(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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18:13 - The House divided: - Ayes: 223 / Noes: 335 - Question accordingly negatived.
Mr Speaker
Before we begin the next item of business, I think it would be helpful to the House if I reminded Members of the decision in question and the procedures for today’s debate. The decision before the House today is not whether a contempt has been committed; it is whether to refer the matter to the Privileges Committee. If such a referral is made, it will be for the Committee to report back to this House in due course and make any necessary recommendations.
The debate today may continue until 7 o’clock at the latest, at which time there will need to be a successful closure motion, or the debate will be adjourned to a future date. In recent years, the length of time taken for debates on similar motions has ranged from seven minutes to five hours. Any Members who wish to speak need to stand at the beginning of the debate to ensure that they catch my eye. If the debate becomes very repetitive, we may have to consider whether it would be appropriate to accept an early closure motion.
Finally, Members will be aware of the rules relating to good temper and moderation in parliamentary language. Today’s proceedings are on a substantive motion relating to specific responses by the Prime Minister to this House. It is perfectly in order for hon. Members to question the veracity of the responses cited in the motion, and to debate whether or not they were misleading. However, it is not in order to challenge in more general terms the truthfulness of the Prime Minister.
The Leader of the Opposition has tabled a motion for debate on the matter of privilege, which I have agreed should take precedence today. I call her to move the motion.
Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House
(1) notes the Rt hon Member for Holborn and St Pancras’s assurances on the floor of the House about “full due process” being followed in the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States of America, in particular (but not limited to) answers given on 10 September 2025, 4 February and 22 April 2026, further notes his assertion on 20 April 2026 that he “had made it clear that my position was that the position was subject to developed vetting” and his assertions that “Sir Olly Robbins was absolutely clear that nobody put pressure on him to make this appointment” and that “No pressure existed whatsoever in relation to this case” on 22 April 2026; and
(2) accordingly orders that these matters be referred to the Committee of Privileges to consider whether, in making these and other related statements, the Rt hon Member may have misled the House, and whether such conduct amounts to a contempt of the House, bearing in mind the standards expected of Ministers as set out in the House’s own resolution on Ministerial Accountability and the Ministerial Code.
Shall we pick up where we left off last Tuesday, when we had an emergency debate about the Government’s accountability to Parliament over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as our ambassador to the United States? The very next day at Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister read out selective quotes from Sir Olly Robbins’ evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee, and deliberately left out critical sections to make it seem as if that evidence had exonerated him. The Prime Minister told the House that
“No pressure existed whatsoever in relation to this case.”—[Official Report, 22 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 316.]
That is not what the record shows. Let me read Sir Olly Robbins’ exact quote:
“Throughout January…my office and the Foreign Secretary’s office were under constant pressure. There was an atmosphere of constant chasing”.
So how can the Prime Minister tell us that Sir Olly Robbins said “No pressure existed whatsoever”? Everybody heard what Olly Robbins said; we are not here to test whether Members have good hearing. People can look in Hansard. As Mr Speaker said, the question today is whether this matter should be referred to the Privileges Committee. It is a question of whether this House and Labour MPs really believe in full due process, and whether Labour MPs have the integrity to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee, knowing what we all know and can all read in Hansard.
The ministerial code is very clear that Ministers who mislead the House must correct the record “at the earliest opportunity”. It is very obvious that what the Prime Minister said at the Dispatch Box was not correct—it is clear that full due process was not followed. If Labour MPs allow the Whips to force them to block the consequences of those decisions, it will degrade not just them, but this House. The question is what kind of people they are. Are they people who will live up to the promises they made about standards and the rules mattering, or are they people who abandon their promises in order to be complicit in a cover-up?
Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)
On 4 February, this House unanimously passed a motion on a Humble Address. It was the opinion of the whole House that all the documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment should be made available and published, and that—[Interruption.] Wait for the question. The House agreed that those documents that were considered sensitive should go to the Intelligence and Security Committee. The Conservative party accepted an amendment to that effect on 4 February, but it seems that the Leader of the Opposition is not going to wait for the outcome of that process. Why has she moved this motion today?
Mrs Badenoch
That is an excellent question. We asked for the release of documents, and then when the evidence came, showing what the Cabinet Secretary said in November 2024 about what full due process was, it was very clear that those instructions had not been followed. We also know that the latest information about the problems with the security vetting did not come from the Humble Address; it came from a leak to The Guardian. Why should we wait for a never-never process that is clearly not happening? In last week’s Standing Order No. 24 debate, even members of the Intelligence and Security Committee said that there were delays to the release of the documents.
Labour Members want to pretend that this motion is something that only one party is backing. I remind them that it is a cross-party motion, supported by Members from across this House—by independents, the Lib Dems, the DUP and the SNP. Calling this a stunt is disrespecting this House and disrespecting Mr Speaker. From listening to the media and seeing Labour Members’ tweets, it is very obvious that they have all been told to come to the Chamber today and tell everybody that this motion is a stunt. Why are they acting like sheep? They should be better than that. By the way, we will count how many times in this debate Labour Members stand up and say that this is a stunt. Some people might even be shouting “Bingo!”. We are looking forward to it.
Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I think my right hon. Friend is being a little too harsh on the limited number of Labour MPs present. The entire reputation of the Prime Minister of this country—the leader of their party—is on the line, and they are not turning out for him, because they know that he is now a laughing stock. Having called round their MPs, the Government found that they had to impose a three-line Whip to get them to spare the Prime Minister’s blushes. Can my right hon. Friend be a little bit kinder to Labour Members, especially the brave ones who are prepared to come to the Chamber and defend the indefensible?
Mrs Badenoch
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention, and I will do my best to be kind. He is right: there are more people in the Chamber today than there were last time, so the Whips have really been working hard over the past seven days. Last week, not a single Labour MP bothered to intervene on me.
Mrs Badenoch
Oh, we have a second one. I am going to take the intervention from the right hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), and then I will come to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth).
Gavin Robinson
The Leader of the Opposition is right to highlight the cross-party nature of this motion, and to question why a Whip has been put in place on the motion that is before the House. Does she not agree, and should Labour MPs not consider, that if there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear?
Mrs Badenoch
The right hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I completely agree with him, and in fact, I will make that case in due course.
Sam Rushworth
A moment ago, the Leader of the Opposition talked about selective quoting. I am sure that she would not want to selectively quote Sir Olly Robbins herself, so could she tell us what the rest of that quote was? When he talked about pressure, was he talking about pressure to deliver a decision in time for President Trump’s inauguration, or was he saying that he felt pressure to materially change what the decision would be? That is quite an important distinction, is it not?
Mrs Badenoch
It is quite important, and if that was the distinction, why did the Prime Minister not say so last week? Why did he say, “No pressure existed whatsoever”? The hon. Gentleman should go and read Hansard.
Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)
Are we really suggesting in this debate, in this Chamber, that anyone who does not pass vetting fully and comprehensively, and who is not granted it without hesitation, should be given the most important of our ambassadorships? The Government seem to be suggesting that someone who is borderline—about whom there are any red flags—should be put in that sort of role. Is that not extraordinary?
Mrs Badenoch
It is extraordinary, and the evidence that we have heard from the Foreign Affairs Committee this morning is only making this matter worse for the Prime Minister, so it is very wrong for Labour Members to be talking about a stunt. This is about the integrity of this House. Why is the Privileges Committee a political stunt only when Labour is in the dock? Do Labour MPs still believe that honesty and accountability matter when the person in question is one of their own? Do they believe that Labour Prime Ministers should be held to the exact same standards that they held Conservative Prime Ministers to, or do they believe that there should be an honesty discount because the Prime Minister is Labour? The fact that there are so few Cabinet Ministers sitting on the Front Bench—that the Government have had to dig deep to the bottom of the barrel for junior Ministers to sit there—shows that they are struggling to get support for their position.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mrs Badenoch
I am going to make some progress. I say gently to Labour MPs—and kindly, as I have been asked to—that if they vote against today’s motion, they are admitting that Labour has lower standards, and should be held to a lower standard than everyone else. When they were elected, they promised their constituents integrity and higher standards, and I am sure that most of them meant it at the time. This country is the mother of all Parliaments, and today’s vote is about Parliament. It is not about the Labour party; it is about the Prime Minister being held to account. To those who are saying that this is a stunt, I say that it is about whether the Prime Minister is accountable, not just to the Opposition but to Labour MPs and their constituents.
Labour Members may believe that the Prime Minister is telling the truth. As Mr Speaker said, they are not being asked whether the Prime Minister is telling the truth; they are being asked whether the Privileges Committee should investigate whether the Prime Minister told the truth. That is a different thing. The question is whether there is a case to answer that he misled this House and has failed to correct the record.
Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) (Ind)
The British public are already fed up with politicians—we see that from the low turnout at general elections. We have here a prime example of why the British public have lost confidence in politicians. We are trying to shield the public from the truth and hide it from them. Does the right hon. Member agree that in order to restore that trust, this Prime Minister must be put in front of the Committee?
Mrs Badenoch
I agree that this is a matter of trust with the public. We have to show that we do things properly here. As I was saying, the question is whether there is a case to answer that the Prime Minister misled this House and failed to correct the record. If there is a credible case that he did, this matter should be referred to the Committee of Privileges—those are the rules of the House.
I will quickly run through the facts to make sure that every Labour MP hears them. The Prime Minister appointed Peter Mandelson before security vetting was granted, in direct contravention of the advice given to him on 11 November 2024 by the then Cabinet Secretary—that is not due process. The Prime Minister’s own National Security Adviser described the appointment and due diligence as “weirdly rushed”, and the Foreign Office was not asked to feed in—that is not due process. [Interruption.] The chair of the Labour party has a lot to say, so I will give way and let her say what she wants to say.
The Minister without Portfolio (Anna Turley)
The Cabinet Secretary said that it was due process.
Mrs Badenoch
We have another Minister coming to the Dispatch Box to say something quite different. Simon Case, the then Cabinet Secretary, set out what the full due process was. A note from the Cabinet Secretary a year after the appointment—after Peter Mandelson had been sacked and after I had asked questions at the Dispatch Box—is not an exoneration. It is part of the cover-up.
We have been told by Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, that the Government showed a “dismissive attitude” to vetting and even argued that Peter Mandelson did not need any vetting—that is not due process. We have been told that No. 10 put “constant pressure” on the Foreign Office to approve the application—that is not due process.
Sir Philip Barton, the former permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, said this morning that he was
“presented with a decision… There was no space for dialogue”.
He also confirmed that the normal order is vetting and then announcement, but in this case the announcement was before the vetting—that is not due process.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Leader of the Opposition for securing and introducing this motion. Does she agree that there is a very dangerous pattern emerging in the Government’s judgment after they bypassed vetting to appoint Lord Mandelson, a man with well-documented security concerns? Is she also concerned about the Government hand-picking an Attorney General whose hands are still warm from defending Gerry Adams against the victims of IRA terror? It is little wonder that the people of this nation, out there in the streets, are worried and concerned. Well done to the Leader of the Opposition for bringing this motion forward.
Mr Speaker
Order. You are straying outside the debate, Mr Shannon, and we must not do that.
Mrs Badenoch
I am concerned about the Prime Minister’s judgment on all manner of issues, not just the one we are discussing today.
This morning, we even heard the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff say that it should not have been him doing the due diligence, and that what he got back from Mandelson was not the full truth, but the Prime Minister appointed Peter Mandelson anyway—that is Morgan McSweeney saying that it was not full due process.
On several counts, it is clear that full due process was, in fact, not followed in this appointment.
Mrs Badenoch
Labour Members should not worry. I will give way because I want them to have every opportunity to make fools of themselves—just be patient.
Even the Prime Minister’s current position contains a glaring logical inconsistency. How can he say that full process was followed while, at the same time, firing Sir Olly Robbins for not following process? It would be fantastic if the hon. Gentleman answered that question.
Justin Madders
I will ask the questions of the Leader of the Opposition, as that is how interventions work. Can I also suggest that, if she wants Government Back Benchers to support her motion, she should not be insulting us and calling us sheep? The critical question to which a lot of Back Benchers want to know the answer is: why now? Why, when the Foreign Affairs Committee has not concluded its investigation, has she brought forward this motion now? Is it because there are local elections next week, or is that a coincidence?
Mr Speaker
Order. The decision was made on the letter that was sent to me, not on whether somebody may be meeting somewhere else. It is judged on the merit of that. I do not need to be questioned again.
Mrs Badenoch
I think the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (Justin Madders) would like his ministerial job back, as that is the only explanation for asking that question.
I asked why, if full due process was followed, Sir Olly Robbins was sacked. No answer.
The Privileges Committee is clear that
“misleading intentionally or recklessly, refusing to answer legitimate questions, or failing to correct misleading statements, impedes or frustrates the functioning of the House and is a contempt.”
The Prime Minister has not answered legitimate questions on this appointment. Labour Members were all there at PMQs when I asked him about six times whether he spoke to Peter Mandelson before the appointment, and the Prime Minister refused to answer—that is contempt.
This is no longer just about the appointment of Peter Mandelson, or about the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This is about whether or not the Prime Minister should be referred for contempt of Parliament. I do not know if he is in the Chamber, but the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) said last week that
“the Prime Minister is a man of the utmost decency who would never, ever lie”.—[Official Report, 21 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 197.]
If that is the case, Labour Members should welcome this chance to prove it. If they really believe that statement, they would not have to be whipped to block an investigation.
Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)
The right hon. Lady will know that I was never a fan of Boris Johnson. Can she confirm that, when there was a similar motion before the House to refer Mr Johnson to the Privileges Committee, his side was not whipped? And can she explain why the Government are whipping their Members on this motion?
Mrs Badenoch
That is an excellent question, and I can confirm that our side was not whipped. I can also confirm that the then Chair of the Privileges Committee was a former acting leader of the Labour party. We trusted this House to do the right thing. Why can they not do the same—why?
The Privileges Committee is mostly made up of Labour MPs. Are Labour Members saying that they do not believe that their own colleagues would give the Prime Minister a fair hearing? If this was just a bad decision for which he has apologised, surely the Privileges Committee will find him not guilty.
Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Prime Minister is pursuing a scorched-earth policy? Adviser after civil servant has been chucked under the bus to save his skin, and now it is the turn of his own MPs. If the Prime Minister has not misled the House, the correct path is to go to the Privileges Committee so that he can clear his name.
Mrs Badenoch
I agree with my right hon. Friend that this is a scorched-earth policy: Labour MPs are the earth, and I am afraid to say that they are being scorched.
Let me ask Labour Members this: if the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, why is he whipping them to avoid scrutiny? They are being whipped today to exonerate him before the facts have even been tested. This is not the first time I have had to tell Labour MPs that they are being stitched up. This is a man who has led them up and down so many hills—[Interruption.] Oh, the Education Secretary wants to intervene. Would she like to talk about yesterday’s U-turn on social media?
The Secretary of State for Education (Bridget Phillipson)
indicated dissent.
Mrs Badenoch
No, she does not want to—shame! We got our U-turn. Labour Members have to sit there looking embarrassed at every decision they have to row back on. The Prime Minister has led them up and down so many hills. He sends them out to defend the indefensible even this afternoon, and it is a great effort by the Whips, I must say.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
Of course, the Leader of the Opposition is right that the Conservatives had a free vote on the partygate scandal. She chose to abstain, which is an absolute disgrace. [Interruption.]
Mrs Badenoch
I actually feel bad at having to give this explanation. [Interruption.] I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness that I am trying to be kind, but there was no vote, so there was no abstention, because not a single one of us voted to block the investigation. That is a clear example—
Mr Speaker
Order. If the right hon. Lady gives way, that is fine. You have had one crack at the whip, Dr Arthur. I would not try too many cracks.
Mrs Badenoch
I know that a lot of Labour MPs have not been in this situation before. They are being stitched up. I am trying to be helpful. This man has led them up so many hills and down again, with U-turn after U-turn. I talked about banning social media for children; there was also a U-turn on pensions mandation. This is a Government that do not know what they are doing.
I think it is very valiant of Labour MPs to come out to defend the Prime Minister, despite the fact that he took the Whip away from MPs who wanted to lift the two-child benefit cap—and then did it anyway. The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) had the Whip removed for opposing the two-child benefit cap, then the Prime Minister U-turned. The hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) had the Whip removed for voting against the Prime Minister’s welfare reforms, then he ditched the reforms. The hon. Member for Penrith and Solway (Markus Campbell-Savours) had the Whip removed for opposing the family farm tax. The Prime Minister has ditched that, but the hon. Member for Penrith and Solway still does not have the Whip back. This matters, Mr Speaker—
Mr Speaker
Order. This is about the privileges motion. I know that you are developing a theme, but I think we have run out of theme.
Mrs Badenoch
You are absolutely right, Mr Speaker. I am just asking why this is a whipped vote, when it will still happen anyway. This man has ruined the reputation of the Labour party, he has not been loyal to his own MPs and I do not think they are united.
Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)
When the Prime Minister came in, he said that he wanted to do things differently. He has had not one, but two, opportunities—one in an emergency debate tabled by the Opposition—to come to the House and answer all the questions so he would not need to go to the Privileges Committee. Will my right hon. Friend surmise why he has not come to the House to answer on two occasions?
Mrs Badenoch
That is an excellent question from my hon. Friend. Why has the Prime Minister not come to the House to correct the record at the earliest opportunity on multiple occasions? What is there to hide? We are hearing evidence to Committees that conflicts with what is being said on the Floor of the House. I will be interested, by the way, to hear whether the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, when he responds, will be happy to repeat the Prime Minister’s words at the Dispatch Box that there was no pressure whatsoever. Will he repeat that statement? Let us see how brave he is.
This is absolutely critical: this cannot just be a debate about the Labour party, or a division between those who are in the inner circle and those who are on the outside. Again and again, we have seen the children of the chosen ones—people who had never been in Parliament before—getting all the best jobs. We now have the sacked chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s wife, who is a Whip, telling people to vote for a cover-up. That is not right. [Interruption.] She has been notified. I know that Labour Members do not like it, but have I said something that is not true? No. I am speaking the truth. I know it hurts, but someone has to point it out. Those people are hanging everyone else out to dry and I cannot believe that Labour MPs are letting it happen again.
I know that a lot of them are expecting a reshuffle after the May election. Let me tell them: it is not worth it. I say directly to those Labour MPs hoping to be Ministers after 7 May that they will condemn themselves to being sent out on the morning round to repeat things that they know are not true, that they do not believe in and that they know will end in disaster. They will end in disaster, as everything the Prime Minister touches does.
This vote should not be about loyalty to the Prime Minister, but about standards. Why should Labour MPs ruin their reputations to save a man who has never shown loyalty to them? He has shown that he will throw everybody under a bus: Sue Gray, Morgan McSweeney, Sir Chris Wormald, Sir Olly Robbins. Do Labour MPs really think that if this goes wrong he will not throw all of them under a bus? Some are walking around Parliament telling everyone that they are going to be one-term MPs and so it does not matter. It does matter, because when they leave this place no one will remember what their Whips told them to do. People will only remember that they voted for a cover-up. That is what will follow them around like a bad smell until the end of their careers. That is what will be in their Wikipedia entries.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that this issue will be resolved in one or two places? It will either be resolved in the court of public opinion or in front of the Privileges Committee. It is actually in the Prime Minister’s interests to have it resolved by a cross-party Committee of this House, which would give confidence to the public that the truth had been found, that the case had been made or not, and that they would have confidence going forward. The public will make up their own mind without the Privileges Committee.
Mrs Badenoch
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I trust the Privileges Committee to do the right thing, as I always have.
I have some advice for Labour MPs: there is nothing wrong with giving their party leader the benefit of the doubt. As a Minister four years ago, I gave my party—[Laughter.] I do not know why they are laughing; I have not got to the punchline yet. Hang on; wait for it! As a Minister four years ago, I gave my party leader the benefit of the doubt, but I trusted the Privileges Committee to do the right thing, even when it was led by a former leader of the Labour party. We did not block the Privileges Committee from looking into things, and the minute that I was asked to go out and say something that was not true, I resigned. None of the Labour Members wants to do that. I will always be able to hold my head up high because I did the right thing.
I do not understand why Labour MPs are quite happy to repeat things that are not true. We have all seen Hansard. That is the difference between them and us. When we get things wrong, we put our hands up and say so; they pretend that the wrong thing is actually the right thing. They pretend that the bad thing is actually a good thing because it is Labour MPs who are doing it. That is what they are being whipped to do today. It is the same way the Mandelson appointment happened—they thought that because they were appointing him, it must be a good thing—and that is what is happening again today. They are being whipped to do the wrong thing.
If Labour MPs are telling the entire country that nothing matters except avoiding scrutiny of this Prime Minister, who will not answer questions at the Dispatch Box, they are telling people that the Labour party is not worth voting for. It does not exist. This is not the Labour party of Attlee, Bevan and Wilson. That Labour party no longer exists because they would never do this. They would never vote for someone who had stood at the Dispatch Box less than a week ago and read out doctored statements from the head of the Foreign Office, like the Prime Minister did.
Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster) (Lab/Co-op)
On the point of reading out statements, I see that the right hon. Lady is enjoying reading out her statement. What I cannot see is the case that she makes about the Privileges Committee, and what she does not think is right about a criminal investigation and the inquiries that are consistently being made about the decision, which we have accepted was wrong. What is wrong with the Foreign Affairs Committee and what is wrong with the processes—
Mrs Badenoch
Perhaps the hon. Lady should have just taken the Whips’ questions instead of messing that one up. She raises an interesting point about the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is looking only at Mandelson and not into the issue of the Prime Minister misleading the House. Let us stop pretending that the Committee is carrying out a massive inquiry. It really is not.
Sam Rushworth
A moment ago, the Leader of the Opposition described the statement read out by the Prime Minister as “doctored”. That is akin to saying that it was dishonest and that he was lying. Is that not unparliamentary language, Mr Speaker?
Mr Speaker
As I suspected, it is not a point of order. You need to read the rule book. This is a substantive motion; it is not the normal debate. It might be helpful if you took some time out, rather than questioning, because you might be on to something, but not today.
Mrs Badenoch
Time and again throughout this debate, I have seen Labour MPs stand up and show that they do not understand what the rules are or what this is about. This is not about the specific statements; it is about whether or not there should be a referral to the Privileges Committee. They are moving the goalposts because they do not want to answer that simple question. They have come up with all sorts of excuses. It is not an excuse to say that there is a war on. The Prime Minister has said repeatedly that we are not in this war. He cannot have it both ways.
At every turn, the Prime Minister has tried to deny the House full transparency over this appointment. The House voted for documents to be released, and yet we discover that documents are not being released. That is a contempt of this Parliament. Labour MPs supported that Humble Address because they knew that we needed to see the truth. Documents from that release show that due process was not followed. The ISC is complaining that the documents are being delayed. We only discovered that there were numerous problems with Mandelson’s vetting because of a leak to The Guardian. The truth is being covered up. Today’s vote is about whether Labour MPs want to be complicit in this cover-up. If they vote against an investigation by the Privileges Committee, they are in this together.
This motion is supported across the House, including by Labour MPs, which is why they have to be whipped to vote against it. The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) tweeted last week that he was calling for a referral to the Privileges Committee, before he deleted that tweet. This week he is calling it “a stunt”. Why? Who is twisting his arm? Why was it not a stunt last week when he was doing it, but it is a stunt this week when everybody else is doing it?
May I remind those who are mindlessly repeating the lines the Labour Whips have given them that it is also their job to hold the Government to account and uphold the standards of our democracy? Appointing a known national security risk to be ambassador to the United States is a profound failure of government. Do they not think it is important that Prime Ministers tell the truth on a matter of national security, or do they think this is an internal Labour party matter that they can fix themselves? For those who believe that Andy Burnham is coming to rescue them, I just say that if they vote against this investigation, there will be so much contempt for Labour that there is no by-election on this planet that Andy Burnham will be able to win. This is not an internal Labour party matter. Do they believe that when something is wrong, we should look into it? This is about whether they believe that Prime Ministers should not destroy the careers of civil servants to cover up for their own failures.
I know it is very difficult for Labour MPs to walk through the Lobby with Members from other parties, but let me be clear what they are saying if they vote against this motion. Would they rather be on the side of Peter Mandelson, of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, of Morgan McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, and of the man who sacked Sir Chris Wormald, Sir Olly Robbins and Sue Gray? Is that what they came into Parliament for? Yesterday we read that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner) said that Labour Members should back the Prime Minister so that she can pay off her new kitchen. Do they really want to tell their constituents that they voted against this inquiry because they are more concerned about their own personal finances than probity in public life? That is a shocking statement.
Every MP voting on this motion today will need to examine their conscience. This is not a matter of party loyalty; it is a matter of what each and every one of us believes is right. Labour MPs are being asked to defend a man who has let the country down, who has let Parliament down, and—let’s be honest—who has let the Labour party down. I say to Labour MPs: you can defend the Prime Minister today, and there are enough of you to get the vote through, but you will be complicit in a shameful abandoning of promises made to the electorate—promises that every Labour MP stood on. It is up to them what kind of MP they choose to be. They can choose to live up to their promises on standards, to ensure proper scrutiny takes place and allow the Privileges Committee to get to the bottom of this, or they can choose to put party before country. Their vote will define them, and the public are watching.
They say it is a stunt—then let the inquiry expose it. They say there is no evidence of misleading the House—then let the Committee test it. They say the Prime Minister has nothing to hide—then they should not vote to stop the Prime Minister being scrutinised. They do not have to defend this. They can still do the right thing. They can show that Parliament matters—it matters more than any party or any faction. They can vote to enhance Parliament, or they can prove the worst fears of people who think there is one rule for Labour and another rule for everyone else. I commend this motion to the House.
