirmed to the House, that document—the question and its answers—is one of the documents being held by the Metropolitan police. I have been advised repeatedly that I am not permitted to disclose what I have seen in that document on the Floor of the House, so I am afraid it will have to be one of those questions that remains until such a time as the Metropolitan police publishes its documentation. In relation to the second part of the right hon. Gentleman’s question, I refer him to the Paymaster General’s answer earlier today. That is the answer to that question.

This is my 11th update to the House on this matter, and I am grateful for the opportunity to answer Members’ questions. I will speak to a number of issues first, before turning to some specific questions from Members and setting out what the Government intend to do next.

Since the Humble Address motion was passed on 4 February, the House will know that a huge disclosure exercise has been undertaken by Government officials. The motion called for the disclosure of documents in respect of the appointment and dismissal of Peter Mandelson as His Majesty’s ambassador to Washington, alongside relevant communications. The publication of documents on 11 March, followed by the second tranche on Monday, has done that, in the Government’s view. I hope the Government have provided the House with the reassurance it needs that, with the exception of the small number of documents withheld at the request of the Metropolitan police, which we intend to publish when we are allowed to do so, the Government have discharged their duties to the House in relation to the Humble Address.

In those terms, at what point did the Metropolitan police ask for the vetting summary? Clearly it is now a known fact that there was an assumption that that vetting summary, but not the granular detail, was likely to be published, albeit in a redacted form, having been through the normal process.

If the right hon. Member will forgive me, I have noted that question from earlier in the debate, and I will come to it in a grouping shortly.

I note the comments and questions today from Members on the process that officials have led to support the Government in responding to the Humble Address. As I have said each time I have been at the Dispatch Box, the Government have taken their obligations to comply with the Humble Address seriously and, in their view, have done so in full.

I hear the calls of some Members for the Government to provide further detail on Peter Mandelson’s vetting. As I told the House on Monday, we have shared the vetting summary and recommendation with the Intelligence and Security Committee. However, the vetting inputs collected as part of those investigations would never be published, because if the Government did so, people would feel unable to answer those questions honestly and frankly in any UK Security Vetting investigation in the future—a point that was made by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin), who has been through that process. That would undermine our national security—not just in this instance, but the very basis of the national security system itself. It would have far-reaching impacts that no responsible Government rightly should entertain.

On that basis, I welcome the comments from the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Lord Beamish, on Monday night. He said that he

“agrees with the Government that the larger vetting documents shouldn’t be released to the Committee”

because of the potential impact on the vetting system. The former National Security Adviser, Lord Sedwill, wrote in a letter published in The Times today that

“the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has seen a summary of the issues that vetting inevitably raised. That should be sufficient for Parliament to judge the Prime Minister’s handling of this episode. Any Humble Address requiring disclosure of Lord Mandelson’s detailed submissions or vetting file would be a serious mistake.”

In the other place yesterday, Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former director general of MI5, said:

“I know that security vetting is very detailed—I have been subjected to it many times myself. It goes to your school, education, employers and friends, and people speak frankly. If for one moment they felt it was going to be published, security vetting designed to protect the most secret information would be of little value. Whatever else we do, we must hold on to that. However tempting it would be, for whatever reason, to know the full contents, they must not be revealed. I am talking not about this case but about a general principle.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 2 June 2026; Vol. 856, c. 764.]

I hear the arguments put by right hon. and hon. Members in the House today, but I do say that not just the Government’s position, but the advice from the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, a former National Security Adviser and a former director general of MI5 should be taken seriously.

I have said repeatedly that the summary has been given to the Intelligence and Security Committee. I think the hon. Lady may be confusing the summary and the recommendation from the interview information that was collected between the UKSV official and Peter Mandelson. This is important because, as the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells said, when someone goes into an interview with a UKSV specialist and they say, “You must tell me everything, and it will go no further,” if that were to be handed over to a politician—even a politician on the Intelligence and Security Committee—it would undermine the very basis of that work.

We need to be very clear about this: the arguments the Minister is making are right, but as the hon. Lady points out, they are not a response to the arguments we are making. The argument that has been made to him by the Intelligence and Security Committee, as he knows, is that there is no harm to be found in the disclosure of the conclusions of the vetting process. We accept absolutely that the contributing material that led to those conclusions should not be disclosed. I need him to be very clear that it is our view that the conclusions could be disclosed, and there is no harm to be done to national security, which there would be if the contributing material were disclosed, by the disclosure of the conclusions. Will he confirm that?

Again, it is important to distinguish between the notes and information collected in the interview process, which some Members have called to be given to the Intelligence and Security Committee, and the interviewer’s recommendation and summary and conclusions, which, as I say, the Government have already given to the Intelligence and Security Committee. The fact that documents that have gone through the ISC have not appeared in the bundles of this week must be in relation to the fact that categories of information given to the Metropolitan police are relevant to this question.

Moving to the documents that Members may have expected to see in the second tranche, as I said on Monday, some messages may not have been captured where people may have previously changed their phones without having backed up their messages or where they had disappearing messages turned on, and I noted to the House on Monday that that included myself. In my circumstance, to answer the questions from the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, it is not that I took a unilateral decision about messages that I felt were in scope or not in scope of the Humble Address; it is merely that I have access to no messages to disclose.

That is an important distinction because the disclosure process that took place involved the Cabinet Office writing to every Department, to permanent secretary and principal private secretary level for all relevant Ministers, special advisers and officials, to set out the guidance on which the disclosure process should take place—that is, for example, to include WhatsApp and other communication services, emails, personal devices, work devices and other messaging platforms—and a clear set of guidance about what would be in scope and not in scope. Permanent secretaries as the accounting officers to Parliament for each of those Departments were individually made liable for ensuring that that disclosure process took place in line with the guidance. The Cabinet Office did not go to each person in each Department and conduct that itself; it executed it through Departments in line with the process that I have set out.