Emma Lewell (South Shields) (Lab)
I have watched this whole sorry saga play out for weeks now. Like the public, I feel let down, disappointed and angry. Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. That was a fundamental failure of judgment. Matthew Doyle should never have been given a peerage. That was also a failure of judgment. I feel the way that today’s vote has been handled by the Government smacks once again of being out of touch and disconnected from the public mood. The fact that MPs like me are being whipped into voting against the motion is, in my view, wrong. It has played into the terrible narrative that there is something to hide, and good, decent colleagues will be accused of being complicit in a cover-up.
A number of weeks ago, at a private meeting with my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister, I spoke about how, after a career spent working so closely with victims of child sexual abuse, I could not even begin to express how much it hurts me when people are screaming at me in the street that I am a member of the “paedo protectors party”. I also said that prior to this scandal, people criticised the Government’s policies and, at times, lack of political narrative, but they are now questioning the Government’s moral compass. My comments were leaked, almost immediately, by colleagues who were present. My words were later used by the Leader of the Opposition. Recent weeks have seen such abuse intensify and ongoing abuse and threats to my and my staff’s safety continue.
Privilege motions, ISC investigations, Committee hearings and process do not come up on the doorstep. What does come up time and again is a general feeling that there is something just not right—that politicians are failing to deliver on their promises. Trust has gone, and it has been replaced by anger. The already fragile fabric of our democracy is eroding further every day that this continues.
This Prime Minister is very careful with his words and does have respect for the office he holds. He does want to change this country for the better, and he truly believes in public service—something that has been sorely lacking from Prime Ministers in recent years—so I cannot understand why the Prime Minister does not refer himself to the Committee, with a clear statement that he is doing so to clear his name. One quick session of the Committee could surely see this matter concluded. Instead, this will now drag on and dominate every headline and interview. It will overshadow and undermine every good policy we make and continue to drag every single one of us down. Whether any Prime Minister misled the House is not a matter for the Foreign Affairs Committee, nor is it a matter for the Intelligence and Security Committee. It is a matter for the Privileges Committee—that is why such a Committee exists.
It may be that Opposition parties are using this motion to box Labour MPs in. I am not angry about that—that is politics; some of us here would do the same. I know one thing for certain today: I will not be voting against this motion. But I want to listen carefully to the rest of this debate, because like everyone, when I came to this House I wanted to do the right thing, and I hope I continue to do that for however long I have left in this place.
Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell), who made a very powerful speech. I think Members on all sides of the House listened to it, and I hope her colleagues on the Government Benches think about it carefully during the debate.
The Prime Minister called this motion a “stunt”. That is not why I put my name to it. [Interruption.] I was just checking whether they were awake, Mr Speaker. It is funny, though, because “stunt” is exactly the same word Boris Johnson used about the motion that the Prime Minister and I tabled four years ago, referring Boris Johnson to the Privileges Committee. Ironic? Alanis Morissette could probably write a whole album about it. It was not a stunt then, and it is not a stunt today. It is, as the Prime Minister said back then, a motion that
“seeks to defend the simple principle that honesty, integrity and telling the truth matter in our politics.”—[Official Report, 21 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 352.]
Honesty, integrity, telling the truth—these things matter in our nation’s Parliament perhaps more than anywhere else.
When I hear the Prime Minister complain that we have tabled this motion just over a week before important elections, I find myself transported back to that debate four years ago, seven days before crucial local elections. At that time, Conservative MP after Conservative MP made exactly the same bogus argument in defence of Boris Johnson. Although there are differences in the whipping arrangements, I find it hard to take some of the sanctimony from the leader of the Conservative party seriously. She and her Conservative colleagues propped up Boris Johnson back then. She called him a great Prime Minister. Even after the game was up and Johnson was gone, she dismissed the partygate scandal and called it “overblown”. It does seem that there is quite a lot of hypocrisy to go around.
I want to try to be consistent, so I looked back in Hansard at what I said then, and I was struck that I can use exactly the same words today. I said that
“with families facing the deepest fall in their living standards since the 1950s, with the pain of energy bills and rising food prices compounded by the Government’s unfair tax rises, we know that our constituents are facing real hardship. It is not just a cost of living crisis; it is a cost of living emergency. At such a time, the country needs a Government that will be focused on tackling that economic emergency. Crucially, it needs a Government that it can trust”.—[Official Report, 21 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 372.]
Labour Members agreed with me back then; I hope they will still agree with those words now.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
The right hon. Member has mentioned Boris Johnson a few times, so I just wanted to remind the House that Boris Johnson misled the Foreign Affairs Committee. His words about my constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, meant that she spent six extra years in jail for a crime she did not commit. He had multiple opportunities to apologise, including when he saw Nazanin face to face. Does the right hon. Member think that when someone has made a mistake, especially someone in a position of power, they should apologise?
Ed Davey
Mr Speaker, I can see from your restlessness in the Chair that you do not necessarily want me to go down that particular avenue, but I hope I speak for others when I reflect on how incredibly depressing it is that nothing has really changed.
The British people are facing a cost of living emergency. They need a Government focused on tackling it and a Government they can trust, but instead this is what we have. We have a Prime Minister who promised to be different, who promised to turn the page and who promised, above everything else, change. He has now mired this Government in the same endless cycle of chaos and scandal as the last one. He is a Prime Minister who appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, even though his links to Jeffrey Epstein had been widely reported, even though those reports had been brought directly to the Prime Minister’s attention and even though the Cabinet Secretary had advised him that security clearance should be acquired before the choice was confirmed. He is a Prime Minister who, despite all that, still told the House repeatedly that “full due process” was followed. He is a Prime Minister who says that “No pressure existed whatsoever” to appoint Mandelson, despite all the evidence we have heard to the contrary, as the right hon. Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) set out in her speech. We have a Prime Minister who desperately claims that he would not have appointed Mandelson if he had known about UK Security Vetting’s recommendation.
The Prime Minister said that we would find what he told us to be “incredible”, and we do, but that last part is the most incredible of all. Does he really expect us to believe that after all of that—ignoring the clear warnings from the propriety and ethics team, ignoring the advice of his then Cabinet Secretary to get the security vetting done first, and ignoring everything we already knew about Peter Mandelson and announcing his appointment to the world before the vetting had been done—if he had been given the same recommendation as Olly Robbins received that it was a borderline case, he would have cancelled the appointment? Do Members on the Government Benches really believe that is what would have happened? That claim is all that is left of the Prime Minister’s case for the defence, and I am afraid that it just does not stand up.
I will finish not with my own words, but with those of another Member four years ago—the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner). I know that her words carry a lot of weight on the Labour Benches. She said that
“the only way to get to the bottom of this issue and regain public confidence in our democracy is by respecting the processes that have been created to enshrine the rules of our Parliament. I point out that the process we are following today is in place only because the Prime Minister has failed to do the decent thing and resign. I repeat: honesty, integrity and the truth matter in our politics. Today, MPs across the House have the opportunity to defend those principles and to vote to support our democracy.”—[Official Report, 21 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 425.]
The right hon. Lady was right back then. That is the opportunity before MPs today, and I urge us all to take it.
Gurinder Singh Josan (Smethwick) (Lab)
Last week in the emergency debate I spoke about the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the approach taken by the Prime Minister as details have become available, and the vetting process overall. Today, I want to address the motion and why I feel it is premature. In doing so, I believe that three principles of this House are key to our considerations today: transparency, due process and proportionality.
A privilege motion is a serious matter and a tool available for Parliament to use in such circumstances. Although a privilege motion is to address such matters, its use also impacts on the integrity of the House and its procedures. Deploying a privilege motion prematurely or in the absence of full and proper grounds has the ability to impact negatively on the integrity of the House.
Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
I refer the hon. Member to the words of Mr Speaker earlier. It is the Speaker who decides whether a privilege motion goes ahead. The hon. Member is criticising Mr Speaker for having allowed it.
Gurinder Singh Josan
My point is about our consideration of the motion. The fact that Mr Speaker made the decision means we are here discussing it. I am putting a case forward about why I think it is premature to vote on the motion today. Just because the Leader of the Opposition and others have decided to table it does not make it right; it is clearly a political and partisan process.
I am clear that any allegations or concerns must be addressed, and it is clear that the Prime Minister is of that view, too. It is why we have the Humble Address, ongoing inquiries by the Foreign Affairs Committee and even an ongoing police investigation. It is right and proper that all allegations are examined thoroughly and that these processes are allowed to run their course. I suggest that while those things are ongoing, the privilege motion is premature.
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is giving a powerful speech. He says that all allegations should be investigated properly. With the greatest respect to him, the Foreign Affairs Committee is not looking into whether the Prime Minister misled the House, and neither are the police. There is no process to do that, other than the one that Mr Speaker has allowed to be brought to the House today, which is to refer this matter—whether the Prime Minister has misled this House—to the Privileges Committee to determine. If the hon. Gentleman is to be consistent, he should agree with that and vote for it today.
Gurinder Singh Josan
The right hon. Gentleman should understand that we are here today only because of things that have been determined, whether from the release of papers through the Humble Address or from evidence people have given to the Foreign Affairs Committee. For him to say that those processes have no relevance is wrong; they absolutely have full relevance. My whole case is that we should let those processes complete in their entirety. That is why I believe this motion is premature. Given that those processes are already taking place, this privilege motion is premature. More than that, this motion is a clear attempt to bypass those processes.
Whatever one’s view of the substantive issues, there are some points on which we should all agree. The Prime Minister has been forthcoming in addressing the allegations, both in the House and outside. The Prime Minister has apologised from the very outset in the House and outside it, for the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson, and his apologies have been full, wholesome and without equivocation. He has also specifically apologised to the victims of Epstein. The Prime Minister has repeatedly answered questions in the House and outside, and has shown a willingness to be held accountable.
Ayoub Khan
Whatever the merits of the motion, does the hon. Member accept that the party whip should not be exercised so that politicians are constrained and cannot support or oppose a particular motion? Does he agree that that whip should be withdrawn?
Gurinder Singh Josan
I am a humble Back Bencher, and I would not disagree with my Chief Whip in respect of his decisions on how to apply the whip. That is a matter for him.
All the inquiries that I have mentioned are ongoing, and are being robustly pursued. I fear, therefore, that the motion risks setting an unhealthy precedent, namely that unproven allegations alone are sufficient to utilise one of Parliament’s most serious procedures. That is not something with which any of us should be comfortable. The naked politicising of this process will not serve Parliament well. My further fear is that while Opposition Members are seeking to utilise this procedure in this way, some of them will already be looking into what other procedures they can use to extend the process in the same partisan fashion.
It is incumbent on all of us to give consideration to due process and proportionality. Diverting from the high standards that voters expect of the House risks damaging confidence in Parliament itself. Substantial parliamentary and other processes are already under way. We should not pre-empt those processes, which is what this motion has the potential to do, but should allow them to be completed. That is in the best interests of Parliament and in the best interests of transparency, due process and proportionality, and that is why I call on Members to vote against the motion.
David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)
Sometimes the wisdom of the House is crystallised in the comments of us ordinary Back Benchers. That was particularly evident today in the brave speech of the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) and, indeed, the intervention of the hon. Member for Birmingham Perry Barr (Ayoub Khan) on the Leader of the Opposition. Both Members said, in effect, that what we have lived through in the last several months is a tragedy—not just for the House, not just for the Government, not just for the Labour party, but for the trust in government, and in our democracy among ordinary people.
At the risk of expulsion from my own party, I will admit to having hoped after the election that this Prime Minister would succeed, because it was in the interests of the country that he did so, but in some ways even more importantly, it was in the interests of our democracy. There is already extant throughout the western world a corrosion of belief in democracy; that goes on and on, and this will make it worse.
We are here today for a simple reason. Statements made by the Prime Minister in this Chamber are at odds with those provided by the civil service on the material issue of Peter Mandelson. This matters. It is not a stunt. Honesty between Ministers and Parliament is fundamental to our democracy. Without it, scrutiny fails. Without it, accountability fails. Without it, trust fails. The responsibility for absolute honesty rests most heavily on the Prime Minister, so the standard that should be met by the Prime Minister is even higher than that applying to others. Recklessness with the truth from any Minister is unacceptable; from the Prime Minister, it is indefensible.
All political parties have their inherent flaws—and I am not going to spend a whole day talking about mine—but the origins of this situation lie in a stance often taken by Labour MPs, which is that good intentions somehow justify bad decisions. It is a case of saying, “We mean well, so our mistakes do not matter” or, worse, “We mean well, so we should be forgiven for anything”, whether it is freebies or wrong appointments or whatever.
That mindset, which I am afraid constitutes a sanctimonious arrogance sustained by a habit of believing their own propaganda, is precisely what led to the appointment of a deeply unsuitable individual as our ambassador to Washington: a man twice dismissed after scandal; a man now under formal investigation by the European Union’s anti-fraud office; a man who had an extraordinary relationship with a convicted paedophile; a man driven, above all, by a pursuit of glamour, money and status; a man who turned amorality into an art form—and, in addition to that, a man plainly compromised by over-close relationships with the proxies of both the Russian and the Chinese Governments.
Together, those facts should have made this appointment unthinkable, yet the concerns were brushed aside. The head of the diplomatic service, as we heard this morning in the Foreign Affairs Committee, was not even consulted. Why? Because within the London establishment, a ludicrous self-deception had taken hold—that the peculiarities of the Trump Administration could be countered by the peculiarities of Peter Mandelson.
Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the previous ambassador, Dame Karen Pierce, was widely—indeed almost universally—respected and felt to have a good relationship with the previous Trump Administration, and there was no reason to believe that she would not have a good relationship with the current Trump Administration?
David Davis
That is entirely true, and in fact, the current Trump Administration made the same point to the Government before the nomination of Peter Mandelson.
That perverse logic led to the most obviously unwise public appointment in modern times, and the implied message, unfortunately, was clear: “Government appointments rest on networks of patronage; great offices of state are perks to be handed out to friends.” It is systemic. They even tried to secure an ambassadorial appointment for Lord Doyle, a man so unsuitable that he has even had the Whip withdrawn. Mandelson’s unsuitability was evident before vetting began. It would have been surprising had the vetting service not found grounds to reject the appointment. I suspect that No. 10 knew that, and leant on the Foreign Office to ensure that the outcome was secured quickly and without question.
One Member—I cannot remember his name, or see him in the Chamber—tried to suggest earlier that pressure on time was different from pressure on outcome, but when vetting is involved, it is not. My first positive vetting took six months. Now, I know I have unreliable friends, but I have fewer, I think, than Lord Mandelson. It would have taken quite a long time to get to the bottom of all the issues relating to Lord Mandelson. Saying “You’ve got to do it quickly” is the same as saying “You’ve got to do it shoddily.” Let us not lose sight of that.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, but is it not true that the post of UK ambassador to Washington would be held by someone who would therefore have access to extremely sensitive intelligence, potentially including nuclear co-operation? Surely the fact that Mandelson had been found to have been working for a Russian company post the invasion of Ukraine should have completely barred him from the appointment, on that ground alone.
David Davis
My right hon. Friend is exactly right. Indeed, it is worse than that, because this post is the nexus of the entire Five Eyes intelligence co-operation. Our service is not like that of the Americans. In the American embassy, the CIA is freestanding; the ambassador does not matter. In our service, the ambassador runs the local secret service element, as it were, so he or she is entirely responsible and has entire access. That is an issue with the Americans in particular, because they are incredibly sensitive about the corruption, or the undermining in any way, of the security of that arrangement, so we could actually have put the whole Five Eyes co-operation arrangement at risk—but my right hon. Friend has led me off on a completely different tangent.
I come back to the general point. Sir Philip Barton was asked this morning about delay, attitude and pressure; when asked at the Foreign Affairs Committee if he recalled “any dismissiveness in No. 10 about the importance” of Mandelson’s vetting, Sir Philip—Sir Olly Robbins’ predecessor—described No. 10 as “uninterested” in his security clearance. The evidence that Sir Olly Robbins gave was that, throughout January, there was “constant pressure” and an “atmosphere of constant chasing”. Yesterday, Ian Collard, the former head of the Foreign Office security team, corroborated Sir Olly Robbins’s account. Just this morning, again, Sir Philip Barton repeatedly emphasised that there was pressure to secure Mandelson’s vetting clearance within a “very compressed timescale”, yet the Prime Minister told this House only a week ago that “no pressure existed whatsoever”. If that was the only issue, it would justify being referred to the Committee of Privileges—in order to resolve what the exact truth was—but it was not the only issue. Plainly, if the Foreign Office is right, the Prime Minister is wrong—and, on that timetable, actually, deliberately wrong.
Let us take some other occasions. On 4 February this year, the Prime Minister gave an unambiguous impression, when asked about Epstein’s coverage in the security clearance, that he had seen Peter Mandelson’s security vetting file, but in April he told the House that on 14 April he
“found out for the first time”
that Mandelson had been granted
“developed vetting clearance, against the specific recommendation of the United Kingdom Security Vetting that developed vetting clearance should be denied.”—[Official Report, 20 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 23.]
Those two statements are incompatible—again, a free-standing failure of the rules.
What is more, that chaotic clash of opinions reinforces the impression that, far from “following due process”, as the Prime Minister has maintained on a number of occasions, No. 10 was effectively making it up as it went along. As we have already heard from the Leader of the Opposition, the then Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, issued explicit advice on 11 November 2024: secure the
“necessary security clearances…before confirming your choice.”
That was reinforced this morning by Sir Philip Barton, who said of the correct process:
“The normal order is vetting and then announcement.”
Normal due process was clear, but the Prime Minister did the opposite. Claims that this was normal defy common sense.
For career ambassadors, developed vetting happens for every new post. If someone goes to become the ambassador in Tehran, they are DV-ed. If they then go to become ambassador in Washington, they are DV-ed again—but at that point, the vetting is an update, so it is lower risk. By definition, our ambassadors are, generally speaking, low-risk security personnel anyway. That is plainly not the case for a high-risk figure like Peter Mandelson. Indeed, frankly, it is hard to imagine a higher-risk appointment to a post that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) said, is of the utmost sensitivity. To appoint first and vet later is not due process, and it is certainly not prudent. It is a gamble with national security and a risk to our single most important alliance.
There are three instances where the Prime Minister made questionable statements: his insistence that there was no pressure, when there evidently was; the two versions he gave of when he saw the vetting file; and his assertion that due process was followed, when it clearly was at odds with the process described by both the Cabinet Secretary and the permanent secretary for the Foreign Office.
The Prime Minister made a deeply questionable decision. We cannot know for certain whether it was due to cronyism, a misunderstanding of the role or excessive leniency towards a member of his own party—something he would never have tolerated, and quite rightly, from any other party. Whatever the explanation, the conclusion is unavoidable: the decision was wrong. To implement it, established procedures were bent out of shape. The civil service was placed under extreme pressure to deliver outcomes that sat on the margins of propriety. When concerns were raised, they were not confronted but sidestepped. As usual in No. 10, an attempt was made to place the blame on somebody else.
Even in this week’s New Statesman, which is traditionally a banner carrier for the Prime Minister, there is a quote—I think it is in Tom McTague’s article—from a senior Government official who goes on at length against the Prime Minister and ends by saying:
“Ask Chris. Ask Sue. Ask Morgan. Ask Olly. He will say he takes responsibility, but then he makes everyone else pay.”
That is what we are looking at.
Rather than addressing concerns directly, the Prime Minister proceeded regardless, and only later sought to justify his decision with answers that were, I am afraid, frequently misleading. As a former Director of Public Prosecutions, he should have known better. What began as a mistake evolved into something more serious. A failure turned into a defence, a problem became a pattern and, ultimately, the situation now looks like a cover-up. But as we have already heard from my Front Benchers and a number of other speakers, today is not about determining guilt; it is about determining whether there is a case to answer. Finding the truth and adjudicating guilt is the task of the Committee of Privileges, which has both the time and the access required to examine the evidence in full.
Much has been made of Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Committee of Privileges, and I am famously a fan of Boris Johnson. When a similar motion was brought to this House on whether the matter should go to that Committee, it was clearly recognised at the time that we were not delivering a verdict, but deciding whether there was a case to be answered. At the time, I made it very plain to our Whips Office that I would not countenance any attempt to block a proper investigation into a House of Commons matter. I was by no means alone; a number of other colleagues made the same argument. As a result, the Government of the day accepted that it was a House of Commons matter. It is improper for the Government to intervene in such a matter to try to guide the House. Accordingly, the motion passed without a Whip, and without a Division. Interestingly, the hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) thought otherwise.
David Davis
In a debate about misleading the House, it makes me wonder when Members of this House accuse others of not voting on a motion that did not lead to a vote, so I will not take an intervention. I will certainly not take an intervention from the hon. Gentleman. He is a noise maker, not a truth issuer.
On the evidence before us today—contradictions, procedural failures and an emerging pattern of conduct—there is plainly a case for referral. Where doubt exists, it should be resolved through proper scrutiny. Where a case exists, it should be tested. This case should go to the Committee of Privileges, and go today.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Ind)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis). He and I rarely agree politically, but we do work together constructively in our constituencies for the betterment of the region.
I start by way of an apology, because last week —I think this was mentioned by the Leader of the Opposition—I accidentally published correspondence between me and you, Mr Speaker. That was my mistake. I respect you, Mr Speaker, and I respect your office, so I apologise sincerely for that mistake, but it was my mistake.
Do I believe that the Prime Minister deliberately misled this House? No, frankly. I have known him a long time, and I think I know him very well. It is fair to say that I describe him as a friend, and I think he has described me as a friend as well. Both him and I are lawyers by trade. In my honest opinion, there is no way that the Prime Minister would come here and deliberately mislead the House. However, there was a very significant difference, in my view, between what the Prime Minister said in answer to the right hon. Lady the Leader of the Opposition in last week’s Prime Minister’s questions, and Olly Robbins’ evidence the previous day. I think I am right in saying that the Prime Minister said there was “no pressure whatsoever”, intimating that that was the evidence that Olly Robbins had given to the Foreign Affairs Committee, but I watched every minute of it and that is definitely not the case. I have looked back, and I have checked Hansard and the evidence that was given by Olly Robbins.
So I do think that there is a prima facie case for this matter to be investigated and for an inquiry to be conducted by the appropriate Committee of this House. I suspect that is not going to happen, because this debate is being whipped. I do not blame the Government for that—I find it unfortunate, to be honest, but they are not setting any new precedent; there is precedent for whipped scenarios in these situations in the past. But I do think that the Prime Minister would be vindicated.
Alicia Kearns
The hon. Gentleman is right that there are some precedents for House business being whipped, but the lesson is that it is a fool’s errand—it is normally the start of the end. He is making a fair point and being kind to his Front Benchers, but does he agree that we should learn from precedent and not necessarily repeat it?
Karl Turner
I am grateful to the hon. Lady, who is spot on. She leads me to the point raised by the Leader of the Opposition. I made a statement on social media that this motion is a stunt. A stunt is defined as an action designed to capture attention, but it is worse than that, actually. If I was to be cynical, I think the problem is that the motion is designed to capture Labour MPs. That is my concern. If it is said by our political opponents that Labour MPs came here today to block an inquiry of this House into the leader of the Labour party and Prime Minister, every single one of us will be accused by the electorate of trying to help the Prime Minister when he needed to face the music.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough and Thornaby East) (Lab)
The Prime Minister has set out a detailed chronology. He has made it abundantly clear that he has not lied and he has not misled this House. In those circumstances, would it not be right to embrace this process and wipe the floor with the critics who have put those things to him? While we are at it, would my hon. Friend agree that the fact that Peter Mandelson had previously made it abundantly clear that his purpose every day was to take action to bring down the then duly elected leader of the Labour party made him wholly and utterly unsuitable for the office of ambassador?
Karl Turner
I was about to say that my hon. Friend is a good man—he used to be my boss in the shadow Transport team, Mr Speaker, and he always tries to help me. I do not want to get into the stuff about Mandelson, as my hon. Friend hopes I will. But while I am speaking about the appointment of Mandelson, I will say this: I think that the Prime Minister appointed Mandelson in the national interest. I think he thought Mandelson would go to Washington, do a job in the national interest and deliver for the country. I think that is why he made the appointment.
When it became clear, following the Bloomberg emails, that the appointment was politically difficult for the Government, the Prime Minister again did the right thing by dismissing Mandelson, very properly. Where I think the Prime Minister went wrong was in the shenanigans between those two points: looking around for an excuse for why it had gone wrong. “Just take it on the chin—deal with it!” That is the advice I would have given him, and that is why I am particularly disappointed.
Colleagues who came in at the last general election might be disappointed in me for having the audacity to stand up and say what I happen to believe is the truth. I am sorry if they are not happy with me, but I am here to represent not my interests but the interests of those who elected me. That is what I will always do; whether it is against the policy of a Tory Government or my own Government, I will do what I think is in the interests of my electorate.
Let me warn colleagues about what will happen if we are seen to go through the Lobby to defeat this process. It is a reasonable process; this is not the shenanigans that the Government have suggested in relation to jury trials. This does not involve a single judge, but a jury of peers—impartial, and made up of more Labour MPs than Tory MPs. The Prime Minister has nothing to fear. He ought to do the right thing. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) has suggested, he should have referred himself. That would have saved us all this messing around—debating the point and trying to justify why the referral is a bad idea or having two Committees running alongside each other. Utter nonsense! Get on with it, let it be dealt with and let us move on.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
My hon. Friend mentioned my recommendation that the Prime Minister should refer himself. I did that because when someone is under attack like this, they should not run away from the attack; they should face it with confidence. They should argue that if people want to criticise the individual concerned, they should produce the evidence. My hon. Friend knows as well as I do that the Privileges Committee would deal with this matter fairly, and I believe that the Labour party would come out stronger as a result.
Karl Turner
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. I think I said on Twitter that he rarely gets things wrong—I was accused of being wrong for agreeing with what he said. In the time I have known him, my right hon. Friend has rarely, in my opinion, got it wrong. I think he is absolutely spot on.
I am confident and convinced. I know the Prime Minister and know that he is not a liar. I know for a fact that he would not deliberately mislead. I think he would be exonerated. The trouble we now face is accusations from the electorate that we stopped the inquiry from happening in the first place and that the Prime Minister is guilty through the fact that we avoided it. Once we are in that position, we have a big problem, because you cannot prove something that never happened.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
I want to speak only briefly. I am not particularly party political. I do not like making personal attacks and I am not calling for the Prime Minister to resign. I am not questioning the appointment of Peter Mandelson—this debate is not about whether that was a good decision. I am sure that at the time there was some logic in appointing him. Obviously, the incoming President was a very political, difficult character, and it was felt that Mandelson had the political skills to deal with him. I understand all that, so I am not making a big issue about whether or not it was right to appoint him.
I was not going to speak in the debate until I heard the very powerful speech made by the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell). It came from somebody who is obviously a loyal member of the Labour party, as is the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), who has just spoken. They were not trying to damage their own Government; all they were trying to say, I think, was that when there is an issue such as this, when all sorts of allegations are being thrown across the Floor of the House about whether people lied or not, a Privileges Committee process is one of catharsis. We saw that with Boris Johnson. There was deep upset in the country. Whether that was fair or not, and whether Mr Johnson acted wrongly or not, we know that there was deep upset about partygate. But it was right for the House to decide to have the Privileges Committee inquiry. We knew that, in a way, that drew a line under the whole thing.
I believe the Prime Minister. I am sure that he is an honourable person. It is not for me to say that he deliberately misled the House. But there are many questions that quite reasonable people are asking. One of the most reasonable questions was put by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition: if due process was followed, why was a dedicated civil servant, Sir Olly Robbins, sacked for apparently not following due process? I think many reasonable people feel that what is really monstrously unfair about this matter is that dedicated civil servants were simply trying to carry out the wishes of their political masters and that Sir Olly Robbins has paid a very great price. Our civil service is incredibly loyal to Ministers. They work loyally for Ministers and they try to carry out their wishes. I think many reasonable people feel that the treatment of Sir Olly Robbins has been quite wrong and that he should be reinstated.
But that, in a way, is for another day. The hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) put it so well: if there is nothing to hide, why worry? These scandals are such a war of words that we almost lose track of what was originally true. It is not the original scandal—if there is indeed a scandal—that is at fault; it is the cover-up or the perceived cover-up. What is the best way to restore public trust in Parliament, in the system and in what the Prime Minister said or did not say? The public are not that interested in all the details. They are probably, like me, quite confused about whether the process was followed, who said what, whether the chief of staff bullied the head of the Foreign Office and so on. Those are all just party political words and the Westminster bubble. What is important is the reputation of this place. The most important thing in this place—we may say wrong things, we may say silly things, we may be party political—is that we must tell the truth. That is all that matters. Nothing else matters in this Parliament.
I am prepared to accept that the Prime Minister, for whatever reason, made this appointment. I am prepared to accept that in his heart of hearts, when he has been standing at that Dispatch Box, he has been telling the truth. Why can we not just have the Privileges Committee—not the Foreign Affairs Committee, which is deciding great issues of foreign affairs—look at that narrow issue? Why can we not just not have a vote at all, as we did on the previous occasion with Boris Johnson? Just do not have a vote, let us all express our point of view and let it go through. Let us have an impartial Committee, let us listen to the testimony, and let the Committee and the House of Commons make up their own mind on the truth.
Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)
First, it is important that in all of this we are centring Epstein’s victims, who have so often been forgotten. Their courageous campaign for justice and accountability continues and we must all do all we can to support it.
I have heard the argument that this is all a distraction from the real issues that we should be discussing. I would like nothing more than for us to be focusing on what the Government have delivered, such as: bringing NHS waiting lists down; raising the minimum wage and lifting children out of poverty; and pushing for even greater ambition. Unfortunately, it is because of serious mistakes made by No. 10, such as appointing Peter Mandelson, that those achievements are being overshadowed.
I also do not doubt that the Conservatives are attempting to use this issue for their own gain ahead of the local elections. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) said, that is politics—of course our political opponents will try to exploit our weaknesses. Nevertheless, I believe that our constituents do care about the honesty of politicians and that they deserve nothing less than the whole truth on this matter.
This vote is not on whether we in this House believe the Prime Minister misled Parliament or not, but whether we believe there are questions the Prime Minister needs to answer, and that the Privileges Committee should look at the matter and give its assessment. I appreciate that the Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry is ongoing—I commend its Chair, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), for her fantastic work—but the purpose of that inquiry is not to look at the Prime Minister’s conduct.
I have listened to the Prime Minister’s arguments and unfortunately I am yet to be convinced that he has definitively not misled the House, even if inadvertently. I am concerned that, given Sir Olly Robbins’ evidence, pressure was put on the Foreign Office regarding Mandelson’s appointment. If I remain unconvinced, I am sure there will be a sizeable number of our constituents who are also unconvinced. Why not let the Privileges Committee settle this matter once and for all? As is often said, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
If we are to preserve what little trust still remains in our political system, it is vital that Ministers demonstrate the utmost transparency. And it is vital that we, as MPs, no matter our political allegiance, do not allow the impression that we are in any way attempting to cover things up for the leadership of our parties. That is why I am extremely disappointed that Labour MPs are being whipped to oppose the motion. Votes on House business are not normally whipped, and even Boris Johnson’s Government did not whip Conservative MPs to oppose his referral to the Privileges Committee. I am not making any comparison between his behaviour and that of the Prime Minister’s, but our Government must be seen to be holding themselves to far higher standards than the mess of sleaze and corruption that Johnson’s Government came to represent. I wish that the Prime Minister would refer himself to the Privileges Committee, demonstrating his confidence that he has nothing to hide and preventing entirely the need for a vote.
Colleagues will be aware that the Prime Minister and I have had our political differences—that is to be expected in a broad-church party—but I want to be clear that that has absolutely no bearing on my vote today. I would rather stick to debating those politics, not matters of integrity, so it brings me no pleasure to vote for the motion today. But this is about doing what is right by our constituents, for trust in politics and for the party that I have been a member of for almost half my life.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
There has been a common theme in the remarks made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome)—it is a pleasure to follow her—and the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell). I do not really know what wings of the Labour party they are on, or what complexion of Labour they are, but I do know that the three of them are Labour people, and part of the Labour family to their very fingertips. The emotional difficulty that they felt in giving their powerful speeches was certainly tangible to Opposition Members. I hope that their right hon. and hon. Friends felt it, too.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis) and one or two others have mentioned, one of the hardest things in this place is when your instincts and your judgment are to go against the herd—against what your family, or the Whip, is telling you to do. Politics is a tribal thing. We stand together or we hang together, so we are told; but it was Lord Nolan, in the principles that he set out some years ago, who reminded us all that the exercise of our judgment as individual Members of Parliament is so important. It was depressing to hear the hon. Member for Smethwick (Gurinder Singh Josan) say, slightly tongue in cheek, “I’m just a humble Back Bencher. It is not for me to say what the whipping should be.” We are all capable of forming our own rational judgment, informed by all sorts of imperatives.
One or two Labour Members have prayed in aid, as a reason why the motion should not be carried, the Humble Address. I remind colleagues from across the House, but particularly Government Members, that when we started the debate on the Humble Address motion, Government Members were being whipped to vote it down. It was only when the Government Chief Whip and the Leader of the House—two right hon. Gentlemen for whom I have the highest esteem and regard—and the Paymaster General listened to the debate and read the mood of not the House but Labour Members, that they realised that imposing the Whip was wrong, and that they needed to meet somewhere in the middle. Now, all of this could go away, of course, were the Prime Minister to refer himself.
Sir Alec Shelbrooke
My hon. Friend and I could never have been described as the greatest fans of Boris Johnson. When the question of his going before the Privileges Committee came forward, the Conservatives decided that the Committee was the right body to decide whether he had misled Parliament. Nobody was calling for his resignation until its report came out; after that report, this party moved, and he went. Is it not the flip side of the coin that once the Privileges Committee has cleared the Prime Minister, as many Labour MPs believe will happen, his strength will grow? Is it not true that he has nothing to fear?
Simon Hoare
My right hon. Friend has many skills; one that I have just learned of is that he is able to read the left-handed scrawl of my notes, even when he is sitting next to me, because that is the point that I am just about to come to. The hon. Member for South Shields wondered, as have one or two other Members, whether this motion is a trap set by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and Opposition Members. I do not think it is, but if it were, the Government whipping operation today has baited that trap. It is the wrong thing to do. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke) suggests, it makes the Prime Minister look uncertain and weak. He is not using a large parliamentary majority in this place to deliver change for the country; instead, he is turning his MPs into a human shield for himself.
I agree with the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East: I think the Prime Minister takes his training and experience as a lawyer very seriously. I think he takes the integrity of politics very seriously. I sometimes think the Prime Minister can be naive in presuming that everybody else takes a similarly elevated view of these things, and I think that can feed into some of his problems. One has to ask: what would the Prime Minister—an experienced lawyer—have to fear from having his name cleared and his reputation strengthened by going through a cross-party, informal process of this House? He would have nothing to fear. He would feel stronger.
We understand that Labour Whips and loyal Ministers have been picking up the telephones, and accidentally on purpose bumping into people in the Lobby and elsewhere, and asking them to vote this motion down. For what it is worth, may I give some thoughts on how I would respond, were a Whip from my party to ask me to do the same?
Simon Hoare
Don’t worry, Madam Deputy Speaker; I have checked what is parliamentary language and what is not.
The first point I would make is one that has already been made. I was never a fan of Boris Johnson. We first met in the late 1990s; I never got him then, and he never got me, and nothing ever changed, but not even Boris Johnson thought to apply a Whip on a privileges motion. The question I would be asking the Whips, if I was the hon. Member for Smethwick or any other Labour MP, is this: does Labour really want to let Boris Johnson look like the good guy, when it comes to referrals to the Privileges Committee? That is bad politics, as far as the Labour party is concerned.
The second point I would make is that the Privileges Committee can be a fulcrum, the place where this boil is lanced. It will do that dispassionately, and do it well, without fear or favour. That is what it is taught to do. It has done that in the past; it could do so now; and it will doubtless do so in the future. There is nothing to be afraid of. This is not a kangaroo court, or a Committee composed solely of people who really cannot stand the Prime Minister. It is a Committee of this House.
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
My hon. Friend is, as usual, making an excellent speech. He is talking about the composition of the Privileges Committee. Is it right to say that a majority of its members are Labour Members? The Prime Minister would be asking his own colleagues, among others, to judge him.
Simon Hoare
My hon. Friend is right. The same was true, of course, when the Privileges Committee looked at Boris Johnson’s behaviour; the majority of MPs on the Committee were Tory, and the Committee was still able to come to a judgment on the facts and the evidence.
Simon Hoare
Would my right hon. Friend forgive me if I do not? A lot of Members want to speak, so I want to make a little progress.
The third compelling point is that Labour Whips and Ministers will have deployed an argument about the local elections, and elections in Wales and Scotland; they will say, “This will not do Labour any good at all.” Well, what would give a whole lot more confidence to party canvassers would be the ability to say, if this subject was raised on the doorstep, “My leader has nothing to fear. He has referred himself to the Privileges Committee—or has sought not to hinder a motion that referred him.” If Labour Members follow the advice—that might be the gentlest way of describing it—of Government Whips today, they will be creating the largest albatross to hang around their neck in these closing days before polling day. They will be asked, “Why did you vote to cover up for the Prime Minister? Why did you not do the right thing? What has the Prime Minister got to hide? Why is the Prime Minister running scared?”. It would be far better to be able to say to the floating voter, or the person havering over where to put their cross, “What confidence my party leader has! The Prime Minister is happy for this to happen. He is absolutely clear in his own mind that his integrity is unimpeachable and his honesty is unquestionable. He has not misled the House.” They would be off to the races! But this is another trap that the Labour party seems to be keen to fall into. We are all familiar, I would say to the Whips, with the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let the Privileges Committee be that sunlight.
I can well remember the whipped vote in the previous Parliament. Thirteen of us Government Members rebelled. It was a hard and tricky vote. We came under pressure during it, and most certainly after it. However, within 24 hours, the position of the Government had changed, and they found themselves pointing in the direction of those of us who had rebelled, rather than those who had been loyal.
This may be a slightly old-fashioned question to ask ourselves, but when we leave this place—either by our own choice, or by the choice of our electorate—we all want, I think, to sit back and ask ourselves: when those crunch votes came, did we do the right and honourable thing? Did we do something that left our soul and spirit feeling peaceful, or in a state of turmoil? Possibly more importantly for today and tomorrow, could we, without blushing or crossing our fingers, or trying to find some weasel words, say truthfully why anybody would vote against this motion, if we were asked that in the supermarket queue this weekend, or at the butcher’s, the fishmonger’s or wherever?
If there is nothing to hide, let that absence of something to hide be shown to the Privileges Committee. The Prime Minister will be strengthened, the integrity of this place enhanced, and the honesty of politics burnished. The referral is the right thing to do. In their hearts, Labour Members know that. They should have the courage of the hon. Members for Kingston upon Hull East, for Nottingham East and for South Shields; they will be in jolly good company.
Tim Roca (Macclesfield) (Lab)
The appointment of Mandelson was a profoundly flawed process; it was also a profoundly flawed choice—it was the wrong choice. I think of the victims of Epstein; I also think of Alistair Darling, who was a fine, committed public servant, and what he would be thinking today.
This afternoon, we are being asked to make several leaps of faith, one of which is to believe that just nine days from local and national elections, we are here not because of a political stunt co-ordinated by the Conservative party but to accept that the Conservatives have turned into a sober, principled set of defenders of parliamentary standards who are not interested in pre-election theatre. Nobody seriously believes that. Even their own press briefings give the game away: a senior Conservative source was reported as saying
“we got the privileges vote. That was the goal”
ahead of the local elections. The goal was not the truth, not the outcome, and not the merits of the case—it was simply to force the spectacle of a vote. That tells us everything we need to know about the intent behind what is happening this afternoon.
It is therefore no surprise that this debate has been widely characterised, even by those observing closely—political correspondents—as a win-win exercise for the Opposition. If they secure an inquiry, they claim vindication; if they lose, they still bank the headlines, the insinuation and the noise. That is not how the House should conduct itself when invoking one of the most serious mechanisms at its disposal.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Smethwick (Gurinder Singh Josan) powerfully pointed out, we are not dealing with a vacuum. Mechanisms are already in train, including the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Humble Address, and last week the Prime Minister answered questions for nearly three hours. That is important.
Referral to the Privileges Committee is not a partisan tool or a device to be deployed because one side sees a political opportunity. It exists for a clear, serious and evidenced prima facie case of misleading the House—cases that go to the heart of ministerial integrity.
Tim Roca
Because it is so evident that what the hon. Member is participating in this afternoon is partly political. In fact, he is partaking in a particularly dishonourable act in doing this in such a partisan way.
To carry on with the case that I was making, I do not believe that what has been presented meets the bar that I just mentioned.
Tim Roca
No, I am going to make some progress.
At most, what we are dealing with is an argument about, as I said, a deeply flawed appointment, a deeply flawed process and the judgments around it. Those are matters for political debate, for scrutiny and for challenge across the Chamber, but they are not in themselves grounds for alleging contempt of Parliament. If they were, the Privileges Committee would be constantly in session.
That brings me to the question of consistency. In recent years, the House has had to confront genuinely serious breaches: cases where standards were not just questioned but plainly and repeatedly violated; findings of bullying at the highest levels of government in the last Government; and Ministers in the last Government falling short of the standards expected of them. Most notably, we saw a former Conservative Prime Minister investigated and found to have repeatedly misled the House.
Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Tim Roca
I will finish this point; I might then give way if I am feeling generous.
That conduct was so grave that it resulted in a damning report, which I think the Leader of the Opposition abstained on, rather than voting in favour of it. Of course, that is quite aside from the fact that it also involved a criminal conviction.
There is no equivalence—none—between those cases and what is before us today. If there was, there would have been a genuine attempt at a cross-party piece of persuasion. Instead, what we got from the Leader of the Opposition was a rambling rollercoaster on Iran, the two-child benefit cap, U-turns and so on. To attempt to draw that comparison is not just wrong but diminishes the seriousness of those findings in the past. It risks turning the Privileges Committee from a guardian of standards into a weapon of convenience. The motion speaks the language of contempt—contempt of Parliament—but actually it reveals something else: the contempt in which the Opposition hold the British people.
Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Tim Roca), who has done no harm whatsoever to his case to soon become a junior Whip in the Government—[Interruption.] Or a trade envoy, of course. [Hon. Members: “An ambassador!”] I will let hon. Members have their fun soon.
I wish to start on a much more important note, which is to dwell not on what the Prime Minister said when he is accused of having misled the House—I will come to that—but on something that he said at the Dispatch Box a few months beforehand. In response to the Leader of the Opposition, he stood up just there and said that he knew—he knew—that Peter Mandelson had maintained a relationship with the world’s most notorious paedophile and child trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. When he stood up at that Dispatch Box and finally admitted that he knew, that should have been it—that should have been curtains for him. At that moment, Labour Members should have made a moral decision that he was not fit to hold the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and First Lord of the Treasury because his judgment was flawed and it was wrong, but they proactively chose to ignore that and to defend him. In the weeks that have passed, all we have seen is even greater scandal engulf this Prime Minister and Labour Members, whether they realise it or not; some appear not to.
We have now received confirmation from the Prime Minister’s chief bag carrier that as Parliament returns after the Prorogation that is to come, the second tranche of the Mandelson files will become apparent. Each and every one of the Members opposite will be wedded to the Prime Minister as their leader, despite everything that the public know and everything that the public will come to learn. Let me tell them something, as someone who has sat in this House and watched a little bit of chaos up close: it will come back to haunt them, and it will come back to bite them far sooner than they realise.
All of us in all our political parties go through these moments. I have seen it in my own party in recent years, just as Conservative Members have said they have seen it in theirs. But what we should seek to do in politics is to learn from those mistakes, not to repeat them. I remember sitting outside the Chamber during a contentious vote to which the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) referred, where Conservative Members were whipped to support the indefensible and all chaos broke loose. That was the legacy that the Conservatives built for themselves, and that is why they got hammered at the last election. That is what will befall Labour Members. They cannot outrun Peter Mandelson. They cannot outrun their own Prime Minister and his record.
What Members of this House are being asked to do today is very simple. If they believe that the Prime Minister is innocent of the accusations that are being put to him, all they need to do is accept the premise of taking this to a Committee of their peers in this House—ourselves—to decide whether it is accurate. A confident Labour party and a confident Government would believe their Prime Minister; they would have courage in their convictions and go to that Committee posthaste to clear his name, but they will not do that because they are not acting from a position of strength. They are acting from a position of profound weakness. The public see that and smell it, and all they are going to believe is that there is a cover-up on behalf of each and every one of the Labour Members who traipse through the Lobby behind those who sit on their Front Bench.
Peter Fortune
Referring to the whiff that the public may pick up, does the right hon. Gentleman think that the Prime Minister’s concern could be that the Privileges Committee will deliver a result that he might not like?
Stephen Flynn
It is hard at this stage to come to any other conclusion. If Labour Members had confidence in their Prime Minister, they would already be going to the Privileges Committee, irrespective of the views of any of us in this here House.
Notwithstanding the arguments that have been made regarding Olly Robbins, Simon Case and others, or the Prime Minister’s decision to throw everyone under the bus bar himself, I do wonder what the public make of all this, at a time when they are—I am sure we can all agree on this—profoundly anxious about the very basics in their life. They are anxious about being able to afford things in the supermarket and about being able to fill up their car because the price of diesel is near two quid, yet when they turn on their TV they see a Labour party that should be acting in their best interests and looking to protect and save their jobs, and to give them hope and opportunity for the future, seeking to defend the indefensible. That breach of trust with the public cannot simply be renewed.
When the Prime Minister first came to the Dispatch Box following the general election, I did as many others did: I congratulated him and wished him well. The phrase that sits most acutely in my mind from that moment was his attempt to convey to the people of these isles that he would tread lightly on their lives. He has done the opposite. He promised to be change, but I am afraid to say that he has delivered more of the same. The public deserve better. The Government can do better, but that will happen only if the Labour Members who are sitting behind their Front Bench find the courage that those on the Front Bench so badly lack.
Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
As others have said, it is important that when we speak in this place we reflect the feelings of those we represent, and I think that if they see anything at all in all of this, they will be thinking about Epstein’s victims. As someone who knows more about sexual abuse than I would like to, I want to be absolutely clear, before I make any other remarks, that I think that it was wrong to appoint Peter Mandelson, even knowing what the Prime Minister knew at the time. But I will also say this: the Prime Minister has acknowledged as much. He has acknowledged it at the Dispatch Box, he has acknowledged it to the parliamentary Labour party and he has acknowledged it to Epstein’s victims, who he has apologised to on multiple occasions. I speak with ordinary people, like my auntie who voted for Brexit and did not vote Labour at the last election. She told me that she thinks the public are sick and tired of hearing about this, because we are not addressing the bread-and-butter issues of their lives. None the less, this is the motion before the House today.
I also want to say a word about pressure. Many people have alluded to this being a whipped vote. In many ways, I wish it was not, because it would not change the way that I will vote. I intend to vote against the motion before us, and I would do so based on my conscience and how I read this situation. I am a Back Bencher with nothing to lose and nothing greatly to gain from loyalty to the Government. I have looked at the merits of the case, and I think it is really important that we have a robust system of standards in this place, and that we do not make a mockery of it. When we have politically motivated charges such as those that have been brought today, it risks making a mockery of the Privileges Committee and the process.
Graham Stuart
What does the hon. Gentleman say to his colleagues, the hon. Members for South Shields (Emma Lewell), for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) and for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome)? They do not see this as some politically motivated thing. This is a serious issue. It is a House issue. He has already said that he regrets that the vote is whipped. Surely he needs to see beyond whatever the Whips have told him.
Sam Rushworth
The Whips have not told me very much, but I will address the right hon. Gentleman’s question as I make progress in my speech and he will see why I have drawn my conclusions.
The question is this: has the Prime Minister deliberately or recklessly misled the House, sufficient to make a referral to the Privileges Committee? As I said a moment ago, it is important that we treat that question properly, because we should not treat the Committee lightly; we should not mock it. If we made political referrals every time a Member said anything where someone could twist or misconstrue their words, we would always be making referrals.
It seems to me, from listening to the Leader of the Opposition, that there are two principal claims. One is regarding whether due process was followed; the other is regarding pressure. I have been watching the evidence sessions in the Foreign Affairs Committee, as we all have, and I have been listening carefully. We are still awaiting many of the documents, including more than 300 that have been referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee. We are waiting to see what those documents say, but nothing that has come out so far has done anything other than corroborate what the Prime Minister has told us.
Peter Fortune
I just want to make sure that I can follow the hon. Gentleman’s logical structure. When he said that the Prime Minister said that there was no pressure whatever, he meant that there was no pressure whatever apart from the various types of pressure—is that right?
Sam Rushworth
I will address that point in just a moment.
First, let us address the point about process. Sir Chris Wormald’s letter to the Prime Minister said:
“The evidence I have reviewed leads me to conclude that appropriate processes were followed in both the appointment and withdrawal of the former HMA Washington.”
Sir Olly Robbins confirmed that he did not tell the Prime Minister that Mandelson had failed the vetting process, and said:
“You are not supposed to share the findings and reports of UKSV, other than in the exceptional circumstances where doing so allows for the specific mitigation of risk.”
Cat Little, who also appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee, said:
“My view is that due process was followed...because the process as I’ve outlined to the Committee, is that UKSV make a recommendation, and the Foreign Office make a decision as to whether to grant DV.”
All the evidence so far is certainly corroborating that view.
Sam Rushworth
I will in a moment. I want to address my colleague’s question about pressure.
Clearly there are different types of pressure that can be exerted, and Sir Olly Robbins was clearly talking about the pressure to reach a decision quickly—[Interruption.] Opposition Members all know what was going on in the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson. We had had a change in Government in the United States. We had no trade deal with the United States, thanks to the legacy that the Conservatives left us. We had a difficult situation that meant that we needed a capable ambassador in post before President Trump’s inauguration.
Harriet Cross
Is the hon. Member therefore suggesting that the previous ambassador was not capable?
Sam Rushworth
I am happy to answer that point—[Interruption.] If Opposition Members stop chuntering, they will hear the answer, which is no, not at all. It is my personal view, although I am not an expert in these things, that I probably would have appointed an ambassador. I have said I thought the appointment of Peter Mandelson was wrong. I would have probably appointed an ambassador to the United States or left her in post, but that is immaterial to the point I am making. The point I am making is that No. 10 clearly felt time pressure to get somebody in post. There is a difference between feeling a pressure to conclude a process quickly and pressure being exerted on someone to change the decision. If we listen to what Sir Olly Robbins actually said, we will see that.
Peter Fortune
I am genuinely listening to the hon. Member’s logical process as he ratiocinates through it. I humbly say that we could set this evidence out in the Privileges Committee. In terms of no pressure whatsoever being exerted—and he is talking about the kinds of pressure exerted that that did not include—could he give examples of the kind of pressures that were not exerted?
Sam Rushworth
We have seen no evidence and, indeed, Sir Olly Robbins made it quite clear that he did not feel pressure to change his mind, that pressure was exerted on him with regard to the decision that he made. There was pressure exerted to make a decision. That is just part and parcel of the normal running of government, particularly when working to a timeline. Let me quote him:
“I walked into a situation”
where there was a
“strong expectation—you will have seen the papers, released…under the Humble Address—coming from No. 10, that he needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible, the very first formal communication…to my predecessor from the No. 10 private office being that they wanted all this done at pace and Mandelson in post before inauguration.”
That does not imply that there was some pressure to appoint him against the evidence that came forward.
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
Having recognised that, as Sir Philip Barton said this morning, there cannot be any doubt that there was pressure to get this “done as quickly as possible”—that is, to jump through all the hoops, to confirm an announcement that had already been made that Mandelson was appointed as ambassador—[Interruption.] That first bit is a quote; the next part of the sentence is my words. It simply stretches the bounds of reason to breaking point to suggest that pressure on timeframe, within the context of an already announced decision where there was no contingency plan, had no impact on pressure on the content of that decision—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Message received—I call Sam Rushworth.