I just want to make sure that I understand—I hope the Minister will forgive me if I do not. In his case, was it his permanent secretary as the accounting officer who verified that the messages he had were not admissible to the process?

The hon. Gentleman misunderstands: there were no messages to consider and that is different.

The reason I brought this up is that on Monday the right hon. Gentleman said:

“I do recall having some limited exchanges with Peter Mandelson over WhatsApp, including those I have already discussed in the media”.—[Official Report, 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 853.]

I do not wish to push this point too far, but I do wish to understand: there were messages, so who decided that they were not to be submitted under the Humble Address? Please can he explain?

I have tried to explain the answer to that question a number of times. There was no decision to disregard any messages because there are no messages to consider. What I confirmed on Monday was that I have had WhatsApp exchanges with Peter Mandelson, but I have not saved them on my devices to be able to share with my principal private secretary. The only person who could release those messages, if they have them, would be Peter Mandelson, who has refused to disclose his phone to the process—[Interruption.]

Order. Mr Burghart, please can you observe the courtesies of the House and ensure that the debate continues in an orderly fashion?

As an extension of that question, the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster asked me to comment on how this relates to Morgan McSweeney’s messages. I am afraid that I did not conduct that conversation or investigation, so I cannot answer on the specifics of that question.

I will now turn to some of the specific questions raised by Members during the debate, which I have grouped in a way that I hope is satisfactory to the House. The first group relates to vetting information, information on mitigations, both commercial and related to national security, and the question of attachments. I have already addressed the issue of vetting information. In relation to mitigations, I confirm to the House that I have not personally seen any of the UKSV information nor the summary, recommendations or any mitigation information that was put in place, so I cannot speak to this question from personal experience. However, I note my comment on Monday that the Metropolitan police have permitted us to confirm that the categories of documents that they are holding include vetting information and conflict of interest process material. Unfortunately, that is all I am able to say on the matter.

Does the Minister appreciate that there may be a difference between conflict of interest information and national security mitigations, and that he may be able to tell us about some of that information but not able to tell us whether or not there were mitigations to defend national security?

I share the expectation of my right hon. Friend that there would be a difference between commercial mitigations—for example, what investments there may be in particular companies—and mitigations that may have arisen from national security considerations. What I do not know is whether that was the case and how they were dealt with in any particular instance, because I do not have that information to hand.

Lastly on this first group of questions, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) asked me to confirm the relevant detail in relation to the Metropolitan police dates and documents. As I have set out previously, I have been advised that I am not permitted to put that on the public record, but I am happy to go back to the Metropolitan police to see if there is anything further that we can add in due course.

When the Metropolitan police have concluded their investigation, all of that material will return to the ISC, and presumably the Government will then want to publish the information, albeit in an appropriate and redacted form.

Again, I do not know which documents the Metropolitan police have, so I cannot speak to them specifically, but I share the sentiment of the right hon. Gentleman’s point.

The shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster asked me to confirm that there was a leak inquiry under way in relation to what appears to be information from UKSV being in the hands of Guardian journalists. I can confirm that that leak inquiry is under way but has not yet concluded.

Questions of judgment and due diligence have been put to me. I have already answered the point about the follow-up questions to the due diligence report and can only reiterate to the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom), the words of the Prime Minister when he said that he regrets the appointment and has apologised for it.

The deputy Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), made the helpful suggestion that we should think about codifying the precedent on which the Government rely when making redactions for the future. I commit to taking that away and taking advice, not least on what that might mean in terms of House business and Government business.

My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) made some interesting points about how Humble Addresses may be used in the future, given that the House seems to have decided that it wants to use them more often than has been the case in the past. I was then asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) to confirm the Government’s continued commitment to the duty of candour legislation, which I can confirm. As he knows, there have been discussions with families and others about refining some of the final points in that legislation. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) asked me about freedom of information requests, and I commit to taking that question away and asking officials to try to respond as promptly as possible.

As the Prime Minister has set out, there are clearly significant lessons to be learned from the issues that arose from Peter Mandelson’s appointment, so while the Government consider that they have now duly discharged their obligations in respect of the Humble Address, they will none the less continue work on a number of important areas. Those include our commitment to bring forward legislation to ensure that peerages can be removed from disgraced peers, noting that Peter Mandelson has already been removed from the list of Privy Counsellors, and changing the process for direct ministerial appointments so that due diligence and national security vetting must take place prior to announcement.

I say politely to the hon. Lady that I have already answered all of those questions.

The Government will continue their review with Sir Adrian Fulford, looking at recommendations for the national security vetting system arising from the lessons of the Peter Mandelson case. We are ordering an examination of any security concerns raised during Peter Mandelson’s tenure as ambassador, which the Government Security Group in the Cabinet Office is now taking forward. We are commissioning an independent review of how non-corporate communications channels, including WhatsApp, are used in Government. In addition, the Cabinet Secretary has written to all heads of department to clarify the rules on record keeping and ensure they are being properly applied across Government. The Government have also noted the Intelligence and Security Committee’s comments on the management of sensitive information; I share those concerns, and have expressed them at the Dispatch Box. The Government are committed to raising information security standards, and will take further action on this issue.

As I have committed to previously, I will return to the House to update it on the progress of this work in due course, but on the basis of my statements today and on Monday this week, the Government now consider that they have duly discharged their obligations in respect of the Humble Address. I thank the Intelligence and Security Committee, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, and right hon. and hon. Members for their work on this matter and their contributions to today’s debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Government’s response to the House’s humble Address of 4 February 2026.