Sam Rushworth
I simply disagree. Pressure to get things done is part and parcel of what we do in government all the time. I am always under pressure and under deadlines. On the central allegation that the Prime Minister somehow pressured them with regard to the decision, I am sorry but the evidence has not pointed to that in any shape or form.
Sam Rushworth
I will not take any more interventions, because Madam Deputy Speaker is looking at her watch. The allegation simply has not been substantiated. There is pressure going on at the moment: documents are being released under the Humble Address and evidence is being given before the Foreign Affairs Committee. I have to wonder why the Opposition have not waited until that process has been concluded before writing to the Speaker requesting this motion.
I want to address a couple more points quickly, and I will not take any more interventions. I acknowledge that there are Members on the Government Benches, and indeed some Opposition Members, who have suggested that they are so confident that the Prime Minister has no case to answer that he should just refer himself to the Committee to prove it. I do not think that that is the way we should be using the Committee’s time. The onus is on this place to decide whether any evidence has yet come forward that suggests that there is a case to answer, and I do not think that anybody so far has shown any.
People have also referenced the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I remind the House that at the point he was referred to the Privileges Committee, it was not a case of what happened in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office beyond the Prime Minister’s knowledge. This was a case of him saying, “There were no parties in Downing Street,” of him then appearing photographed at parties, and there being a Metropolitan police investigation and a criminal conviction. I am simply not going to indulge the Opposition in their games. We all know what this is about. We all know that somewhere in Conservative headquarters right now, graphs are being prepared with our faces on them to try to play some narrative to our voters that we are all part of some big cover-up. When we behave like this, it does a disservice to all of us and to this place, and I am simply not going to play their games today.
Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)
The motion does not attribute wrongdoing. It represents a simple choice and a decision: do we as a House support transparency, and do we think that truth in this place still matters? Peter Mandelson’s CV reads like an indictment—we all know that—and I do not need to rehearse the litany of appalling and heinous decisions and acts. For me, that leaves no question but that the Prime Minister’s judgment was absolutely found wanting in this situation. Given the seriousness of Mandelson’s actions and of this appointment, surely every Member of this House wants to know why he was appointed, how he was appointed and whether we and the British people have been given the full story of what happened.
I worked at the Foreign Office as a civil servant. If I, listening and reading every single detail, feel that something does not sit quite right; if I have former colleagues ringing me and saying, “That is not how the process works. It just doesn’t make sense—that is not right”; if we then have the Prime Minister saying that he had seen the vetting, “Oh no, I meant I’d seen something else. Sorry, I had not seen the security vetting; I had seen the due diligence. Oh, there was not any pressure put on” when others most clearly think there was pressure put on; and if the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth) is genuinely suggesting that there is no such thing as abuse from those who have more power against those who have less, that politicians do not sometimes behave appallingly to civil servants and that, “Oh, we are all busy. It’s the same pressure”, then I say no. That is why we have specific laws.
Alicia Kearns
Let me finish this point and then I will happily take an intervention.
We have specific laws that when someone senior to you puts you under undue pressure or treats you in a certain way, they have to take far more responsibility, because they have the ability to exercise that responsibility and authority over you which you cannot challenge. If the hon. Gentleman wants to come back and argue that he does not believe that in hierarchies, particularly No. 10 political appointments versus civil servants, there is such an imbalance in power, I will happily have him make that case.
Sam Rushworth
I think the hon. Member knows that I have great affection for her, so I am disappointed in the way she has just made that point. In Sir Olly Robbins’s testimony, he said that No. 10 was repeatedly asking, “Has the vetting been completed?” That is inconsistent with the idea that No. 10 regarded the vetting as immaterial to its decision—quite the opposite. It demonstrates to me a No. 10 that felt that this was an important process that had to be followed. There was of course pressure to complete it quickly, but that does not mean that there was pressure to change the outcome. I am sorry but until somebody shows otherwise through evidence, there is no reason we should believe that.
Alicia Kearns
I am sorry but the idea that somebody just chasing an update—“Can I just check where we are with that? We really would like to get it done”—and that there is no concept of any bullying because someone is just asking for something to be done a bit quicker, is a foolhardy suggestion by the hon. Gentleman.
The Prime Minister has come to the House many times, as hon. Members have said, but he has not answered the questions. The Prime Minister himself set the terms. Either he misled the House or he was reckless with the truth, and those are the terms that he set. Multiple people have lost their jobs over this Prime Minister’s decision to appoint Mandelson: two civil servants and two political appointments. For a man who said he would never sack his staff because of his own appointments, that is quite something. The Prime Minister’s judgment has also shown that he was happy to appoint people to Cabinet who had lied to the police, where he knew full well that they had done that, so there is a pattern.
Olly Robbins lost his job for implementing the wishes of the Prime Minister by the book. Either he followed due process and was sacked for doing so, or there was no due process and he was sacked because there was not. The Prime Minister’s position so far is that the former is true; it cannot be both, in which case Olly Robbins should never have been sacked. He did his job under immense pressure and was stripped of the agency to say no. As Mr Speaker set out at the start of the debate, this motion does not attribute guilt to anyone and the vote today is for an investigation by the Privileges Committee. That Committee is chaired by my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa), and I want to place on the record my total faith in his probity and professionalism.
Unfortunately, as we have seen in previous approaches and investigations, some people may seek to undermine individuals.
I appreciate that there are a range of views among Labour Members. Some of them seem genuinely to believe the Prime Minister’s version of events, while others share the concerns of Conservative Members, even if they are reticent to say so. I point out that at no point in this debate has there been more than nine Labour MPs sat on the Back Benches who were elected before 2024.
I was once a new MP, and I too went through this process. As I have said before, on the Owen Paterson vote, I voted in a way that I deeply regret. I had planned to vote against him, because, in watching the debate from the Government Benches, I was horrified by what I saw. Despite the enormous pressure from people around me, I thought, “Okay, I must do what is right,” and I decided to vote with those 13 brave Conservatives who did the right thing. I then went downstairs to breastfeed my daughter, who was very young at the time—she was just turning six months old—but when I came back upstairs there was only one minute remaining following the Division Bells. When I looked at the two voting Lobbies, I could not see those 13 friends who had gone the right way on the vote, so I stood there on my own, absolutely terrified about what to do, and saw everyone else going through the other Lobby. I will never, ever accept feeling that way ever again.
I say to the new intake that there is a reason why no other MPs from previous intakes are on the Labour Benches, and why MPs from previous intakes have said, “If your gut is telling you there’s a problem, there’s a problem.” They have given you their advice. They often tell us how dismissive you are of them, but—[Interruption.] Forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker—you would never be dismissive of anyone.
There is a reason, and you should take that time—
Alicia Kearns
Oh my goodness! I can only apologise again for saying “you”, Madam Deputy Speaker.
There is a reason why Labour MPs from older intakes have chosen not to come and defend the Prime Minister: they have seen this show before and know what happens. They know that their gut is telling them the right thing to do. I congratulate those of them who have been brave enough to speak out and share their views.
The House will recall that the Government attempted to whip Labour MPs against giving the Intelligence and Security Committee a role in assessing and releasing the Mandelson files, as per the Humble Address. Parliament asserted itself on that day, and we must do so again. A vote against this motion will show loud and clear that Labour Members forgave, followed the party line and ignored their conscience. There is precedent here: in 2022, the House unanimously passed a motion allowing an inquiry into whether the then Prime Minister had misled Parliament. We Conservatives supported that motion—not a single MP blocked it. I know how hard such decisions are because we have been there. I supported the Committee’s finding that Boris Johnson had misled the House. My advice to Labour MPs is to listen to your conscience and do what you know is right. Members will thank themselves, as the years pass by, for being free of the weight of regret.
Standards matters should never be whipped. Is any Labour MP willing to stand up and say that the threat of having the Whip removed has not been made? So far, none of them has said that. [Interruption.] Indeed, pressure seems to be an issue that we ought to debate more. I would also say to Labour MPs who are considering speaking in this debate that you may find—[Hon. Members: “They may find!”] Labour Members may find that, before the vote this evening, their party changes its mind and they are no longer being whipped. I encourage Labour MPs to reflect on whether that is the record that a Member may wish to have. Whips do change their minds if Members make representations to them. Can you truly say that the whole story is out there?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. May I remind the hon. Lady that much of her speech has been addressed to me, but I am not speaking or voting this afternoon?
Alicia Kearns
I fully accept that. I know better and I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)
The hon. Lady’s speech is based on wisdom, reflecting on her personal experience in previous votes. Does she agree that, no matter which voting Lobby we walk through, the question we must all ask today is whether we can justify our decision to our constituents?
Alicia Kearns
Absolutely. Some Members have suggested that their constituents do not really care about process and whether the truth is told in this Chamber, and that they are not really interested in this privilege motion, but that is most certainly not the case—and that is something that Members will experience in the months to come.
I fear that a future release of files will further contradict the Prime Minister’s version of events. We discovered only this morning that Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, was also appointed before being vetted. I asked the Government about his vetting in February, and I was told that national security vetting for the current National Security Adviser was conducted to the usual standard set for developed vetting. Does that sound familiar? Clearly, something went awry and due process was not followed, but this House was told once again that due process was followed. Judgment is revealed not in the exception but in the pattern, and there is a very clear pattern in this situation.
Imran Hussain
The hon. Lady comes to the crux of the debate: was due process followed? The simple fact is that vetting must always come before an appointment, but as we heard in evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee this morning, that did not happen. It is clear that due process was not followed.
Alicia Kearns
The hon. Gentleman is completely right. We were told repeatedly and consistently that due process was not followed. I know that it was not because I have been through security clearance. At the first level, before I could hand in my notice at my existing job and join the civil service, I had to wait seven months for security clearance. Then there was developed vetting, for which I had to wait about six months before I could take up a new role. I have also been through STRAP clearance, so I have been through the works. The claim that due process was followed does not sit right with me. Fundamentally, if due process was followed, Olly Robbins did not deserve to be sacked—he must have breached due process if he needed to be sacked.
I will vote in favour of the motion and end my day with a clear conscience, knowing that I voted to give my communities the answers that they deserve. I hope that every Member can say the same. We are asking whether the man leading our country has the judgment that his office necessitates and the required commitment to the truth. At this moment, the country does not believe that that commitment is there, so let us have an inquiry and see if it was.
Brian Leishman (Alloa and Grangemouth) (Lab)
From the outset, I wish to state my support for the delivery of justice for all the people who were harmed by Jeffrey Epstein and those involved with him who committed such despicable violations and crimes, and who must be held responsible. The people who were exploited should be at the front of all our minds.
It is my opinion that this motion does not come from anything noble or a deep concern for those who were trafficked or abused; nor is it about the protection of democracy or anything of that nature. Of course, the motion is designed to embarrass the Prime Minister and put Labour MPs in an awkward position. Not for the first time, we Labour MPs are in an awkward position, and not for the first time, it is because of the Prime Minister’s actions, not those of the Opposition.
The accusations of secrecy and goings-on in this place are serious political issues that mean the world to a whole host of our constituents. Sometimes that relates to the traditions and protocols of this place, which to many people seem archaic, arcane and totally unrelatable to how they lead their daily lives. People are regularly frustrated by Ministers not answering questions at the Dispatch Box, and, equally, by shadow Ministers’ amnesia about their own record when in power. People are infuriated watching politicians do the media circuit, slavishly going through the party lines, no matter how illogical they may be. All of it just breeds utter contempt in politics and for politicians. People are sick to the back teeth of it all.
When I am out campaigning and knocking on people’s doors, they tell me just how irritated they are with politicians who endlessly try to deflect and defend the most absurd and wrong decisions, just because of the party they represent. Of course, this is not unique to the Labour party—all parties indulge in this. The Conservatives defend their record of austerity that ripped the heart out of communities up and down the United Kingdom. Many in the SNP refuse to take responsibility for failures in housing, education, health, local authorities and vital public services, but credit to the right hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) for alluding to, with a lightness of touch, some of the travails that his party has experienced.
I just want my Labour Government to be better than that. It really is a low bar that we have been set, but people genuinely think that we are all the same—they see no real difference. To echo other right hon. and hon. Members, I think that the Prime Minister should refer himself to the Privileges Committee. It would say to Parliament—and, more importantly, to our voters across the country—that he knows that he will be proved innocent, that he will be vindicated, that he has got nothing to hide, and, importantly, that transparency and accountability really are at the heart of our democracy.
I say to my colleagues on the Labour Benches that we were elected based on the promise of providing change—an end to the scandals and the cover-ups that people are so disgusted with. Whether it be Tory lockdown parties or trips to castles hundreds of miles away to test eyesight, the SNP abandonment of care homes and the “do not resuscitate” notices placed on patients without their consent during covid, we need to be better than all of that. But truthfully, in our first 20 months in government, the public do not think that we are.
Because of the mistakes, the decline in standards, the secrecy and the lack of accountability, we are paving the way for a hard-line, far-right Government to come next. And let us be under no illusions: that Government would set the country back to the days of mass unemployment, dire poverty and inequality. They would want to create a society that is as intolerant as it is unfair, and it absolutely terrifies me.
In finishing, I say to any colleague who thinks I am wrong: please do have a look at the polls—look at the by-election results that we have had. The Prime Minister said that we would put country before party. Today, with this vote, he has the perfect opportunity to do just that. The Prime Minister needs to stop putting Labour MPs in awkward situations. The open and honest thing would be to refer himself to the Committee of Privileges. If he will not do that, then I am afraid that he has left me with no choice: I will have to vote for the motion this afternoon.
Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)
At the start of the debate, when Mr Speaker was in the Chair, he reminded the House that this was not a trial of the Prime Minister, but a debate about whether or not an issue should be put to the Privileges Committee; I do think we all need to remember that. He also said that when the debate became repetitive, he might consider taking a closure motion. I am sorely tempted to move one, Madam Deputy Speaker—but not yet.
It saddens me deeply that we are where we are today. It saddens me that the motion has been presented by some Members on the Government Benches as a ruse before the local government elections. This is about something very fundamental to many of us; it is about the truth, the probity and the integrity of this House, and every man and woman who sits in it. I have heard some very courageous speeches from the Government Benches this afternoon, and I applaud each and every one of the people who made them, because I know just how difficult this is.
Mr Johnson has been referred to frequently. I was one of the first—possibly the first—to call publicly for him to resign as Prime Minister. That was not a happy circumstance—I did not enjoy it, as I do not like taking on my own side—but I believed then, as I believe now, that that man was not fit to be Prime Minister. I know that what I did and said was right, as I believe those hon. Members on the Government Benches who have spoken in support of the motion are doing what they believe to be right.
I am horrified to have to believe that House business is being whipped. It should not be. It has been said repetitively that the sensible thing would have been for the Prime Minister to refer himself to the Privileges Committee. If that is not going to happen, we all need to understand that there are people out there who are waiting to see what we do and if we can be trusted—never mind if the Prime Minister can be trusted. Can we be trusted to take the right and proper decision tonight?
Every single one of us is going to get up in the morning and look in the mirror, either to put on make-up or to shave—
Sir Roger Gale
My right hon. Friend reminds me that he said, incorrectly, that the vote on the call for Johnson to resign was not taken until after the Privileges Committee had released its findings. He is quite wrong: that call was made well before it went to the Privileges Committee.
Let me come back to what I was trying to say. Every single one of us has to be able to look in the mirror and live with ourselves. I hope very much that the Government Whips will withdraw the whipping tonight, so that hon. Members can vote according to their conscience. I believe that if that is done, then this matter will be referred, entirely properly, to the Privileges Committee, and then after the King’s Speech we can get on with our job and devote our concerns to the cost of living, fuel prices and the manner in which hospitality businesses are being destroyed, and to all the matters that we ought to be discussing today, rather than discussing this. I beg my friends on the Government Benches to do the right thing tonight.
Chris Kane (Stirling and Strathallan) (Lab)
A referral to the Privileges Committee, particularly involving a Prime Minister, should be rare. The bar should be high, because we have so many other processes available to us in this place, and with this issue, many of those processes are already in action. The Foreign Affairs Committee, excellently chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), is taking evidence and will report in due course. The Humble Address from this House has put a process in place to ensure transparency, and the Government are complying with it.
Then there is attendance in this Chamber. I have no doubt that the Prime Minister will continue to make himself available here, as he has done in recent weeks through statements and at Prime Minister’s questions, both because it is right and because the processes of this House require it. Let us be honest about the timing. Bringing this motion forward one week before elections is political. I do not criticise that—it is part of the system we operate in—but we should be clear about it.
I have been reflecting this week on the concept of pressure. We have heard from senior civil servants that there was pressure to proceed with the appointment of Peter Mandelson before vetting had concluded. They have not said that the pressure was inappropriate; they have said simply that it existed. For his part, the Prime Minister has been clear: he has said that this was the kind of pressure that exists in any high-performing environment where decisions need to be made and progress needs to happen. That is very different from pressure to do something that you are not comfortable with. I suppose the truth is that my experience of pressure is not the same as the Prime Minister’s—a degree of recalibration is required on my part.
I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee, and we apply pressure to senior civil servants every week. We expect them to account for their decisions, often in difficult circumstances and under public scrutiny. Time and again, I am struck by their professionalism and ability to handle that pressure, and I am equally struck by the Prime Minister’s ability to do the same. Whether it is at Prime Minister’s questions or in extended sessions such as the one we held last week, when the Prime Minister answered questions for more than two hours, that level of scrutiny is constant and unrelenting.
In my time in this House, I have never known the Prime Minister to act in anything other than good faith. He is focused, serious and determined to deliver in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Is he perfect? Of course not—none of us is. His is an almost impossible job in turbulent times, but that is the nature of government. The public elect a Government and give them time to govern. That requires consistency, judgment and, at times, the ability to change course as circumstances demand. It does not require abandoning the course entirely at the first sign that another ship looks to be sailing more smoothly.
We are quite clearly in the middle of a storm. It is not a passing squall, but sustained, difficult conditions—economic pressure, global instability and challenges at home that have been building for years. In those circumstances, what matters is not whether the sea is calm, but whether the vessel is seaworthy and whether the person at the helm knows how to navigate. No ship is perfect—there will always be repairs to make, adjustments to take and decisions that, with hindsight, might have been handled differently—but abandoning a ship mid-storm or trying to sink it is a risk. We may find another ship that is sailing in different waters and under different conditions, but let us be honest: the same storm is heading its way. The real question is not whether things are perfect, but whether we have a vessel that can withstand the conditions and a captain who can steer it.
When I look across the Chamber, I do not see credible alternatives ready to take us through what lies ahead. On one side, we have a Conservative approach that too often feels like a ship designed for a different age—a wooden ship that is not equipped for the realities of the world we now live in. It is a vision that looks backward, rather than forward. On the other side, I see the SNP. If it cannot reliably build and run the ferries that connect its own communities, that raises serious questions about its readiness to navigate a much bigger journey. The SNP’s is less of a fully equipped vessel and more like something assembled for the appearance of movement, rather than the reality.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. I think hon. Members will find that this debate is not about the SNP. Perhaps we all ought to confine our remarks to the subject we are actually debating.
Chris Kane
To finish my metaphor—not about the SNP—we must hold steady, make the adjustments needed and focus on getting safely to better conditions. That is the task in front of us, and that is why I will support the Prime Minister to continue doing the job that he was elected to do, keep a steady hand on the tiller and guide the country through challenging times. I urge colleagues to do the same.
In the end, this is about stability, seriousness and leadership, and that is what this country needs. Today’s motion feels to me like a distraction from that mission, so I urge colleagues across the Chamber to vote against it.
Ann Davies (Caerfyrddin) (PC)
The Prime Minister has called this motion a “stunt” and “pure politics”, but he and the Labour MPs rallying around him forget the seriousness of the allegations against him. The allegations regard misleading the House of Commons over statements relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States—an individual with well-documented links to a convicted sex offender and human trafficker. Swatting away those allegations as a “desperate political stunt” and refusing to let them be investigated properly by the Committee of Privileges is an insult to us all. It is an insult to the public, who were promised transparency and openness by the Prime Minister’s Labour Government, and it is an insult to victims and survivors of violence and abuse, who deserve so much better from those who claim to represent them.
Parliament is today being asked a straightforward question: whether serious concerns regarding the Prime Minister should be examined properly and independently. If the Prime Minister insists that he has done nothing wrong, surely the Committee of Privileges will come to the same conclusion. If Labour believes that everything is in order, why has it forced its MPs to vote against the motion? That begs the question: what does the Prime Minister have to hide?
The Prime Minister promised change, and people across Wales gave him a mandate for that change, but what did the public get instead? Misjudgements, incompetence, a lack of transparency at the heart of Government and no real accountability. I put myself forward to become a Member of Parliament because, to be frank, I was fed up of partygate, the betting scandal and the £250,000 that Vaughan Gething accepted in order to fund his leadership campaign. I thought, “We are better than this. as residents and constituents, we are better than that.” People deserve a Government who are honest and transparent, and we certainly have not had that in the two years that I have been on these Benches.
The Prime Minister has tried to wash his hands of Mandelson’s appointment, hiding behind processes, procedure and the actions of civil servants. He has been destroying decent people’s lives only to hobble on for another few weeks. Even if the Prime Minister’s loyalists vote this motion down, Labour and the Prime Minister will have shown their true colours. In just over a week, the people of Wales have a chance to give their verdict, and they will.
Mr Alex Barros-Curtis (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I rise in this debate first and foremost to reiterate, as other colleagues have done, my fullest solidarity with the victims of Epstein. We should always maintain them at the forefront of our minds. Notwithstanding their absence from the motion, I know that many colleagues on both sides of the House have referenced them, and I am sure that we will continue to do so.
I want to be clear that I will vote against this motion, not because I have to be told to, but because the case has absolutely not been made. Given some of the contributions made about shaving or putting on make-up in the morning, and considering and reflecting on the vote that will be cast tonight, I will have no compunction whatsoever and absolutely no doubt in my mind when I go through the Lobby that I will have made the right decision. I do not need insinuations to the contrary impugning my integrity.
Mr Barros-Curtis
Before I explain why I am making that case and that decision, I will happily give way.
Ayoub Khan
Of course, every Member is entitled to make their decision, and to vote in either Lobby, but they have to justify that to the electorate. Given that, does the hon. Member believe that a three-line Whip is necessary?
Mr Barros-Curtis
That is an irrelevant point. I have already said that regardless of the position of the party, I do not need to be told how I will vote on this motion, because the case has not been made out. [Interruption.] If people will stop chuntering, I will respond to the individuals who have said that we will have to look in the mirror tomorrow. I have no doubt that every decision we make in this place, whether on this motion, on amendments or on legislation, is made with integrity, and with the best interests of our constituents in mind, so reminding me or my colleagues of that today suggests more about the person making the statement than it does about me and the decision I have made.
As I have said, I will vote against the motion, because I do not believe that the case has been made out. In my time as a solicitor, I have seen many witness statements and particulars of claim, and the case that the Leader of the Opposition laid out today was one of the most appallingly made-out cases I have seen in my professional lifetime.
Mr Barros-Curtis
If the right hon. Gentleman will wait to hear why I think that, I will happily give way in a moment. As has been said, the motion cuts across existing procedures that everyone in this House unanimously agreed, supported and initiated just a few weeks ago. As I have stated and will go on to explain, it lacks any credibility or evidential basis.
Mr Barros-Curtis
The right hon. Gentleman can chunter some more, but maybe he should listen to what I say about the basis on which I reached my decision, and then I will happily give way.
Before I turn to the lack of evidence to make out this case, I want to mention—as others have—the integrity of the Prime Minister. I have known him for a number of years, and I know that he is a man of integrity. I know that he will act without fear or favour, and will always be the hardest critic of himself. He has rightly apologised for the poor and incorrect decision to appoint Peter Mandelson. He has done it in this House, he has done it to the country, and most importantly, he has done it to the victims of Epstein.
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is being most generous with his time, but we have not really heard the case yet. Labour colleagues will be in a similar position to the hon. Gentleman. They know the Prime Minister—they have known him for years—and will be sure of his integrity or otherwise. Why does he think that a three-line Whip should be imposed on Labour Members? Even the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth), who spoke for the Prime Minister’s cause, could see that that was not a good idea, but the hon. Gentleman does not seem to see it. As a good lawyer, maybe he will be able to share that argument with the House.
Mr Barros-Curtis
I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman’s patronising tone, but I will simply say that I do not need to be told how to vote on this motion, because I do not believe that the case has been made out, as I will explain now, if I can make some progress.
I underline my point by reiterating what the Speaker said earlier, and what I said to him when he was in the Chair: of course, the question we are considering is not about the application that was put before him. He has rightly made a decision, as he was required to once the application came before him, but I am clear that those who submitted that application to him were engaged in a nakedly political stunt. That is not just because of the nature of the motion before us, but because of the shapeshifting of the Opposition party leaders on this issue since The Guardian broke the story on 16 April.
Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Is it not the reality that this is about a Leader of the Opposition who called for us to join the US in the war in Iran, and who called the Prime Minister a liar when the evidence has shown that there is absolutely no basis for it? Is this not just the Leader of the Opposition once again shooting from the hip?
Mr Barros-Curtis
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Even if his intervention was perhaps slightly askew from the point I am about to make, it goes to the question of consistency on this issue and many others.
As I said, the Opposition party leaders have been shapeshifting on this issue. The Leader of the Opposition and the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), rather than waiting for the evidence, had already made up their minds two weeks ago. On 17 April, the day after the story broke in The Guardian, the Lib Dems put out a press release stating that
“Starmer must be investigated by Privileges Committee over…the decision to overrule Mandelson’s failed security vetting”,
but that was found wanting, because the evidence showed otherwise. That was proven when the Prime Minister came to the Chamber at the earliest opportunity, on Monday 20 April, and laid the evidence before this House. Sir Olly Robbins backed that up in his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on 21 April.
Harriet Cross
The hon. Member mentioned the Guardian story on 16 April. The Prime Minister found out about this on 14 April, so the earliest opportunity would have been 15 April at Prime Minister’s questions, would it not?
Mr Barros-Curtis
The Prime Minister addressed that question when it was put to him in this House a number of times over the following days. He said that he was trying to secure the answers to the questions that he asked on that evening, and the officials were not able to answer, so as he has said, and as colleagues have made clear, including Cabinet colleagues, he came back to this House at the earliest opportunity to update it, as is right.
I go back to the timeline of the Opposition’s shapeshifting. On Friday 17 April, the Leader of the Opposition went on national radio and television to say:
“It is completely preposterous for us to believe that civil servants would have cleared a political appointee who had failed security vetting.”
She also said that the Prime Minister is “taking us for fools,” and she called for him to go. As other colleagues have elaborated—I will not dwell on this—that standard was not consistently applied to the proven liar Boris Johnson, so we see the shapeshifting of the Opposition parties on that point.
The motion before us dwells on two aspects: due process and, of course, the question of pressure. On due process, I will explain why I do not think the case is made out. I note that the motion does not criticise the process, which, as this debate has played out over recent weeks, has been shown to be seriously deficient and lacking. That has necessitated reviews and changes, at the Prime Minister’s order, and some of that has been elaborated on in today’s debate. Indeed, the motion makes assertions, without actual evidence, that have not withstood further testimony from key officials to the Foreign Affairs Committee. We know that the Prime Minister was not told about UK Security Vetting’s recommendation not to grant clearance to Peter Mandelson for many weeks, and Sir Chris Wormald has confirmed that due process was followed, so I do not accept that the case has been made out.
When we turn to the question of there being no pressure, the Leader of the Opposition made great play of her selective quotes. I have the Hansard before me for Prime Minister’s questions of 22 April, and it is quite clear:
“Let me deal with this directly, particularly this question of pressure in relation to the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson and to put him in place.”—[Official Report, 22 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 316.]
The Prime Minister was clearly referring to the parts of Sir Olly’s evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on 21 April on the specific point about whether or not pressure was brought to bear on the outcome of the vetting process. That was also the gist of the Leader of the Opposition’s preceding question to the Prime Minister. It is also notable that just today, Sir Philip Barton substantiated the position that there are two different types of pressure, and while there was pressure to get on with making a decision, which the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton alluded to, Sir Philip went on to say that he was
“not aware of any pressure on the substance”
of the vetting decision, which is what this motion goes to.
I am conscious of time, so I will conclude by expressing solidarity with my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell), who spoke with great power. She and I spoke about some of these issues before I had the privilege of coming to this place, and of course I offer my support.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland said in his excellent speech, it is clear from the tone of some in this debate that this is not about the substance of the issue; it is about trying to exploit the situation for partisan political gain. There is no doubt in my mind that certain political opponents will seek to make the lives of my hon. Friends and others difficult, just as they have on other serious issues, for example by impugning our decisions on grooming gangs and targeting us on social media, which means we become subject to death threats. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields said, that makes it much worse for her in her constituency. Indeed, the Tory Front Benchers were nodding when my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland talked about this earlier. As I said, they probably already have their digital media attacks ready, in which they will define us as voting to cover up. [Interruption.] They confirm it again; that belies their intent.
There is no doubt in my mind that it was a mistake to appoint Peter Mandelson, and the Prime Minister has taken responsibility for that, but as the quality of certain contributions today suggests, and as I explained in setting out my reason for not supporting the motion, it is clear to me that the motion, rather than seeking to uphold standards, risks undermining them. We should get on with the business of Government, and we should get on with tackling the issues that our constituents are most concerned about, as the Leader of the Opposition said. We should focus on the job in hand. For all those reasons, I will not support the motion today.
Charlie Dewhirst (Bridlington and The Wolds) (Con)
I am mindful of Mr Speaker’s advice about repetition. I will keep my remarks short and to the point. We have had a number of speeches in which Labour Members have debated whether the threshold for referring this matter to the Privileges Committee has been met. If we look at the evidence, there are clearly some very concerning issues arising from the documents that have been released into the public domain, and from what has been said on the Floor of this House and what has not.
Let us take the advice given by Simon Case in November 2024, when he was Cabinet Secretary. It is clear from that document, which was released following the Humble Address motion, that the Prime Minister was advised that if he wanted to make a political appointment, vetting should be done before the appointment was made. We now know that did not happen. We can also take the letter that Chris Wormald, as Cabinet Secretary, sent to the Prime Minister in September 2025, asserting that the process that was followed was in line with the advice given by Simon Case to the Prime Minister. That is important, because the Prime Minister has referred back to that letter as a reason to accept that due process was followed, yet that letter seems, on the face of it, to be inaccurate. We in this House need to investigate that.
We then come to the Prime Minister’s answer at Prime Minister’s questions on 22 April, in which he replaced the word “that” with “any”; he implied that there had not been “any” pressure, instead of saying “that pressure”. When that was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) at Cabinet Office questions last Thursday, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster asserted on the Floor of the House:
“I think the difference between the words ‘that’ and ‘any’ is not of material relevance”.—[Official Report, 23 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 420.]
Anyone with a basic grasp of English, having heard the testimony of Olly Robbins and the Prime Minister’s answer, would clearly say that the Prime Minister has tried, at least in my view, to misrepresent what Mr Robbins told the Foreign Affairs Committee. That, too, is an extremely powerful reason why this matter needs to be referred.
I come to the matter of the unanswered questions, or the evidence that we do not have. I refer again to Simon Case’s advice to the Prime Minister back in 2024. What was released following the Humble Address motion is just Mr Case’s evidence; the box for the Prime Minister’s comments remains blank. Are we expected to believe that the Prime Minister did not respond to the advice given to him by the Cabinet Secretary, or has that advice been withheld from this House? I think that question needs to be answered.
There are other matters, such as the evidence regarding Peter Mandelson that the Prime Minister did see; he confirmed to the House at Prime Minister’s questions that he did see some of it, regarding Jeffrey Epstein. However, he has refused to say whether he was aware of Mr Mandelson’s business links, particularly with Russia, and his directorship of Sistema, even after Russia invaded Ukraine. Then there is the matter of documents of which the Government are unwilling to confirm even the existence, such as Mr Mandelson’s declaration of interests. We have asked repeatedly whether that document exists—we are not asking whether it will be published in full at this point—and we have not received answers.
Then today we find Morgan McSweeney giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee and confirming that the first meeting regarding the potential appointment of Mr Mandelson as ambassador to the United States took place in December. The Cabinet Office has said that it has no record of the meeting. Were there no minutes taken of that meeting? If not, why not? Or have those minutes somehow vanished? All those are very good reasons why this matter needs to be referred.
Graham Stuart
On the allegation that the Prime Minister may have misled this House, he has told the House that all due process was followed. We were told by Morgan McSweeney this morning that the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was made in a meeting for which there are absolutely no records and notes, despite extensive searches. At the beginning of this process, the Government failed on due process, yet the Prime Minister has repeatedly told us that due process was followed. That alone would be cause to allow the Privileges Committee to investigate. Labour Members need to look deep into their consciences before they vote against the motion.
Charlie Dewhirst
I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend. It is absolutely astonishing that the decision to appoint an individual to the most important ambassadorial role that we can offer took place in a meeting of which there now appears to be no record.
We have three clear issues: a discrepancy in the documents that have been published; an inaccurate recollection of events in response to questions in this House, whether inadvertent or deliberate; and a failure to provide full transparency in relation to this sorry saga. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) said, the Prime Minister is losing in the court of public opinion, and therefore the best route for him now is to refer himself to the Privileges Committee to make his case and perhaps clear his name. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said, it is not always the cock-up—and we know in this case that the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was a cock-up—that brings you down but the conspiracy.
Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)
Before I start, let me pay tribute to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, because their views have been heard far too little in these debates.
Let me address some of the quite patronising comments made to Back-Bench Labour MPs today. Nobody has asked me to speak today, and nobody has put any pressure on me. In fact, colleagues on the Government Benches know that I have my own mind and will express it as I see fit.
At a moment of genuine challenge for families across the country, when households are concerned about rising prices, instability abroad and pressure on living standards, the Opposition have tabled a motion that is ultimately more concerned with political point scoring than practical solutions. That is deeply regrettable, because the British public expect and deserve better than Westminster at its most performative. They expect seriousness, and they rightly expect scrutiny where scrutiny is due, but they also expect Parliament to focus on the issues that shape their daily lives: the bills landing on their doormats, the cost of food in the supermarkets, the price of fuel at the pumps and the strength of the economy in uncertain times.
Let me be absolutely clear: Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed as our ambassador. The Prime Minister has recognised that, and he has apologised for that. He did so properly, repeatedly, with transparency and accountability, and with respect to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. That was the right course of action, and I would not have expected anything less from the Prime Minister, because I have known him for many years. I worked with him as he sought to rid our party of the stain of antisemitism, which has now infected others. I have seen him stand up to Putin when others have taken bribes from his allies.
Given that the processes of transparency are in place and under way, it has to be asked: why are the Opposition parties working to ride roughshod over investigation processes that they all agreed to? We heard the answer earlier in the debate: it is for social media clicks and cheap headlines ahead of significant elections. The fact is that the Government have agreed to and are complying with the Humble Address to allow scrutiny of the Mandelson appointment in this place and to allow us to see the facts and the advice that was available to the Prime Minister at the time Mandelson was appointed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) is chairing a Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry to which key figures involved in the Mandelson appointment have rightly been summoned, and the Prime Minister has come to this House repeatedly to answer questions about that appointment.
As has been expressed by others, politically motivated use of the Privileges Committee procedures risks undermining those procedures. It is clear that the circumstances the Opposition hoped would come to light and might bring down a successful Labour Government have been nothing more than conspiracy. First, they said that the Prime Minister must have known that UK Security Vetting’s recommendation was to reject vetting for Peter Mandelson, yet Olly Robbins confirmed to the Select Committee last week that he had chosen not to share that crucial information with the Prime Minister. They were wrong. They said that the Prime Minister was wrong to say that due process was followed, yet Chris Wormald has confirmed in a letter to the Prime Minister that the process was followed. In his own words, he said:
“The evidence I have reviewed leads me to conclude that appropriate processes were followed in both the appointment and withdrawal”
of the former ambassador to Washington. Again, they were wrong. How could the Prime Minister have made any other assessment than that due process was followed, when that was spelled out to him in black and white by his own officials? Those are not rumours or talking points; they are facts, and facts matter in this place.
Many good colleagues on the Government Benches and, indeed, some on the Opposition Benches know deep down that the No. 1 issue facing our constituents is the cost of living fallout from Trump’s war in Iran—a war that was egged on by parties on the Opposition Benches. We know that, because that is what voters have been telling every one of us when we have been out on the doors in the lead-up to the elections in May. They are worried about their bills, the prices at the pump and the prices in the supermarkets. While some in this House want to engage in political stunts, this very afternoon the Prime Minister is convening a committee on the response to the conflict in the middle east and on how we support the British economy, our services and, most importantly, our constituents.
What is clear is that only one party is focused on the job of delivering for the British people, and it is the one that the country voted for in the last election. It is galling that the Conservative party, after 14 years of chaos, scandal and economic recklessness, now wants to lecture anyone else on standards in public life. It is the party that gave us partygate, revolving-door Prime Ministers, cronyism, collapsing public services and Liz Truss’s catastrophic experiment that sent mortgages soaring and punished working families for the Conservatives’ failures. Meanwhile, the Conservatives collude with the SNP—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. I have made the point previously, but please will Members confine themselves to debating the issue at hand and not get into fighting the local election campaign?
Johanna Baxter
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Those are the issues we could have been debating today, but instead we are debating a political stunt. This Government are standing up for the British people, showing leadership in our support for Ukraine, bringing our national rail services back into public ownership and delivering our historic Employment Rights Act 2025, among many other things. When I vote this afternoon, I do so knowing full well that I was elected to serve on the priorities that matter to the people of Paisley and Renfrewshire South: their bills, their security and their welfare. I will vote to ensure that we have a Government who continue to focus on those priorities.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
The motion to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee revolves around two words. Pressure is the first. The other, which is vital, is process. Of course, the Prime Minister is the master of process. He bangs on about it all the time. He is the king of process here in the Commons. He says that “full due process” was followed, yet we have already heard from other hon. Members that Sir Simon Case, the then Cabinet Secretary, gave the Prime Minister due process in November 2024. Sir Simon said that the vetting and due diligence should be carried out before confirming the choice of ambassador. The Prime Minister chose to avoid that due process.
There is a second key element of due process that has not been properly teased out so far this afternoon, and it relates to the timing of the decision on vetting through January 2025. If full due process was being followed, the security authorities and the vetting authorities should have been allowed to take whatever time they deemed necessary to make their judgment. With Mandelson—goodness me—there was a lot to go through to check that clearance. We have heard from a number of senior civil servants that they were not allowed to carry out full due process and to take as long as they determined was necessary, even if that took them beyond the inauguration of the President of the United States—no, no.
I shall move on to the second work, which is whether any pressure whatsoever was applied. We have heard from not one, not two, but three separate senior civil servants that the pressure was not on the decision itself, but on the speed of the decision, because the decision had already been taken by due process not being followed. We have heard Sir Olly Robbins confirm that pressure was felt to get on with the decision; we heard yesterday from Ian Collard that pressure was applied for that decision to be made; and we have, of course, heard from Sir Philip Barton that—again—the pressure was to “get on with it.” There was “no space” in the decision. In other words, due process was not followed.
Dr Arthur
Did we not hear last week, in the Foreign Affairs Committee, that while there was pressure, it had no impact on the decision? It was a marginal decision, and it was felt that that the risks could be managed. I feel that the hon. Gentleman is missing that part out in his story.
Richard Tice
I thank the hon. Gentleman, but let me remind him what the Prime Minister said during Prime Minister’s questions just last week: “No pressure existed whatsoever”. “Whatsoever” is the critical word, and that is the flaw in the hon. Gentleman’s argument.
We now know that not only did the Prime Minister inadvertently mislead the House with regard to “full due process”, but he has misled the House a second time with regard to whether or not any pressure existed “whatsoever”. The evidence is in; while this is a Prime Minister who prides himself on process, anecdotally it seems that that is a culture that does not exist around him or perhaps within him. For example, we now know that those in the Cabinet Office questioned whether there should be any vetting at all. In other words, they did not want full due process. We now know, too, that in respect of the decision on whether to retain Sir Olly Robbins or fire him, full due process was not followed. As for the issue of whether or not a decision to refer any Member of the House to the Privileges Committee should be whipped, precedent clearly shows that it should not. I would argue that precedent is a process, and that in this instance, the process of not whipping a vote of this kind is not being followed. I therefore urge all Members to ignore the whipping, to follow their conscience, and to follow the evidence. The evidence is in: the Prime Minister inadvertently misled the House of Commons.
David Pinto-Duschinsky (Hendon) (Lab)
Appointing Peter Mandelson was wrong, and, as with any debate on this subject, we should start by acknowledging the suffering of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. They have my full solidarity.
However, I have listened closely to what has been said by Opposition Members during the debate, and I think we need to call their behaviour what it is: political game playing of the lowest order. Politics is a circus for the Opposition. They thrive on the use of politics as a soap opera, because it is all they know. That is why the public grew so heartily sick of them, and it is precisely why so many of their former colleagues no longer sit on their Benches. Just weeks ago, their leader showed a catastrophic failure of leadership in calling for this country to rush to war. When she spoke then, she had no underlying strategy, and she did not focus on what was right for the country. Clearly she has learned nothing from that. Her cynicism becomes clear now, when we peel back the rhetoric and expose the lack of substance behind her arguments.
Peter Mandelson was dismissed last September, and rightly so. The Prime Minister has already acknowledged that his appointment was a mistake. Senior civil servants, including Olly Robbins, Chris Wormald and Cat Little, have all made it clear that due process was followed in that appointment. Olly Robbins has said that no one from No. 10 ever spoke to him or messaged him to apply pressure, and Philip Barton has today confirmed that there was no pressure on the substance of the vetting.
I want to deal directly with the sequence of vetting. I have been through developed vetting. I have been through security vetting numerous times, and it is completely standard procedure to make offers of jobs contingent on passing security. On this point, as on other points, there is simply no case to answer.
David Pinto-Duschinsky
No, I will make some progress.
What is more, this Government are undertaking an extensive release of documents in the interests of transparency and out of respect for this House. Ministers have updated us on the progress with the Humble Address. On top of that, the Foreign Affairs Committee is holding hearings. Alongside that, the Government have already strengthened the processes around national security vetting and senior appointments. So I ask again: what is the real substance here? We are not uncovering new facts. In fact, the Conservatives’ argument has changed time and again, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Mr Barros-Curtis) so eloquently pointed out. What we are seeing is lots of throwing mud in the hope that some of it will stick. The Conservatives are speaking not in the public interest, but in service of political opportunism.
David Pinto-Duschinsky
No.
The Conservatives are demeaning and diminishing an important parliamentary process. Our disciplinary processes are serious, and they should not be used for political point scoring. A Committee of Privileges investigation would not bring further clarity; it would only create a long, costly and wholly unnecessary duplication of processes that are either completed or already under way. It is a distraction, and I guess that is why the Conservatives want it. It is a stunt, and that is why I will vote against it.
Under the previous Government, this House was treated with contempt. Standards were bent and procedures were torn apart to protect those in power, with the support of many Conservative Members. We are entitled to ask: why do they raise this matter now? Well, it is because there is an election in a few days’ time, but it is also because they fundamentally cannot accept the change that this Government are delivering. They cannot accept that we are investing in public services that they ran into the ground.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. I am going to make this point again: we are debating privilege, not the Government’s record and actions.
David Pinto-Duschinsky
I will wind up.
We were elected with a mandate to deliver change, and that is exactly what we will do. The Conservative party is trying to distract from that fact, but it will not work.
Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)
I echo the voices of MPs from across the House, particularly the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell), in asking why the Prime Minister does not refer himself to the Committee of Privileges. If the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, why is he whipping his MPs against a House motion?
As you know full well, Madam Deputy Speaker, the Committee of Privileges and the Committee on Standards are there to judge us and our conduct in this House. We sign a code of conduct when we become MPs, and those two Committees are the Select Committees that judge our conduct in the House. The Foreign Affairs Committee and others hold the Government to account, but those two Committees are the only ones that hold MPs to account. Why has the Prime Minister not taken the leadership that he has demanded of others time and again, and not referred himself to the Committee of Privileges? He has demanded that others resign for far more trivial matters. He has demanded that others be referred to the Committee of Privileges or the Committee on Standards, but why have the rules changed for him?
We could spend another afternoon laboriously analysing who did what, and when—another week of the Prime Minister telling us what he did not know and was not responsible for, and that the buck stops anywhere but here. This is from a man who has made a career of standing on the moral high ground and damning others for behaviour that he is now demonstrating. He has demanded that others do the honourable thing—something that we now see he is clearly incapable of doing himself. Instead, he has chosen this painful spectacle and is clinging on until those sitting behind him or beside him inevitably dispense with his tarnished services, which we all know they will do soon. I note that many are absent from the Front Bench—on full-time leadership manoeuvres as we speak, perhaps.
I do not wish to condemn the Prime Minister further, only to offer my genuine sympathy on a basic human level for the embarrassment and shame that he must be feeling underneath the veneer of virtue that he has spent decades cultivating and that is now crumbling to dust with his every word—his every defection, his every desperate excuse. What goes around, comes around. For the Prime Minister, it has come around, right here, right now. It is an intensely sad and embarrassing sight. For that, he does not deserve my condemnation—only pity.
Andrew Lewin (Welwyn Hatfield) (Lab)
In advocating for the motion, the Leader of the Opposition—[Interruption.] She is just returning to her place; I knew she was waiting for me. Her essential argument, I believe, was that we in this House had not spent enough time debating this issue, and that perhaps just one more Committee would be the answer.
Before we began our debate today, there had been five statements and two debates: more than 13 hours of debate in the House of Commons. That is my count of how long we have been discussing the Mandelson issue. That is a conservative estimate—small c—because it cannot account for Prime Minister’s questions and all the other ministerial questions. It is also, of course, distinct from the important hearings being held by the Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as those of the Intelligence and Security Committee, as it forensically carries out its work in compliance with the Humble Address and the release of all papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the United States.
I do not think that the British public believe that just one more Committee is the answer, but I want to set out why I think we are at an important juncture and to look at three actions that the Government have taken: the apology from the Prime Minister, the action taken across Government Departments and the ongoing scrutiny still being applied to this case. The Prime Minister has offered repeated and unconditional apologies from the Dispatch Box and when he has been asked questions by the media, including to the victims of Epstein. He has made clear that this was an error of judgment. A message of contrition has been heard by people in this House and across the country. We all make mistakes; that is not in dispute. Let us turn next to the action that has been taken and continues to take place across Government.
More than 300 documents have already been released to the Intelligence and Security Committee, in full compliance with the Humble Address. That is really important. I was part of the debate—a good debate in this House—about giving the Intelligence and Security Committee oversight of the process. At the time, the Opposition said that that was an important thing to do and there was consensus across the House.
Dr Luke Evans
I also took part in that debate. The hon. Gentleman will remember and the record will show that the decision was suddenly made during the debate. The Government were going to vote against the Humble Address; the decision was made only because Members on both sides, particularly those on the Intelligence and Security Committee, put themselves forward and said that there was that option. We were having the debate in the first place because the Opposition compelled the Government to submit the papers. The hon. Gentleman cannot say that the decision was just put out there by his side.
Andrew Lewin
I remember the debate vividly. Members from both sides made the case. I said in my remarks that that was an example of the House at its best, because we came to a good decision to involve the ISC. I raise the issue again today because I was fascinated by what the Leader of the Opposition said. She characterised that Committee as a “never-never” Committee earlier today, as if it would never come to the answer. All of a sudden it seems that it is politically convenient for the Opposition to lose faith in the ISC, although they were advocating for it for so long.
More action has been taken, and that is important. Vetting has been discussed extensively today. The process in place under the last Government and at the start of this Government has gone: it has already been changed by my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. In future, all vetting will now be completed before appointments. That is absolutely the right change.
Graham Stuart
It is quite clear, from the advice given by Simon Case in November 2024, that that was the situation. We only found out that there was not the alternative process because the documents were forced into the open. Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that Chris Wormald’s letter, which suggested that everything had been done properly, contradicts the direct advice given by the then Cabinet Secretary that the vetting should be done first? It is not compatible; it is illogical. Surely, the hon. Gentleman, who is giving the least embarrassing speech on behalf of the Government so far—congratulations to him on that—can see that?
Andrew Lewin
The right hon. Gentleman is very kind; I will see him on the cricket pitch in a week’s time. There is a serious point, in that there are a number of very senior civil servants, who I will come to, who have given evidence on that and have said that process was followed. That leads neatly to my next point about the importance of ongoing scrutiny—the scrutiny that is being conducted by the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
I want to pick up on that point. We have heard a lot of evidence today. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is clear that there were so many inconsistencies and so much confusion about the process that the Prime Minister was absolutely right to build back trust in that process and make the decisions he has made?
Andrew Lewin
I appreciate my hon. Friend’s intervention. The Prime Minister was right and the House was right to accept the Humble Address, involve the Intelligence and Security Committee, and give the Foreign Affairs Committee all the scope it needs to ask questions of the key actors in the process. Just to remind the House, in the past few weeks and days we have heard evidence in public from Cat Little, Sir Olly Robbins, Morgan McSweeney and from the Prime Minister himself, repeatedly, from the Dispatch Box. The Prime Minister and the Government are not hiding; they are putting everything in the sunlight, as an hon. Member suggested earlier.
This is a deeply serious issue for the House and for the country. I want again to associate myself with everyone who has spoken today about the pain that is continually being felt by the victims of Jeffrey Epstein every time this issue is raised. Our thoughts are with all of them.
The Prime Minister has apologised unconditionally. He has acted and the Government have acted, and scrutiny from two Committees is still ongoing. The judgment before us is not whether scrutiny should happen—it most clearly and evidently is happening—but whether we should support a conveniently timed motion from the Leader of the Opposition to refer the issue to one more Committee. I am afraid I do not believe that that is the answer, and I would trust the judgment of this Prime Minister over that of the Leader of the Opposition every day of the week.
Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)
I want to put two things on record at the outset. The Labour party does not stand for election in Northern Ireland. We do not have elections next week or the week after, so everything I am about to say has got absolutely nothing to do with a so-called political stunt, and everything to do with the integrity of this House. By the way, I find patronising the idea that we should not be discussing these things because the Government of the day want to get on with discussing the cost of living. I have had two car bombs at the edges of my constituency in the past five weeks, so believe me there are much bigger things that I would prefer to be talking about. However, it is incumbent on everybody in this House to ensure that everything we are doing is completely above board.
Last week, I said that I did not know why Mandelson was appointed. The Prime Minister said it was a mistake, but here is what I do not understand: everything about Mandelson that would have been a cause for concern was open-source material—it was out there. Peter Mandelson would not have survived the vetting for a kids’ football club, and rightly so. Yet we are expected to believe, by those on the Labour Benches, that “There is nothing to see here, we are going to do some process here and there; it’s a bit of a hoo-hah,” as if there has been a bit of opprobrium around the appointment of a local rotary club. This is the Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland; and we need to make sure that everything that is done here has the trust and confidence of the people we were sent here to represent.
Something I am really passionate about is people being able to get on in life. The social mobility figures for the UK are declining steeply, which should be a concern for us all. But don’t worry about that—it seems to be “jobs for the boys”, going great guns over the road in Labour. Instead of a meritocracy, it is a chumocracy. That is the nub of this: we cannot get answers as to why this was done.
Today, I am asking: will the real Prime Minister please stand up? Please stand up. Is it the man who wanted to tread lightly on our lives? Is it the man who promised a decade of national renewal? Is it the man who said he was going to do things by the book and better? Because in my nearly two years here, I have not seen that.
I commend the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) for her heartfelt words. This should not be about party politics—it should be about doing the right thing. I am here as the one Member of my party in Westminster, so I am aware that I am speaking from a place of privilege myself. But believe you me: there is a stink here, and the public smell it. If we are serious about getting better in terms of making our constituents’ lives better and proving that this place can deliver, every single person here today has a choice—make the right one.
Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)
May I start by saying that I take serious exception to the remarks made by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey), who I see is just about to leave the Chamber? She complained about us spending an afternoon talking “laboriously” about process. It is process that is on the face of the motion that the Leader of the Opposition has brought to the Chamber today, and that is what we are debating. That is because of the hon. Lady’s party. I am more than happy to spend an afternoon talking about process, because that is what we are here to do.
I speak in this debate on privileges with a unique perspective—one garnered from almost 15 years of experience working in a highly regulated sector, with responsibility for managing financial crime and reputational risk at two FTSE 100 firms, accountable for decisions made in managing conflicts of interest, promoting ethical codes of practice, training staff on when to do the right thing, testing the effectiveness of whistleblowing regimes and completing enhanced due diligence on individuals who posed heightened risk. That experience was gathered in the UK, the US, India, the UAE and elsewhere. I also speak as a recently departed member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who sat in Portcullis House only in November and quizzed Sir Chris Wormald, the former Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, when they gave oral evidence to the Committee in the light of the sacking of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington.
Let me say first that my thoughts are with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s terrible crimes. Nothing we say or do today can take away from the unimaginable hurt and pain that that man caused and continues to cause for victims, survivors, and their friends and families. Today and all days, we must remember them and do all that we can to support them in their continued fight for justice.
Secondly, I will confine my remarks to the specifics of the proposed referral to the Privileges Committee in the motion today. Mandelson’s appointment, what was recorded in the proprietary and ethics team’s due diligence report, and the UK Security Vetting process have all been debated on numerous occasions in this place already, and there remain live reviews under way that I do not want to preclude in any way.
Thirdly, the Prime Minister has rightly recognised that appointing Mandelson as ambassador to Washington was a mistake. Mandelson’s behaviour has been contemptible, and we are in no doubt on the Government Benches that he should never have been appointed. It was a mistake for which the PM has faced significant opprobrium, and there have been consequences for him—let us not forget that.
The honest truth is that we are all fallible. The PM made an error of judgment. For that, he rightly apologised in the House last Monday and sought forgiveness. As I will set out, to suggest that he has in any way misled the House is a political fabrication anchored not in truth but in a smokescreen of political mendacity that supposes a cock-up somehow equates to a conspiracy.
The Opposition moved a motion to have the Prime Minister referred to the Privileges Committee—something that has not happened since Boris Johnson’s referral back in the early part of 2022. That case and the matters being debated today are like chalk and cheese. Johnson was referred to the Privileges Committee for the most egregious of lockdown breaches: partying in No. 10, in breach of the rules, while we all made daily sacrifices to contain the virus; denying that he had breached the rules; and then doubling down on his denials.
Reading back through the Committee’s 108-page final report from 2023 gave me flashbacks, especially in recalling that Johnson misled the House on no fewer than six occasions, that he misled the Privileges Committee, that he breached confidence, that he impugned the Committee and undermined the democratic processes of the House and—perhaps most importantly—that he was complicit in a campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the Committee. I mention all that not to advance a political argument but rather to warn Conservative colleagues that the country has not forgotten what took place the last time the Privileges Committee convened to consider a PM’s conduct, and to advise them to take heed of that history.
Lloyd Hatton (South Dorset) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is speaking wisely of the time when Boris Johnson was before the Privileges Committee. Does he believe the House should remember that that Prime Minister lost an anti-corruption champion, who resigned over the issue? Conservative Members would be well placed to remember what happened when the Privileges Committee found misdeeds and wrongdoing on the part of that Prime Minister.
Phil Brickell
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. He is a noble campaigner on cleaning up the House and the public sector more broadly.
The Opposition’s motion supposes that the PM may have misled the House due to statements he gave in this place about due process and about pressure. This is a complex topic. Given the forensic demolition of the motion by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Mr Barros-Curtis) with reference to pressure, I will focus my remarks on due process.
Before I speak more pointedly to process, as flagged by the Opposition, let me say this: I have no special access to information and I have not spoken to any of the individuals concerned regarding Mandelson in any way, shape or form since the Humble Address. I offer only my analysis based on the documents we have been given and statements made to the House by the Prime Minister and others when giving evidence before Parliament.
I speak as a Member of the House who is determined to drive up standards in public life, to improve the integrity of our system of government and to work constructively with Members of all political persuasions to improve the standing of politics as a force for good in the country at large. That is why only last week I met the Ethics and Integrity Commission to give formal input into that body’s workstream to tighten rules about financial disclosures, lobbying and the operation of the business appointment rules as they relate to Ministers and senior civil servants. But first, let us consider ongoing proceedings.
On 4 February, the House passed a Humble Address relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as His Majesty’s ambassador to Washington DC. It directed Government to
“lay before this House all papers relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment…including but not confined to the Cabinet Office due diligence which was passed to Number 10, the Conflict of Interest Form Lord Mandelson provided to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office…material the FCDO and the Cabinet Office provided to UK Security Vetting”
as well as, among others,
“all information on Lord Mandelson provided to the Prime Minister prior to his assurance to this House on 10 September 2025 that ‘full due process was followed during this appointment’”.
Subject to agreed redactions for national security and international relations purposes as agreed with the Intelligence and Security Committee, the first volume of material was published by the Cabinet Office on 11 March.
Last Tuesday, the Foreign Affairs Committee took evidence from Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. On Thursday, the Committee heard from Catherine Little, the civil service chief operating officer and permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office. Earlier today, the Committee heard from Sir Philip Barton, the previous permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, as well as from Morgan McSweeney, the former chief of staff at 10 Downing Street. There is also a separate live police investigation being undertaken by the Met into Mandelson, which the Cabinet Office will be keen to avoid prejudicing. It will require a delicate balancing of information to ensure that detectives are able to conduct their vital work without it being in any way overshadowed by ongoing parliamentary inquiries.
This brings me to the reasoning for today’s debate brought by the official Opposition. The first limb is due process. To the best of my ability, my understanding is that the Opposition contend that due process was not followed, first, because UK security vetting took place after Mandelson’s appointment and, secondly, because his vetting decision was not escalated for discussion with No. 10 or the Cabinet Office.
On the sequencing of events, let me set the record straight as I see it. When the Cabinet Office published its first volume of material after the Humble Address, it included a file note dated 11 November 2024 and marked:
“Official Sensitive—Personal and Staffing. Advice to the Prime Minister, Options for His Majesty’s Ambassador Washington.”
In that note, written to the PM by Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary at the time, it is laid out in very clear language that one option was a political appointment, as was undertaken when Ed Llewellyn was appointed as HM Ambassador Paris by David Cameron in 2016 and as HM Ambassador Rome by Boris Johnson in 2022, for which there was a clear process to go through. To quote Lord Case in that note to the PM:
“If this is the route you wish to take you should give us the name of the person you would like to appoint and we will develop a plan for them to acquire the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential Conflicts of Interest or other issues of which you should be aware before confirming your choice. A letter is then needed from the Foreign Secretary to the PUS to FCDO formalising the decision to make a political appointment.”
That was in November 2024.
Simon Case’s note was followed up by another note dated 11 December 2024 from the PM’s principal private secretary, Nin Pandit, noting that due diligence had been sought from the propriety and ethics team in the Cabinet Office on Mandelson—checks which were conducted by PET on 4 December 2024. After that, the PM’s chief of staff discussed Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein and noted that the PM’s director of communications was satisfied with Mandelson’s responses to questions about contact. Importantly, this was before further information came to light in September of last year, when it was identified that those responses were not truthful.
Phil Brickell
I am going to make some progress, if that is okay—[Interruption.] I am in the flow of things and I am not halfway through yet, so I have a long way to go.
The PM’s PPS flagged that the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein would be gone over with the Prime Minister by his private office, and the principal private secretary noted that after a decision to proceed was made, only then would a decision be made as to when to make any appointment and announce it, and when the new ambassador would take up post, subject to a letter from the Foreign Secretary to the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, followed by approval by the King and then agrément being obtained from the US Administration.
Correspondence from No. 10 to the permanent under-secretary at the FCDO, and from the FCDO PUS at the time, Sir Philip Barton, to the King’s private secretary, was disclosed in the first volume of material published following the Humble Address, which testifies to this sequence of events having taken place. On 20 December 2024, the private secretary to the permanent under-secretary at the FCDO emailed Mandelson congratulating him on his appointment and noting his onboarding, including regarding his “clearance”, which the head of the US and Canada Department of the FCDO noted on 23 December 2024 was an important “first step”.
When Sir Olly Robbins came before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 3 November last year, he said in response to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson):
“as is normally the case with external appointments to my Department and the wider civil service, the appointment was made subject to obtaining security clearance.”
Moreover, Sir Olly confirmed in that very session:
“we also went through the standard UK national security vetting process for DV… I am absolutely confident that UKSV undertook the process in precisely its standard way, doing all the checks it would expect to do, and we had ample time to assess and decide on the basis of its work.”
In reference to the remarks by the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood), it was worth noting for the record that it was confirmed to the Foreign Affairs Committee that the high-risk concerns in SV were not Epstein-related.
Phil Brickell
I am correcting the hon. Member on the points mentioned here; I am not here to talk about the process—we will come on to that shortly.
Chris Wormald, the former Cabinet Secretary, noted at the same session on 3 November that
“the normal thing is for the security clearance to happen after appointment but before the person signs a contract”
—as my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky) mentioned—and
“takes up post. If we are recruiting a permanent secretary or similar from outside the civil service, that is normally what would happen: the security clearance process would happen after the announcement of the appointment but before the person takes up post, and the appointment would be subject to the security clearance being granted.”
Mandelson was issued an FCDO employment contract with a start date of 3 February 2025. Section 17 of that contract, entitled “Security Clearance”, was explicit:
“You must obtain the required level of security clearance as soon as possible and maintain the required level of security clearance throughout your employment.”
Dated 30 January 2025, Mandelson’s offer of fixed-term employment with the FCDO confirmed his
“security clearance has been confirmed by Vetting Unit and is valid until 29 January 2030.”
I will not be selective in referring to evidence given to this House that favours one view or another, so let me be clear: Olly Robbins mentioned in his letter of 21 April to the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that the then Cabinet Secretary at the time of Mandelson’s appointment being proposed, Simon Case, recommended—the operative word—in November 2024 that vetting should have been completed before an announcement was made. But in the very same letter of 21 April, Robbins was also explicit in confirming that:
“When the Prime Minister informed the House that the proper process had been followed in respect of NSV, he was correct.”
Moreover, on the topic of vetting, Robbins stood by the letter he wrote with the Foreign Secretary to the Foreign Affairs Committee on 16 September 2025, in which he confirmed:
“Ministers…are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome.”
He went on to state in his letter on 21 April:
“This position reflected long-standing practice and guidance, and correctly constrained our ability to share information beyond the vetting process then or later.”
He noted that the FCDO
“completed DV to the normal high standard”;
that he, Robbins, met the director for the estates, security and network directorate and was briefed orally that Mandelson was
“a ‘borderline’ case, leaning towards recommending that clearance be denied”;
that the highest risks “could be managed and mitigated”, as recommended by ESND; and that UKSV acknowledged that the FCDO may wish to grant clearance. Robbins also confirmed that UK Security Vetting
“did not ‘fail’ Mandelson and FCDO did not ‘overrule’ their decision”;
that a risk-based decision was arrived at by the FCDO, taking into account the feedback from UKSV as a result of the full vetting process having been gone through; and that
“DV clearance is a risk judgement.”
Sir Olly was clear in his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee recently that no direct communication took place between anyone in No. 10 and himself, that the interaction between UK Security Vetting and the Foreign Office was “entirely standard”, and that clearance was granted subject to mitigations agreed following an FCDO security department assessment that could address the highest risks associated with Mandelson.
Take the remarks from Cat Little, civil service chief operating officer and permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office, in her oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee. She was clear in her remarks last week:
“My view is that due process was followed, and if I might explain why I believe that, it is because the process, as I have outlined to the Committee, is that UKSV makes a recommendation and the Foreign Office makes a decision as to whether to grant DV. That is the process, and that is the process that is agreed with the Foreign Office.”
Furthermore, Cat Little was clear about vetting in her oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee:
“I do have access to a number of emails that have been disclosed recently to me… What I can see is that there is a senior official from the Government Security Group who goes back to the Foreign Office security team and advises two things: one, that this is a decision for the Foreign Office, and two, that they would advise that developed vetting is sought.”
She went on to say that
“the Prime Minister did not know about the UKSV conclusion, and he did not know which specific risks were identified at the time of appointment.”
Only this morning, former Foreign Office permanent secretary Sir Philip Barton told the Committee that he was confident that the appropriate process was carried out.
Those are not my comments, but those of senior civil servants—a former Cabinet Secretary, two former permanent under-secretaries of the FCDO and the current permanent under-secretary at the Cabinet Office—and they all stand in direct contract with the motion before the House. They are all of the view that proper process was followed. I know whose words I would rather believe. Their remarks chime with those of the Prime Minister, who said:
“for a direct ministerial appointment, it was usual for security vetting to happen after the appointment but before the individual starting in post.”—[Official Report, 20 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 24.]
Opposition Members might object to the process—they would be right to do so—but it was set out at the time of the appointment, and it was followed by the Cabinet Office, the FCDO, UKSV and, ultimately, the Prime Minister. As the Minister ultimately accountable for the decision, the Prime Minister has rightly changed the process so that appointments can be confirmed only once vetting has been completed. He has rightly appointed Sir Adrian Fulford to lead a review of security vetting to ensure consistency across Government in the way decision makers are informed of concerns ahead of appointments.
The Prime Minister has rightly set up the Ethics and Integrity Commission and tasked it with improving processes around lobbying, the revolving door between Government and the private sector, and financial transparency. I commend him for those steps and for his commitment to introducing as soon as possible legislation allowing for the removal of disgraced peers—that is the right thing to do. I trust that the legislation will obtain support from across this House.
Only yesterday, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister confirmed that
“the Cabinet Office will have passed to the ISC all the material it has processed as part of the Humble Address and judged to be prejudicial to national security or international relations. This has amounted to over 300 individual documents. It includes a number that are relevant to the processes of Peter Mandelson’s security vetting, too.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 588.]
We expect the second tranche of documents under the ambit of the Humble Address to be published after Parliament returns following Prorogation.
As mentioned in yesterday’s ministerial statement on progress on the Humble Address, outstanding documents are either with the Government awaiting publication, with the ISC, or with the Metropolitan police, given the ongoing criminal investigation into Mandelson. The last time a Prime Minister’s conduct was referred to the Privileges Committee was during the covid pandemic. Boris Johnson was under investigation by the Metropolitan police for repeatedly partying in No. 10 during lockdown. He then misled the House by saying that rules had been followed when they had not. The police had issued fixed penalty notices for breaches of covid-19 regulations.
I have mentioned the Cabinet Office’s vital ongoing work to review the documents within the remit of the Humble Address, the Intelligence and Security Committee’s work to review proposed redactions, the Foreign Affairs Committee’s public evidence sessions, and the wholly separate police investigation. My question to the Leader of the Opposition is: why bring this motion now? Why bring this motion when we have not had the full disclosure of the documents within the ambit of the Humble Address, including the private messages, WhatsApps, and the additional minutes and file notes that were not published in volume one back in March. Why duplicate the work that is already being undertaken by the Cabinet Office and the ISC under the Humble Address? Why not wait until after Prorogation, when the full documentary evidence is available, to determine whether a Privileges Committee referral is warranted? Why not wait until all relevant witnesses have given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee? We are only just digesting the evidence given today.
The Leader of the Opposition makes much of due process in her motion. My retort is simple: due process ought also to be followed in getting to the truth. Let all the documents be released, and then let this House determine the facts of the matter. The cynic in me would say that today’s privileges motion is nothing but a bare-faced political stunt by the Conservative party, which, with just over a week to go until the local elections, is clutching at straws. It politicises the important review process that is under way across Government and Westminster. Hard-working and dedicated civil servants are working alongside Ministers to ensure that the Humble Address is fulfilled as quickly as possible. My first obligation is to this country above all else. I owe it to my constituents to outline my rationale and my way of thinking, as I have done. I will vote with the Government today.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
I am not quite sure how to follow that speech, but I hope that the Whips were listening to that job application by the hon. Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell).
In the history of Leaders of the Opposition in this place, no one was quicker to demand investigations, no one was more willing to take a pious, high-and-mighty view, no one was faster to demand resignations and no one talked more about accountability than the current Prime Minister. He claimed to the whole country that he was a man of morals, principles and high character. In opposition, he portrayed himself as the moral arbiter and the font of all things just. Now that he is in power, with the threat of an investigation hanging over him, his true self has been revealed.
There was much evidence of the Prime Minister’s failings prior to the Peter Mandelson affair, but this scandal has truly exposed him for all that he is and is not. In the Prime Minister’s efforts to reject and supress an investigation into this torrid affair, he has renounced all those claims he made to be a man of morals, principles, conviction, honour and all the other similar words he lifted from the dictionary without really understanding their meaning.
It is apparent that, in opposition, the Prime Minister said what he thought needed to be said, not what he meant. The litany of broken promises over which he has presided since assuming office are a system, not a bug, because this Prime Minister did not come into office with a plan, a vision or anything he would stick by. He told the country what he thought they wanted to hear, with no intention of keeping his word or delivering. In the Peter Mandelson scandal, he is showing who he really is: a Prime Minister with no substance.
If the House believes that this sounds like a partisan political attack, let us not forget that it was this very scandal that provoked the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, to call for the Prime Minister to go. It is the handling of this scandal that caused Scottish Labour to lose all faith in the Prime Minister’s judgment and his leadership. I notice that Scottish Labour MPs are conveniently looking at their phones at this moment.
At the very least, the Prime Minister could have come forward and admitted all he got wrong here, and thrown open every document so that the public got the transparency they deserve. Then, as some small consolation for his failings, there would be some accountability. Yet today he still refuses even to deliver that. He rejects further investigation and he gives the distinct appearance of someone afraid of scrutiny, running scared of what may yet come out, and unable to accept the scale of the mistakes made during this scandal.
If this position does not change, then it is up to Labour Back Benchers to show what they stand for. Will they let a Prime Minister of this political colour or any other blatantly disregard accountability and transparency? Will they let a Prime Minister refuse the scrutiny that the public expect when a scandal like this occurs? Will they let a Prime Minister get away with such a grotesque error of judgment as appointing Peter Mandelson? It is their choice today. Labour MPs have the opportunity to show that they are not all of the same lot as the Prime Minister. They can demonstrate that they meant some of the lofty promises they were elected on, or they can continue to back a Prime Minister who has lost his way and lost the country.
If an investigation happens or not, this scandal has already told the public everything they need to know about this Prime Minister. Even if they cannot see it and even if the parliamentary Labour party do not accept it for many months to come, it is over. Refusing investigations, as he is trying to do today, only confirms what is already apparent: the Prime Minister is not who he claimed to be in opposition, the principles he claimed to hold are gone, his commitment to accountability was a nonsense, the morals he espoused were a con trick and the piety was all pretend.
The Prime Minister’s promise to the British people was “change”, and change is what they want now. They want a change of position today, which should not be hard, given the example that this Government have set during their short term in office. What is one more U-turn among dozens? The British people want a change in the culture at the heart of this Government, so that they do not have to meekly go along with the Prime Minister’s appointment of people like Peter Mandelson.
The people of this country have now had a good look at the Prime Minister, and they no longer see what they thought they did when he was in opposition. Even the Prime Minister must now look back at his own words and wonder, “Who was that?” His record has not lived up to his rhetoric, the standards that he claimed to hold, or the promises that he made to the British people. If the Prime Minister today whips his MPs to vote against an inquiry, he may survive in office a little while longer, but it will not change what he has done, or stop the British public demanding change.
David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)
My constituency neighbour is giving a speech full of hyperbole. The motion is about a specific question, yet he treats this as if it were a referendum on the Prime Minister. Does he agree that that is simply not what we are voting on tonight?
John Lamont
If this motion is passed by the House, it will allow an investigation into the integrity of the Prime Minister and the decisions that he has made, and it is Labour MPs and the Prime Minister who are blocking that investigation. We are grateful to Mr Speaker for allowing this motion to be debated today. He has decided that it meets the standard required to be debated, and it is for MPs like the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith), my constituency neighbour, to decide whether they will stand with their constituents and not block this investigation. We all want answers. If the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, he should have no fear of this investigation.
I will happily support the motion to allow this investigation to proceed. I congratulate the hon. Members for South Shields (Emma Lewell), for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome), and for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) on their very brave decision to defy the Labour Whip and support this motion.
I remember being a Government MP and sitting in the far corner of the Chamber, having just voted for the Owen Paterson motion. I never felt so dirty or disappointed in myself as when I made the decision to vote in that way. I was following the Whip and my party colleagues at the time. We thought it was the right thing to do, but it was the wrong thing to do; my gut told me that, but I was just not brave enough to make that decision. A few months later, a similar moment arose, and I had to decide whether to follow the Whip or follow my conscience. I followed my conscience and resigned; I did the right thing, and I have never regretted it. My call to Labour MPs who are mulling over this decision is: do what your gut is telling you to do. Follow your conscience, and do the right thing. This investigation will provide the answers that we all want. If the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear.
Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)
I apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the fact that I cannot promise as learned and long a speech as that given by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell). [Interruption.] Even in such a heated and highly controversial debate, I have managed to gain cross-party consensus. My day has not been wasted.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak. I am perhaps not so pleased that I am speaking in this particular debate, but the opportunity to speak in this place and represent the people of my constituency is an honour every single day. I hope that Members from across the House will recognise that I do my best to avoid being too party political. In fact, I gave a whole speech in which the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) was not able to intervene on me, because I avoided being party political; I appreciate that the challenge is on again. I do my best to avoid being too party political, except when it comes to education policy, but I declare an interest there.
I have actively engaged in this matter, and have contributed when the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister has attended this House to speak on the subject of the Humble Address, as he has done a number of times. I see he is not here; he has slipped out while I am giving my speech. I have represented to him my genuine concerns about the vetting process, and I would ask him to refer to that in his winding-up speech, if he were here. I have expressed my genuine concern about the impact of Peter Mandelson’s appointment on the victims of Jeffrey Epstein.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to put on record my deepest respect for the Speaker’s Office, and for you personally. As you will be aware, I find you just a little bit terrifying. [Hon. Members: “Quite right.”] More cross-party agreement. I absolutely respect Mr Speaker’s decision to allow this debate. I will admit that I was reluctant to speak in it, not because I lack faith in the Prime Minister—that faith remains firm—and not, to mention an issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Mr Barros-Curtis), because I genuinely worry about my security and that of my family, although I have to put on record that I do; Members from across the House who have supported me in that matter will know what I am talking about.
On a lighter note, I was reluctant to speak in this debate because I could not work out how I was going to make reference to Harlow in it. [Hon. Members: “But you have.”] Twice. Then I realised that that was the point; I come to this place to talk about my constituents. Take my constituent, friend and former work colleague Jamie, who works six days a week, and has nothing left with which to enjoy himself or treat his family, including his two-year-old son. I want to be talking about how this Government help people like Jamie. [Interruption.] Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker—again, terrified. I want to be talking about how we in this House can make a difference to Jamie and tackle the cost of living crisis.
I want to gently respond to those on both sides of the House who have implied that those who do not agree with them are somehow selling their soul. I respectfully disagree. As Members know, I was a teacher before I came to this place, and I came to this place because I was angry with the former Member for Surrey Heath. I frankly disagreed with some of the decisions he made about education, but what really struck me when I came here was that Opposition Members are not the horrible, terrible, horned beasts that I was led to believe they were—some of them, maybe. [Hon. Members: “Horny?”] Did I say that? I meant horned. I feel like I am going to have to make a point of order and apologise in a minute.
Opposition Members genuinely believe in what they are voting for. I saw that the other day during the debate on the Pension Schemes Bill, in the discussion about mitigation. I disagreed with what Opposition Members said, but I respected their right to disagree, and I think it is important that in any debate—including this one—we can agree to disagree.
Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)
I realise that the hon. Member is struggling to read his own handwriting, but does he have anything at all to say about the Prime Minister’s conduct in appointing Peter Mandelson?
Chris Vince
I thank the hon. Member for his contribution, I think. I am sorry that he is offended by my handwriting, but there are probably more important things to discuss.
Simon Hoare
A moment ago, while the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister had popped out of the Chamber, the hon. Gentleman was saying something rather nice and complimentary about him. I just wanted to give him the opportunity to repeat it, now that he is back.
Chris Vince
I thank the hon. Gentleman for a far better intervention. The comment I made about the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister while he had popped out was that, as he is aware, I have contributed many times when he has spoken about the Humble Address, and have asked him a number of questions about the vetting process, as well as the impact that this ongoing issue obviously has—
Chris Vince
Trade envoy to Harlow, did you say?
I asked the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister about the impact that this ongoing issue has on the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. I think it is really important that we recognise that, and I ask him to comment on it in his wind-up.
The point that I wish to make, and I hope it is taken on its merits, is that I absolutely appreciate that the Labour Members who have spoken in support of the motion did so because they believe that it is right. However, do not assume that those of us who are not speaking in support of the motion believe the same. The majority of Members, whatever political party they represent, vote in the Lobby for what they genuinely believe is the right thing to do, for whatever reason. I reject the concept that that is not the case. Opposition Members should trust me when I say that it would be far easier for me to join them in the Lobby this afternoon, but I do not believe that is the right thing to do.
Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)
Having listened to this debate, I fear that the Labour Back Benchers who do not support the motion are being too pessimistic. They see a referral to the Privileges Committee as a threat or something to fear, which is the wrong approach. A referral to the Privileges Committee should be seen by Labour MPs as an opportunity for the Prime Minister to prove, as he says he believes, that he has done nothing wrong and has not misled the House; and an opportunity for the Government, who have summoned all their Back Benchers here today, demanding and expecting that they will give the Prime Minister their confidence, to show that the loyalty the Prime Minister expects of them is justified.
Labour Back Benchers should be in no doubt that, as we have heard multiple times today, the manner in which this vote is being managed by the Labour Whips is not usual for a privilege motion. In whipping them to vote to save him from appearing before the Privileges Committee, and from having to explain himself, the Prime Minister is once again not following normal process.
We have heard many speeches from Opposition Members about the allegations, our belief that the Prime Minister has misled the House, and our belief that normal due process has not been followed, although the Prime Minister has repeatedly said that it has. Labour Members must not forget that at the heart of this saga is the catastrophic lack of judgment shown by the Prime Minister in hiring the twice-fired known friend of a convicted paedophile, who, as the Prime Minister knew, retained, even after the annexation of Crimea, an exec role at Sistema, a company with Russian defence interests. That is the level of judgment and the calibre of decision making that the Prime Minister has been trying to justify, and that is what has led to the claim that he has been misleading the House, which we are discussing today.
The decision that Labour MPs face today is whether to support the Prime Minister’s version of events. We have seen too many times throughout this saga that it has been the Prime Minister’s version of events versus that of others. By asserting that he has not misled the House, the Prime Minister is effectively saying that Sir Olly Robbins and Sir Philip Barton have misled the Foreign Affairs Committee. Is that really what Labour MPs are comfortable supporting?
Sir Olly Robbins said that No. 10 put pressure on the Foreign Office to expedite Mandelson’s vetting, and the Prime Minister insists that this did not happen. Sir Philip Barton said today at the Foreign Affairs Committee that the usual process for appointing an ambassador would be vetting first and then the announcement, not the announcement and then the vetting, as happened in the case of Mandelson’s appointment.
Sam Rushworth
I think the hon. Lady may be inadvertently misquoting the Prime Minister, but if I am wrong, I invite her to quote exactly what the Prime Minister said about pressure to expedite the process. My recollection is that the Prime Minister said that there was no pressure to change the decision, not expedite the process.
Harriet Cross
That is a very welcome intervention. My recollection, and that of most Opposition Members, is that the Prime Minister said there was no pressure whatsoever. That is not what was said at the Foreign Affairs Committee. Both those things cannot be right. Are Labour MPs saying that the Prime Minister is right, or are they saying that Sir Olly Robbins misled the Foreign Affairs Committee? Both those things cannot be right. They need to choose who they agree with and which of those is correct. They cannot both be correct.
Joe Robertson
I have a suggestion for this disagreement that is going on in the House: why do we not refer it to the Privileges Committee?
Harriet Cross
Genius! My hon. Friend is full of great ideas. That is the calibre that we expect of him.
On misleading the House, the Prime Minister said that no one in No. 10 was aware that there had been any concerns about Mandelson’s vetting before the revelation was made a few weeks ago, despite it being reported in The Independent in September last year. On that very point, I submitted a named day question to the Cabinet Office last week, which was due to be answered yesterday. It simply asked whether The Independent is one of the newspapers to which the current or any previous director of communications, press secretary or anyone else at No. 10 has a subscription. The named day deadline has passed; the answer has not been received.
That was a simple question. Why has it not been answered? It would be very easy to find the answer. Maybe no one at No. 10 had a subscription to The Independent, but if they did, it would be difficult to hold the line that no one at No. 10 had any indication until just a few weeks ago that there had been any issues with Mandelson’s vetting. If the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister would like to intervene now and shed light on either the delay or the answer to that question, I will happily take the intervention.
The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister (Darren Jones)
indicated dissent.
Harriet Cross
That says all we need to know.
I hope that Labour Back Benchers and, indeed, Ministers see today as the opportunity it is for the Prime Minister. By voting for the motion, they will give the Prime Minister an opportunity to present his case to the Privileges Committee, an opportunity to prove his side of the story and an opportunity—if, as he said, he did not mislead the House—to be exonerated on that claim. I leave MPs with this final thought. If, as he claims, the Prime Minister has done nothing wrong, why has he whipped the entire Labour party, some of them back from across the country—some of whom we have not seen for weeks in this place—to vote to prevent him from having to give evidence to the Privileges Committee?
Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)
I usually come to this House to represent the people of Hinckley and Bosworth, and occasionally other people across the nation, by raising and debating pertinent issues. Today, however, my speech is aimed at Labour Back Benchers, because at the end of the day, regardless of what is said here, it is their decision. When there are 400 of them, it is they who will decide what happens in this debate. I therefore gently highlight two points: the standards that have been set, and doubt.
The Prime Minister has set very clear standards since he has been in Parliament. It reminds me of the famous fable of the fox and the stork. Those familiar with it will know that the fox invites the stork in to have dinner. The fox serves soup but mischievously does so on a flat plate and, of course, the stork cannot eat it. The stork, not losing its temper, reciprocates and invites the fox back to have soup at its house. When the stork serves the soup, it serves it in a long, thin glass. Of course, the fox cannot get to it and loses its temper. The moral of the story is to treat others as you wish to be treated.
The process that the Prime Minister is going through is due process by the standard he himself set, happening in retort to himself. We only have to look at some of the tweets that he put out. In January 2022, he said:
“The Prime Minister is a national distraction.
Millions of people are struggling to pay the bills, but Boris Johnson and his government are spending the whole time mopping up their own rule-breaking, sleaze and deceit.
He’s got to go.”
He followed that up by saying to Boris Johnson at the Dispatch Box:
“There are only two possible explanations. Either the Prime Minister is trashing the ministerial code, or he is claiming he was repeatedly lied to by his own advisers and did not know what was going on in his…own office. Come off it!”—[Official Report, 30 March 2022; Vol. 711, c. 807.]
That is the standard he set himself before he became Prime Minister. Is he following that standard? We only have to look at his actions since he was elected to see that he is not. He gave a donor a pass to No. 10, he took suits, he took glasses, he appointed a donor as the football regulator and, of course, he was the MP who took the most freebies in the last Parliament—more than even the three or four below him in the list combined. He set his own standard but he does not seem to meet it.
That fits with the way in which the Prime Minister came into Parliament. He talked about change, but he changed his promises. He said he would do things differently, and this is where I agree. When it came to the standards debate, the last Government said that it was House business and did not whip it. This Government have made a change: they are whipping it. The question is why.
That leads me on to my next point. I have talked about standards, and now I will talk about doubt. I have heard today that some Labour MPs have no doubt in their mind about the Prime Minister, but I have equally heard that other Labour MPs do. That is really important. If they have no doubt, that is fine—they can vote against the motion. They will have to explain to their constituents the decision they make and why, and they will have to live with that. That is what an MP does, and it is what an MP should do. But the Prime Minister himself clearly has doubts about his Back Benchers, because he is whipping the vote tonight. If he was so confident that so many of them would come to the conclusion that there was nothing to see here, he would not need to whip it.
We know the real reason: there are so many unanswered questions. Labour MPs might say there is no chink of doubt and that no question is unanswered, but how can they explain the inconsistencies from civil servants? Why has it taken months to get this sorted? Why has it required Humble Addresses and emergency debates, yet we are still having these debates nine months on? Why were comments in the PM’s box notes left empty? I do not believe that Labour MPs will show the same lack of curiosity that the Prime Minister showed when appointing Peter Mandelson, because they know they have a duty to their constituents to make sure they get it right.
How do I know all this? Because my party has been here before. Many of us on the Conservative Benches are the remnants of what our party had to go through—we have seen it. I have spoken before about the sword of hypocrisy, which cuts both ways, but as we learned, it is the infection that gets you. Here we are, nine months on since I made that speech, and the infection is turning into sepsis. The patient is in real trouble.
Labour MPs could learn from the Opposition, or they will share the same fate. The Conservative party is effectively a mirror to the Labour party that Labour Members did not ask for but would be wise to study. If they do not believe me, maybe they will listen to the Prime Minister, who closed his speech back in the debate on 21 April 2022 by saying:
“if we do not pass this motion and take this opportunity to restate the principles, we are all complicit in allowing the standards to slip. We are all complicit in allowing the public to think that we are all the same, that nobody tells the truth and that there are alternative sets of facts.”—[Official Report, 21 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 355.]
That is what Labour MPs have to wrestle with, so I hope they listen to the words the Prime Minister said back then.
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
I will aim to be brief and to the point. I pay tribute to the moving, powerful and thoughtful speech by the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) at the beginning of the debate. I do not underestimate the bravery that it takes to stand up and speak out, and I really welcome and value all Labour colleagues who resist the Whip with courage today. What is at stake today is trust, honesty and integrity—those issues go to the core of what our politics should be about—and the behaviour of a Prime Minister who promised to restore honesty and integrity to government. I agree with the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome), who said powerfully that our constituents do care about honesty, truth, trust and integrity.
It is well known that I have many criticisms of the Prime Minister and this Government, as do constituents across the country. Yes, he has repeatedly shown poor judgment. Yes, he has betrayed the hopes of those who voted for real change in 2024. Yes, I am deeply frustrated that we are having to spend so much time debating these issues, when our constituents face pressing daily concerns and a cost of living crisis to which we should be giving more attention. Yes, I think the Prime Minister should resign. However, that is not what we are here to discuss today. Our decision is not even on whether the Prime Minister misled the House, still less to judge whether it was an intentional or reckless misleading—our decision today is whether the Prime Minister has a case to answer on whether he may have misled the House, and it is absolutely clear that he does.
Looking at the detail of the motion, it cites three quotes from the Prime Minister’s own words. The first is his assurance about “full due process” being followed in the appointment of Peter Mandelson. Just this morning, we heard yet more evidence from Sir Philip Barton, the primary civil servant in the Foreign Office at the time. He was categorical that the normal process is that vetting comes first and appointment comes later, but it was the opposite way round in this case. The Prime Minister, as the motion says, made it clear that his position was that Mandelson’s position was “subject to developed vetting”, and that,
“No pressure existed whatsoever in relation to this case.”—[Official Report, 22 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 316.]
That is clearly not a tenable position.
Some colleagues on the Government Benches are asking us to believe, although it is perfectly clear that considerable pressure was put on the timescale—within the context of the already announced appointment of Peter Mandelson, within the context of there being no contingency plan if the vetting process failed him, and within the context that it would have been a complete foreign affairs crisis for that vetting process to have failed him—that there was still no pressure whatsoever on the process.
Dr Chowns
The hon. Gentleman has said a lot today, and there are others still waiting to speak.
It is clear that there is a case to answer here. The decision we have to make is not whether we are definitively certain that the Prime Minister misled the House, but whether we feel that there is a case to be answered, and therefore whether this matter should be referred to the body that is in existence to deal with these issues: the Privileges Committee. As many Members have commented, the Prime Minister could and should refer himself to that Committee. It would clearly save a great deal of heartache within the Labour party. If he will not do that, all of us—whatever our party—owe it to our consciences and to our constituents to refer him to the Privileges Committee and to vote for this motion.
Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
It is a pleasure to participate in this very important debate. I am going to add a perspective from someone who has never been in the Whips Office, but who has witnessed the dark arts of the Whips during his time in this place.
I can see that what is happening today is that the Prime Minister has been persuaded by his Whips to issue a demand that all his troops should support him in voting down this motion, the consequence of which is that he will be even more unpopular, the results for Labour in the local elections will be even worse, and as a result it will be easier for the Labour party and its Whips to scapegoat the Prime Minister for their failures. It will then be easier for them to change their leader, which is what a lot of them are yearning to be able to do. If the Prime Minister referred himself to the Privileges Committee or the motion were not being contested, the Prime Minister, as many of my right hon. and hon. Friends have pointed out, would have the opportunity to go before the Committee and explain himself, and even if some of the allegations were proved to be true, in my view the penalty would not be that severe.
I remember that, at the time of the 1997 general election, Margaret Thatcher came down to support me in Christchurch. On the same day, one of our colleagues, who was standing in another constituency, had been condemned by the then Standards Committee for having been in breach of the rules of the House, so the first question that the former Prime Minister had to contend with when she arrived in Christchurch was “What do you think of Neil Hamilton?” She had what I thought was the perfect answer. She said, “Nobody’s perfect.” Obviously, when someone has answered a question in that way it is very hard to put in any supplementaries, and despite their best efforts the press were not able to get any further, so they had to start talking about the prospects of the Conservatives winning back the Christchurch constituency in the election.
I think that if this matter were referred to the Privileges Committee, ultimately the effect would be that someone would say, “Well, nobody’s perfect. They have a Prime Minister who uses words such as ‘whatsoever’ to exaggerate a situation.” When we look up “whatsoever” in a dictionary, we see that it is really intended to reinforce the strength of a proposition: “There was no pressure—whatsoever”.
Sir Christopher Chope
No, I will not give way; I think we need to make progress.
The effect of using the word “whatsoever”, I think, was that the Prime Minister probably inadvertently misled himself. I am being generous, but what I am really saying to Labour Members is: “Watch out. You are probably working very well together to bring down the downfall of this Prime Minister.” My constituents would be delighted if there was a general election and a chance to change the Government, but the last thing they want is to get rid of this Prime Minister and be faced with another Prime Minister from the Labour party who they think will be far worse, even though they might be more effective.
That is my contribution to this evening’s debate. It is a small contribution, but I hope it may influence the way in which some Labour Members choose to vote.
Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
The Prime Minister came to this very Dispatch Box and said that “No pressure existed whatsoever” in relation to the Mandelson case. I recall Her late Majesty famously saying, “Recollections may vary”, but even from the Prime Minister I think that that is stretching the phrase, given the evidence that we have from Olly Robbins and others.
I was recently reading “Black Box Thinking”, a book by Matthew Syed. At its heart, it is about the importance of learning from failure, and using that to improve. In some respects, I think the Prime Minister believes that he has done all that is necessary by changing the process for appointments, but the Prime Minister is really missing the point. The issue is what has—or, rather, has not—been done, and whether what the Prime Minister told the House was misleading and whether it amounts to a contempt of the House, bearing in mind the standards expected of Ministers in relation to ministerial accountability and in the ministerial code. This is not just an innocent mistake. The phrase “the cover-up is worse that the crime” really resonates with me at this moment, although I think the crime is equally heinous.
I notice that the hon. Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) is not in his place. He has probably tired himself out, so I say to him that brevity is the soul of wit. In spite of his protestations, due process was not followed, despite the Prime Minister stating otherwise to the House. The security vetting was not carried out before Mandelson’s appointment, and the Foreign Office had to act at pace to confirm the appointment. Pressure was applied so that there would be an appointment before the presidential inauguration, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Bridlington and The Wolds (Charlie Dewhirst) said earlier, no minutes or records were kept of a key meeting in December 2024. We have a drip-feed of constant information; eventually, like a dam, it will burst. We are waiting for this to come out.
On the crime itself, it is really a question of judgment. Alarm bells should have been ringing. We in this House all knew about the Prince of Darkness. I was 10 years old when he was first dismissed. I was 13 years old when he was dismissed for his links with the Hinduja case. I grew up knowing Peter Mandelson’s background. Then we found out about his links with Russia and China, which are a national security risk—let alone his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. All this was brushed aside in a rush to appoint this man as our ambassador.
I am sorely disappointed that Labour Members will be whipped to allow the Prime Minister not to go before the Privileges Committee. If he has no case to answer, he has absolutely nothing to hide. The prosecutor is only prepared to ask questions; he is not prepared to answer any. I am sorry that some Labour MPs have had to come before us and say they are scared about what will happen to them for speaking out. That is not what we should be aiming for in this House.
Today’s privilege motion is about the House and its reputation. The Prime Minister has a duty to answer questions, and the Privileges Committee is the perfect mechanism by which to bring certainty on the procedure and on what has been said to the House. This House has a long and distinguished history. Using the Privileges Committee is part of preserving that history and the respect that people have for the mother of all Parliaments, and it is above party allegiances. The Prime Minister would save his MPs if only he would refer himself to the Committee.
Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. As many colleagues on the Opposition Benches have said, it brings a sense of déjà vu. I have a rather horrible chill up my spine when I remember being on the Government Benches and being pushed by the Whips to vote for certain things.
As has already been said, we have a Prime Minister who promised to do things differently. He promised change, higher standards and transparency, and he is the ultimate arbiter and keeper of the ministerial code. Politics is often about a certain amount of deflection, but he seems to go beyond all precedent in not answering questions. He drives Mr Speaker up the wall—to the point that they have altercations in the Chamber. That is the backdrop. We have a Prime Minister who promised that he would be particularly transparent and bring forward a duty of candour law, but that was dropped. He promised higher standards, yet does not live up to it.
The hon. Member for Rugby (John Slinger), who is the new trade envoy to the Republic of Korea, is in the Chamber, and it is fabulous to see that loyalty can be rewarded. I say to him, “Well done!” If Members back the Government, even when they should not, there can be a reward for them. But, as colleagues on this side of the Chamber have said, if Members do not vote with their conscience or do the right thing when their gut tells them to, they will regret it.
Graham Stuart
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment.
There is a particular change today, because we have a three-line Whip on a House matter. Members have spoken on behalf of the Government line. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth), who is in his place, said that he did not think the three-line Whip was a good idea, and others did not want to talk about it, but who was the three-line Whip for? Perhaps the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister can tell us. Labour Members have told us that they will always vote with their conscience and do the right thing, yet after the Whips had phoned round, it was decided that they must impose a three-line Whip.
My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), who has never been a Whip and does not have much fondness for them, has put the ghastly deed at their door. As a former Whip, I tend to think that it is more likely that the Whips did their job, giving a nuanced but properly informed answer. Then No. 10—sitting in the bunker, panicking, their only job to make sure that the Prime Minister is not replaced—said, “No, unless you can give us 100% support.” “There is no such thing as 100%,” the Chief Whip would reply. “No, no—then we insist that a three-line Whip is imposed.” And that happened.
Graham Stuart
The hon. Lady, who is a brilliant tennis player and a great partner, will forgive me if I give way to the hon. Member for Rugby, whom I referenced and should therefore allow to come in.
John Slinger
I like the right hon. Gentleman a great deal and thank him for his kind words. The moment has somewhat passed, but he was implying that the Prime Minister is avoiding answering questions. [Interruption.] If Members will listen: this is the Prime Minister who came before the House last Monday and answered questions from right hon. and hon. Members for two and a half hours.
The right hon. Gentleman spoke about transparency, but we are talking about a Prime Minister who led a Government who are releasing all the documents to this House and the public. He can talk all he likes about transparency and answering questions, but I have just demonstrated that both those things have been achieved already.
Graham Stuart
As so often, the hon. Gentleman does two things brilliantly: he reinforces his merit with the Whips when it comes to a future position, yet makes our case for us. The Prime Minister was dragged before the House. It is not just me—Mr Speaker was falling out with him and he is a former Labour MP. This is the frustration of a whole nation at a man who promised that he would be open and transparent but who cannot, ever, just give a straightforward answer. It has got to the point where if he was asked whether he would like mash or new potatoes, he would start talking to his wife about pork chops. He just cannot answer the question.
I say to the hon. Member for Rugby that when the Prime Minister was dragged here—this is the issue today—he misled this House. We have gone over that; Members will be deeply relieved to hear that I will not go over it again. But he said that due process had been followed. We have evidence today: Morgan McSweeney said he did the interview. He is an old pal of Mandelson’s—the man pushing for his appointment. He is the guy who asked Mandelson the questions. Then, whoa—“Let’s review the answers that McSweeney got and get Lord Doyle”—another pal of them both—“to provide the independent review.” That is what the Prime Minister presided over, all to deliver what McSweeney also made clear today was absolutely the Prime Minister’s decision.
The Prime Minister made the decision. He got his mates in this crony boys’ club to sit around, review each other and put Mandelson into place. Then he came here—this is the point—and said that due process was followed. Due process was not followed. Only because of the Humble Address have we found out that the Cabinet Secretary’s official advice to the Prime Minister was that vetting must be done before the announcement of a political appointee—and again, the Government had to give way halfway through the debate as they could see the direction it was going in. That advice was not in the public domain when Chris Wormald, who will have to answer for his own judgments, came out and said that all due process had been followed. But anyone who could read the advice and see what happened can clearly see that it was not followed. Chris Wormald’s letter was false and wrong. I do not see how it can be squared as the great defence of the Prime Minister. We have had no answers to that point.
We have so many questions—even before we get to last week, when, as the hon. Member for Rugby said, the Prime Minister was here. Under questioning from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, who does a brilliant job of keeping her temper while he evades and seeks not to answer, the Prime Minister said that there had been no pressure whatsoever. That is clearly not true, given that Olly Robbins repeatedly said how much pressure there was.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that the Prime Minister, who said that he was going to set a higher standard, has misled this House. That is all we need; as Mr Speaker said, we are not judge and jury today when it comes to whether he actually misled the House. That is why we have the Privileges Committee to look at the matter. It is dominated by Labour MPs, but such is the lack of confidence in No. 10—perhaps in the Whips Office and certainly in the Cabinet—that not only does the Prime Minister not trust the Labour MPs on the Privileges Committee; he does not even trust all the other Labour Members, who are being dragooned by a three-line Whip into voting for something, when no such Whip should ever have been applied.
Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)
I want to start with a clumsy metaphor. If one is in public office, having anything to do with Peter Mandelson is akin to filling the world’s smallest hot water bottle with the world’s largest kettle, while dressed only in shorts and flip-flops. The question is not whether one will get burned, but how badly—and will it be fatally so?
One of the falsehoods that the Prime Minister has sought repeatedly to advance is that it was a mistake to appoint Peter Mandelson. It was no such thing; it was a debt to be repaid. He had to appoint Peter Mandelson to that job. It was a deal he made with the devil. It was a high-stakes political game of Russian roulette. The Prime Minister pulled the trigger when the bullet was in the chamber and it went off at the heart of his Government. Now that they have got through the noise of the bang, they are all suffering from some sort of collective cognitive dissonance where they cannot see what a preposterous defence the Prime Minister and the Labour party have mounted.
I will frame the rest of what I have to say around honesty, integrity and respect. On honesty, the Prime Minister’s version of events is inconsistent with the evidence in greater or lesser part than that which has been proffered by officials—that much is clear. That in itself is enough to seek recourse to the Privileges Committee. The Prime Minister’s evidence consistently sought to omit that this was a catastrophe of his own making, for the reasons I have set out, in so far as it was political payback. These are the detriments and de-merits against the Prime Minister on the honesty front, but I cannot be the arbiter of that.
On integrity, the Prime Minister made this happen, as we have discussed—it is his mess—but he has inflicted substantial damage on politics across these islands. Many of us are campaigning in elections at the minute. Most of us realise that people do not care which party we are in when they have lost trust in politics; it is a plague on all our houses, and that plague is now substantially more fatal because of the actions of the Prime Minister. Does somebody want to intervene on me? No, I did not think so. The Prime Minister was but one of five actors involved in this debacle. The other four have all lost their jobs, while the Prime Minister, for the time being, has kept his.
I will touch briefly on the whipping scenario. I will not go over what others have said already—although, that the Government have whipped the vote reveals how deeply questionable is the conviction of Back Benchers in their Prime Minister; and conversely, how questionable is the Prime Minister’s conviction in his Back Benchers. However, to be clear, notwithstanding the very brave speeches by the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) and others, I am prepared to believe that there are Labour MPs who will vote against the motion tonight in good conscience, on the basis of the evidence as they see it, and that is fine. The problem they face is that they have been whipped to do so, whether that is their position or not, and they should be absolutely furious about that. But I cannot be the arbiter of that.
On respect, the Prime Minister says that the appointment was a mistake. No, he must take responsibility. Officials and spads have all had to walk the walk while he remains in post, looking increasingly like a cuckoo waiting for his successor to arrive. On respect, the most important thing is that when the Prime Minister stands there and says that he is sorry to the victims of Epstein, what he should continue to say is, “When I appointed Mandelson to the pinnacle of United Kingdom diplomatic appointments over in Washington, I did so in the knowledge that he was a sympathiser, close friend and confidante of the world’s most prolific paedophile, and I still appointed him—I just did not know how much of a friend and confidante he was of the world’s most prolific paedophile.” That is no defence. I know that, and I am surprised that the former Director of Public Prosecutions does not know that that is the shallowest of all defences.
Many Labour Members have talked about how often the Prime Minister has been in this Chamber fielding questions, and how many hours he has spent doing so, but very few of those questions have actually been answered and, with the exception of the Leader of the Opposition, nobody has the right to reply on the questions about the appointment of Peter Mandelson that the Prime Minister serially does not answer. Recourse to the Privileges Committee is what we need here. I cannot be the arbiter of all the things I have covered, and neither can anyone else here, but the Privileges Committee can.
Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)
Madam Deputy Speaker,
“Why does the Prime Minister think everybody else’s actions have consequences except his own?”—[Official Report, 20 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 155.]
That is a question the country would like an answer to. It is, given the appearance of several recently defenestrated senior civil servants, a prescient question. But it is not my question—it is the Prime Minister’s own question from 2022. How hollow those words must feel now. The testimonies from Sir Oliver Robbins last week, and from his predecessor, Sir Philip Barton, and the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, this morning—all casualties trailing in the wake of a Prime Minister who will stop at nothing to save his own skin—have torpedoed what last vestiges of credibility the Prime Minister is desperately clinging on to.
The Prime Minister set the conditions for Peter Mandelson to be the UK ambassador to the United States with a devil-may-care attitude with regard to the consequences. The public announcement of his appointment in December 2024, His Majesty the King being informed and the agrément with the United States being secured all before vetting had taken place ensured that the appointment was a fait accompli.
Peter Mandelson then being granted access to the FCDO building and higher-classification briefings before he was granted developed vetting reveals a shockingly lax approach to our national security, but it is not without precedent. We saw much of the same laissez-faire attitude with a previous ministerial appointment: that of the Prime Minister’s special envoy to the British Indian Ocean Territory, Jonathan Powell. A similar pattern was followed, with access to the FCDO granted and access to classified documents, use of unsecured email for communications and question marks over potential foreign influence all confirmed to have taken place prior to his developed vetting within the last few hours by Morgan McSweeney. That was six months prior to the Mandelson farrago. As I said at PMQs last week, playing fast and loose with national security is a key characteristic of the Prime Minister’s chumocracy.
The question of Mandelson’s security clearance itself poses a host of further questions. When Peter Mandelson commenced his role, he had already been given developed vetting, although UKSV had highlighted concerns—that is now well established. But if full due process was followed, why was Olly Robbins sacked?
On 4 February, less than a week before Mandelson started his role, the appointments and interchange officer of the FCDO informed him via email that the role required STRAP-level clearance in addition to DV and that a new STRAP application would need to be made. Sir Oliver Robbins confirmed that it was clear to him that Mandelson had received STRAP clearance from the STRAP authorities. During the urgent question in the Chamber on 16 March, I asked the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister what level of security clearance Mandelson had been granted, notwithstanding the minutiae of whether developed vetting is a clearance level and STRAP is a role-specific access. The reply I received from the Minister for the Indo-Pacific, the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra)—somewhat conveniently one hour after The Guardian broke its story—stated only that Mandelson had developed vetting upon commencement of his role on 10 February. So when was his STRAP application made, and when was it granted? When I asked the Prime Minister last week, despite his legendary forensic eye for detail, he had no idea. Did the intelligence services also have access to the UKSV vetting report?
The wider question is this: what assessment did the US intelligence services make of Peter Mandelson? Did he pass vetting by the US Department of State? As the nexus for all Five Eyes intelligence and US-UK eyes-only intelligence coming from the United States, was Mandelson granted access to all the available intelligence in order to discharge all his responsibilities as ambassador? Would the US, for example, have given him visibility of TK-level imagery?
What assessment have the Government made of the damage this debacle has done to the UK’s relationship with the United States? It is surely no coincidence that the special relationship has soured at the same time that this fiasco has unravelled, quite apart from the other faux pas that the Government have made in recent weeks.
Even more damning in Sir Olly Robbins’ testimony was the Prime Minister’s dogged determination to reward the now Lord Doyle:
“I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then Foreign Secretary, which was uncomfortable… I found it very hard to think how I would explain to the office what the credentials of Matthew were to be in an important head of mission role, when I was in danger of making very senior, very experienced diplomats leave the office.”
The fact is that the Prime Minister put pressure on the FCDO to give Lord Doyle a head of mission role in the diplomatic service in March last year despite his complete lack of qualification for the role. That same individual later had the Labour Whip removed owing to his relationship with Sean Morton, a man subsequently convicted of possessing indecent images of children. The Prime Minister deliberately directed that information to be withheld from the then Foreign Secretary; I suspect that is not the first time he has done that.
Those two men with proximity to convicted paedophiles were both Labour peers and both key figures in the Starmer project—the Government’s cronyism is second only to their nepotism. Given what we know about the role that Peter Mandelson played in the last reshuffle, what confidence can the general public have that Ministers who owe their careers to him will vote honestly in the coming vote? It is not on the Opposition side of the House that we have to worry about whether Peter Mandelson paid for anybody’s wedding.
The laissez-faire attitude to Peter Mandelson’s appointment has illustrated the nonchalance, arrogance and incompetence of the Government under this milquetoast premiership. There is a key question that we come back to once again: why does the Prime Minister think everybody’s actions have consequences except his own? The public must be assured that there has been an investigation into whether the Prime Minister misled the House. The Privileges Committee must investigate the Prime Minister. Labour MPs must vote for the motion, for transparency and truth, not the defence of a Prime Minister who does not deserve their blinkered loyalty.
Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) (Ind)
May I first extend my thoughts and prayers to the victims of Epstein? I commend the bold and courageous contributions of Labour Members who will be voting for the motion.
I was elected as an independent Member of Parliament to represent the people of Birmingham Perry Barr without fear and without favour. I was sent here without a party Whip—without shackles or controls, or indeed hidden notes given to me behind closed doors. I was sent here to exercise my judgment, my discretion and my conscience at the behest of my constituents, and that is exactly what I do each and every day.
The truth is that the British public feel deeply, profoundly disenfranchised. Too many people no longer trust politicians. Too many believe that we say one thing and do another. Too many feel that there is one rule for those in power and another for everyone else. We cannot simply dismiss that sentiment; we must confront it. Honesty matters. Integrity matters. Credibility matters. Above all, transparency matters. Without those fundamental elements, public confidence does not just weaken; it disappears. And once it is gone, it is incredibly difficult to rebuild. I therefore ask colleagues across the House—especially Labour colleagues—what message do we send today if we refuse even to allow a Committee to examine the facts? What are we saying to the public if we block scrutiny before it has even begun?
The motion is not a verdict, a judgment or a declaration of guilt; it is a fair, established parliamentary process to examine evidence, to determine the facts and to allow the truth to emerge. Yet we are told that Labour Members are under a three-line Whip. For those outside the Chamber who may not know, that means they are being instructed and compelled to vote against the motion—to vote against even allowing the question to be examined. Let us be honest about what that looks like.
If an individual votes to prevent the investigation, they are not defending due process, but denying it; they are not upholding transparency, but obstructing it; they are not strengthening public trust, but further eroding it. To the British people, it will look like they are shielding, blocking and protecting the powerful from scrutiny. That is precisely the perception that we should all be fighting against, not reinforcing.
If we expect the public to follow the rules, to respect the law and to have faith in our institutions, we must hold ourselves to the same, if not higher, standards. We cannot ask for trust while refusing accountability, we cannot demand integrity while avoiding scrutiny and we cannot rebuild confidence by closing ranks.
This is a moment that calls for courage—not partisan courage, but moral courage; the courage to say, “Let the process take its course”; the courage to say that no one is above scrutiny; and the courage to put principle above party. As an independent Member, I answer only to my constituents and to my conscience. I am confident that every Labour Member will listen to their conscience. My conscience tells me that supporting this motion is the right thing to do, not because of politics, but because of principles, and not because of personalities, but because of the standards that we owe to the British public.
I urge colleagues across this House, particularly those under instructions today, to reflect carefully on the message that their vote will send. Will it be a message of openness or a message of obstruction? Will it be a message of accountability or a message of avoidance? The public are watching and they will draw their own conclusions. If we are serious about restoring trust in politics, we must be serious about transparency. If we are serious about integrity, we must be serious about scrutiny. If we are serious about public confidence, we must allow the truth to be examined, wherever that truth leads. For that reason, I support the motion. The Prime Minister is willing to put each and every Labour Member of Parliament at risk at the next general election, but he will not risk going in front of the Privileges Committee.
Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
This has been a long and sometimes interesting debate. We have had some revelations. I was interested to hear the speech by the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey). I am sure we are all delighted to hear that the Liberal Democrats are now opposed to sanctimony. I was also interested to hear from the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), that he is not particularly political. I welcome the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister back to his place. I congratulate him on the fact that, on the “Today” programme this morning, he was being lauded as the Prime Minister’s right-hand man. I hope that he will be not made too anxious by what has happened to all the Prime Minister’s other right-hand men.
The motion before us is very simple. It is about starting a process that will take what has been discussed in this House and put it in the hands of a Committee of our peers, who will get to adjudicate, because there is no agreement on these points. That process has long existed in this House to resolve issues such as these. We are doing this for a reason. It is simply because—[Interruption.] Yeah, okay. Come on. We are doing this for a reason. It is because Members of all parties have reason to believe that the Prime Minister may have misled this House.
Those Labour MPs who said sanctimoniously, to the horror of the Liberal Democrats, that this was some sort of political stunt—[Interruption.] Okay. All right. Do they think that the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) was part of a political stunt when she said that “good, decent colleagues will be accused of being complicit in a cover-up”, or when she said that this was “a matter for the Privileges Committee”? Was she part of a political stunt? Was it all about the local elections for her? The hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) explained that she had no Labour opponent and did not have any local elections; was she part of a political stunt? When the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), who is not in his place, said that he does not believe that the House was misled by the Prime Minister, but does think that the Prime Minister should be referred to the Committee, was he part of a political stunt? This claim falls away at the first hurdle.
Labour’s objection to the motion is political, because the Labour party knows that the Prime Minister may well be in the wrong and is scared of referring him. That is the only reason why the Government needed to put in place a hard three-line Whip and started twisting arms. Do they really believe that the hon. Members for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman), for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) and for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), who is absent and has tweeted that if she was here she
“would be voting for the motion”,
were part of a political stunt? No. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) said at the start of the debate, if the Government have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear from the Privileges Committee.
A number of Labour MPs have objected, saying that they think the Prime Minister is innocent, and they are perfectly entitled to make that case. We think that case is wrong. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) elegantly pointed out, that is why we need the Privileges Committee to adjudicate. A number of Labour MPs thought that the Prime Minister should have referred himself; indeed, he should have. It would have been the simplest way of moving on this whole process without any further need for the House to agonise over it. As for those Labour MPs who said how sad it was that they could not debate all the other things that they wanted to debate today, they could have done so if the Prime Minister had referred himself.
This ground has been well trodden this afternoon, but I will make the case again briefly. It rests on two points: full due process, and pressure. We know because of the Humble Address—and only because of it, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) eloquently said—that the then Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, set out in November 2024 what full due process looked like: the Prime Minister’s appointee had to have security clearance before he was appointed, and he had to declare his interests before he was appointed. So far, the Government, despite being asked on many occasions whether Peter Mandelson filled in a conflict of interest document, have been unable to tell us. They did not release it following the Humble Address, and have not even been able to tell us whether such a document exists.
On the security clearance aspect of the case, we know that process was not followed. We know that the Prime Minister immediately went ahead and made the appointment anyway, despite being told by the Cabinet Secretary that he should not.
There are plenty of other reasons why we know that full due process was not followed. It does not require any great experience of government to know that full due process does not involve reading a due diligence document by the Cabinet Office that says that Peter Mandelson was a director of a Russian company during the Russian invasion of Crimea, and then thinking, “Well, we just need security clearance later.” That is obviously not full due process.
It is obviously not full due process to ask Peter Mandelson’s Labour Together friends to complete the clearance process for him. It is not due process to not keep any records of meetings, calls or decisions in a way that is clearly in violation of all the guidance given to civil servants. In no way was that full due process, although people have nobly tried to make the case that Wormald, the later Cabinet Secretary, said that all that was done was fine. Let us remind the House that Wormald’s letter to the Prime Minister was written on 16 September. By that time, the Prime Minister had already told the House that
“full due process was followed”—[Official Report, 10 September 2025; Vol. 772, c. 859.]
The system was trying to defend a position that the Prime Minister had already made very clear in the House repeatedly. At that moment in time, on 10 December when he told my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition that full due process was followed, the last piece of advice given to him by a Cabinet Secretary was from Simon Case. He knew that he had not followed full due process.
On the point about pressure, it is very clear that the Prime Minister mis-spoke, at the very least, in the House last Wednesday. He said that Sir Olly Robbins
“went on to say:
‘I…have complete confidence that…recommendations to me and the discussion we had and the decision we made were rigorously independent of’
any ‘pressure.’”—[Official Report, 22 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 316.]
But what Sir Olly actually said to the Foreign Affairs Committee was,
“I also have complete confidence that their recommendations to me and the discussion we had and the decision we made were rigorously independent of that pressure.”
There is a difference between no pressure and there being pressure.
Sir Olly made it clear throughout his testimony that he and his office were put under pressure, so when the Prime Minister said,
“Sir Olly was absolutely clear that nobody put pressure on him to make this appointment”,—[Official Report, 22 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 316.]
that was manifestly false. What Sir Olly actually said was:
“Throughout January, honestly, my office and the Foreign Secretary’s office were under constant pressure… While I think the Department felt under pressure, we were proud of the fact that we had not bowed to that pressure.”
He also said that he found an
“atmosphere where this was not just, ‘Please get this done quickly,’ but, ‘And get it done.’”
That was—[Interruption.] Well, it deserves to be said loudly, because it is important.
The Prime Minister appears to have misled the House and not corrected the record. Ministers sometimes make mistakes, but as everyone knows, under the ministerial code, they must come and correct the record at the earliest available opportunity. The earliest available opportunity was Thursday. We could probably have squeezed that to include Monday, but it is now Tuesday, and the Prime Minister is still pretending that he has done nothing wrong, even though what happened is here in black and white, for everyone to read.
There is clearly a case to answer. I have sympathy for all those Labour MPs who have spoken in this debate and have deep concerns and grievances about this. I also have a great deal of sympathy for those who feel the same way but have not spoken. The Prime Minister’s failure to self-refer, as several Labour MPs have suggested he should, has put them in this position. They are being whipped to support something that they know is wrong. They are being whipped to support something that they know their constituents will hate. They are being whipped to defend the Labour Together machine, which has brought such shame on the Labour party. [Interruption.] You can get angry, but you have all taken money from them! Well, not all Labour Members, to be fair—some of them have called for an investigation of Labour Together, and rightly so. They are being whipped by a Prime Minister who will lead them over the edge of the cliff, if they let him.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) said powerfully, in politics, it is important to be able to look at oneself in the mirror at the end of the day. I know that many Labour MPs will struggle to do that after going through the Lobby tonight, but they need not vote against the motion. They all know where this ends. It ends with the Prime Minister not fighting the next general election. It ends with them having to justify what they have done. It ends with them having only what is left of their reputation.
The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister (Darren Jones)
May I begin by saying that the hon. Member’s speech—not least the beginning, when he visibly enjoyed his jokes more than the rest of the House—shows that, for the Conservative party, this is purely a joking matter? The Government take this seriously, however, so I will speak to the substance and the motivations behind the motion. Before I do so, I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions to the debate. I thank in particular hon. Friends and Members who reminded us, as they should, that the victims of Jeffrey Epstein suffered the most hideous abuse and will be reminded of that every single time this matter is debated. The Prime Minister has apologised to them and expressed his ongoing regret for having appointed Peter Mandelson, which he knows is at the heart of this matter.
The Prime Minister, and indeed the whole Government, recognise the importance of transparency in respect of Peter Mandelson’s appointment and dismissal as ambassador. That is why this is my eighth appearance at the Dispatch Box to provide updates on these issues, and why the Government welcome this opportunity to debate the substance of the motion before us. I also acknowledge the diligence of this House’s Select Committees. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and the members of her Foreign Affairs Committee for their important work. Members from across the House will have heard the evidence from a number of officials, and from the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff, as part of that ongoing work. I also thank the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), as well as the members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, for their support in providing additional layers of transparency and accountability as the Government comply with the Humble Address.
Darren Jones
I will not—[Interruption.] I will happily give way in due course, but I want to turn to the substance of the motion first.
In recent weeks, some have accused the Prime Minister of dishonesty, saying that there was no way that Foreign Office officials would have given Peter Mandelson clearance against the vetting agency’s recommendation, let alone without checking with the Prime Minister himself. The Leader of the Opposition herself on BBC Radio 4 said, “He knew”, and that
“I know he is lying”.
However, the testimony provided by Sir Olly Robbins has disproved those accusations without further question. So rather than focus on the issues affecting our constituents and the country most, what do Opposition Members do? They try to shift the goalposts, and they have tried again and again to make their arguments fit.
Today alone, we have heard Opposition Members bounce from one accusation to another in a desperate search for something that will stick. We have been subjected to the ranting incoherence of the Leader of the Opposition while she was in search of something that she could use to justify today’s politically motivated spectacle—[Interruption.]
Darren Jones
I think we have heard enough of the ranting incoherence of the Leader of the Opposition.
Let us take the specific allegations in turn. First, as to whether the Prime Minister was correct when he said “full due process” was followed, yesterday the Government deposited a letter from the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, in the Library of the House. In that letter, it is clear that he was specifically asked by the Prime Minister to review whether due process was followed in the appointment, and he confirmed that it was.
Last week, the former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins, stated to the Foreign Affairs Committee that his Department followed that process. We have also heard the Cabinet Office permanent secretary’s evidence, which covered this issue in great detail. Catherine Little stated unequivocally that “due process was followed” in relation to Peter Mandelson’s vetting.
Sir Julian Lewis
I thank the Minister for giving way. Would not “full due process” have required the vetting to be completed before announcing the appointment, as was advised by the then Cabinet Secretary and then ignored or overruled by the Prime Minister personally?
Darren Jones
The right hon. Gentleman should listen to my speech. I have just said that Catherine Little, Sir Chris Wormald and Sir Olly Robbins all agree on the point that due process was followed. When the Prime Minister received new information about the UKSV process this month, he immediately asked for the full facts to be established and he then come to this House on 20 April.
On the statement that Peter Mandelson’s appointment was “subject to developed vetting”, the Prime Minister has always been clear that this appointment was in line with the processes at the time. I understand that there have been some questions about this process, but to be clear, as Sir Olly Robbins told the Foreign Affairs Committee in November:
“As is normally the case with external appointments to my Department…the appointment was made subject to obtaining security clearance.”
As Sir Chris Wormald told the same Committee:
“The normal thing is for the security clearance to happen after appointment but before the person signs a contract and takes up post.”
And as the former Cabinet Secretary said in his letter to the Prime Minister, having conducted a review into the process,
“the vetting process was complete before the previous HMA Washington took up post on 10 February 2025, and it is more usual for security vetting to happen after appointment.”
Ayoub Khan
The Minister clearly believes that the Prime Minister has a defensible position, so will he support the withdrawal of the whipping of Labour Back Benchers?
Darren Jones
I am not going to answer silly questions.
Next, on the question of pressure—[Interruption.] Many hon. Members have asked questions today about a general pressure, a specific pressure or a variety of different pressures, so they may want to listen to the answer. It is important to be clear about this, because there is pressure to get stuff done every day across every area of government, as we work hard to deliver for the British people. The Leader of the Opposition and other Members who have previously served in government will no doubt recall that from their time in office, but there is clearly a difference between asking for progress updates and putting pressure on officials to predetermine an outcome or not to follow a proper process. That was not the case in this scenario.
Darren Jones
I am trying my best, but I have answered both those questions already from the Dispatch Box. I refer the hon. Lady to my comments.
Darren Jones
I will finish this section, then I will come to the right hon. Lady.
Sir Philip Barton told the Foreign Affairs Committee this morning that
“during my tenure, I was not aware of any pressure on the substance of the Mandelson DV case.”
Mrs Badenoch
I asked the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister just one question in my speech. Will he repeat on the Floor of the House the exact words that the Prime Minister used at PMQs, in front of all of us: that no pressure “whatsoever” was put on the Foreign Office?
Darren Jones
That is an important question, because it goes to the very heart of the motion before the House today. [Hon. Members: “Answer it!”] I am going to—rest your horses. It is important to place the Prime Minister’s words in the right context. When the Prime Minister—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] The Opposition do not want to listen to the answer—again, they do not like the facts—but I am going to try my best. They should pay attention.
To answer the right hon. Lady’s question directly, when the Prime Minister said that there was no pressure “whatsoever”, he was specifically responding to the allegation that there was pressure that Peter Mandelson should not be vetted at all and that he should be sent to Washington regardless of the vetting outcome. Again, Sir Olly Robbins told MPs that it was
“never put to me that way”,
and the Prime Minister made the comment immediately after quoting the evidence provided to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Regrettably—we see this again today, time after time—the Opposition are just trying to expand their interpretation of the Prime Minister’s words in bad faith, because their previous claim that the Prime Minister must have known about Peter Mandelson’s clearance has fallen apart in front of their eyes, and now they are grasping at straws. That matters, because as the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) argued, the processes in this House and the work of the Privileges Committee are important and integral to our constitution, but there must be appropriate thresholds for these investigations.
Darren Jones
These investigations cannot be done every week off the back of PMQs on an interpretation of the wording of the Prime Minister. Instead, they must be done on very significant cases that warrant the work of the Privileges Committee. That is why it is important to contrast the allegations and accusations of the Opposition parties, as many Members of the House have done today, with the seriousness of the situation when Boris Johnson was referred to the Privileges Committee in the last Parliament.
This is an important precedent. In those circumstances, Boris Johnson knowingly told this House that there were no parties in Downing Street during covid lockdowns, only for it to emerge that he had personally been at five of them and received a police fine for attending them. That is the nature of lying to this House, which he was proven to have done in the work of the Privileges Committee. It is not about the interpretation of a question and answer at Prime Minister’s questions.
This all begs the question: if there is no substance to the allegations in the motion today, what is it that is driving the behaviour of Opposition parties? That question goes to the very basis of the motion before us. I have to ask: what is it precisely about this Labour Government giving rights and powers to workers, renters and the disadvantaged that they do not like? What is it about this Labour Government standing against unearned wealth and people who use their privilege to extract value from the system, rather than adding to it, that they do not like? What is it about a Labour Government raising taxes on private jets and non-doms to raise money for our state schools, our NHS and our police and to lift children out of poverty after years of neglect by the Conservative party that the Opposition parties do not want to hear? We all know why—because they are on the side of the vested interests, and we are on the side of the British people.
To be fair to the House, this is not just an accusation that I am levelling at the Conservatives, because they are not the only ones playing games with today’s motion. The SNP, too, is desperate to distract from its record in power. What is it trying to distract from today? It is 10,000 kids in Scotland without a home to call their own, a Scottish NHS in decline, and the shameful ferries fiasco.
Stephen Flynn
I thank the right hon. Member for belatedly giving way. I do not know if he has noticed, but this afternoon, polling was released outlining that 61% of people on these isles believe that there should be an inquiry in the terms laid out in the motion. Just 20% of the public agree with the Minister’s position. Why is he once again on the wrong side of public opinion?
Darren Jones
I notice that the right hon. Member has nothing to say to those kids, to those patients waiting in the NHS, or to the line of other people waiting for his Government to perform.
Just for me to complete going around the House, the so-called Green party is desperate to distract from Labour’s clean energy mission, from its opposition to clean nuclear power, and from its quibbling over new solar farms that—I literally could not make this up—it thinks are too big. Get real!
Darren Jones
We are in an energy bills crisis and a climate emergency, and this Labour party is going to pull out the stops to serve the British people. While the Opposition parties play—
Mr Speaker
Order. In fairness to the right hon. Member, he has given way once already. The hon. Lady cannot stand while he is speaking; she can indicate that she wishes to intervene, but she cannot continue to hang loose like she is trying to summon a taxi.
Darren Jones
I am grateful, Mr Speaker. I, for one, am rather enjoying myself, but I think the public might want to listen to the debate in the House today.
While the Opposition parties are playing games—as we can hear from their chuntering, their joking and their shouting—this Labour Government are doing the work that matters. I have been asked, “Where is the Prime Minister?” This afternoon, the Prime Minister has been chairing the middle east response committee, bringing together the Government to mitigate the impact of the war in the middle east. In contrast, the Opposition parties want to distract from the fact that after years of ordinary people facing pressures from the cost of living and feeling like hard work is not rewarded like it used to be, the Conservatives and their friends in Reform wanted the UK to go to war in the middle east, making it harder for families up and down the country—distraction, distraction, distraction.
In contrast, this Government are investing in new rail, roads and nuclear reactors, new scanners for our hospitals and free breakfast clubs for our kids. It is this Labour Government who have saved British Steel and who are investing in sovereign AI, renewing our high streets and delivering home-grown energy. This is relevant, Mr Speaker, because it goes to the motivation behind today’s motion.
This Labour Government are doing the hard work of building a better Britain, a Britain that gives people hope for a better future. All these Opposition parties want to tear that down—they want to tear down this Labour Government and the labour movement. [Interruption.] They agree, because like our forefathers before us, we have stood up to the power of vested interests, and we will do so again. When the Opposition parties come to the Chamber to try to tear down this labour movement and our project for the British people, I say to them all, “Not today—not on our watch. We will not let it happen.”
Question put.
Mr Speaker
A Member of Parliament has complained to me, as has another Member. When Members are shouting “shame” at others who are voting, it is not acceptable and will not be tolerated. I hope that the people concerned will apologise to those Members they shouted at.
Sir Julian Lewis
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Out of 190 questions for written answer that I have put down in this Session, which is coming to its close, all but one have been answered. The exception is one that I mentioned on the Floor of the House yesterday during the statement by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. He responded:
“I always ensure that I honour parliamentary questions in a timely fashion.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 598.]
The last day for answering this question is today, and it so far has not been answered, so I wonder if I might give the Chief Secretary the opportunity to answer it now. It is this:
“To ask the Prime Minister who first suggested to him that Peter Mandelson should be appointed as Ambassador to the United States.”
Mr Speaker
We are not going to carry on the debate, but the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is desperate to answer.
Darren Jones
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. First, may I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman? I would have cleared parliamentary questions, but I have been in the House all afternoon. To answer his specific question, I refer him to the evidence given today to the Foreign Affairs Committee by Mr Morgan McSweeney, who confirmed that the first person to recommend Peter Mandelson to become ambassador was Peter Mandelson.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I understand that when an MP visits another MP’s constituency, the custom and practice is that they should give that MP due notice. The Leader of the Opposition came to my constituency but did not inform me that she would be there. I seek your advice on how best to resolve this.[Official Report, 28 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 870.] (Correction)
Mr Speaker
The good thing is that the Member has told me about it. I say to Members—whether they are Ministers, shadow Ministers, leaders or whoever—the courtesy is to the inform the Member whose constituency is being visited, unless it is a private visit. Can everybody please take that on board, especially as we are coming up to the election? The fever is already with us, so please adhere to what I believe is good practice.