Peter Mandelson: Government Appointment

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Kemi Badenoch

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Government’s accountability to the House in connection to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States of America.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this important debate.

The Prime Minister personally decided to appoint a serious, known national security risk to our most sensitive diplomatic post. Peter Mandelson was not just a man who had already been sacked twice from Government for lying and not just a man who had a public relationship with a convicted paedophile, but a man with links to the Kremlin and China—links so close that they were raised as red flags with the Prime Minister before his appointment.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister did not deny that he knew about those links before he appointed Mandelson. He could not deny that because by his own admission he had seen the documents that proved the links. I cannot overstate how serious a matter this is. The Prime Minister sent a known security risk to Washington, to a position where he would see our most important ally’s top secret intelligence. What if he had seen something and leaked it to one of our enemies? How much would that have damaged our security partnership? We cannot even be sure that that did not happen.

What is most extraordinary is that the Prime Minister appointed Peter Mandelson before vetting was complete. He did that despite a letter from the then Cabinet Secretary, Lord Case, clearly expressing to the Prime Minister that the process required security vetting to be done before the appointment. So how can he then have claimed on the Floor of the House that the process was followed, when he knew that it had not been? The Prime Minister mentioned the word “process” more than 100 times in Parliament yesterday, but he was the one who did not follow that process.

This morning, we have heard the bombshell testimony of the former permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins. Sir Olly Robbins had a long and distinguished career serving Ministers. He is not the sort of person to give us a frank personal account of how things played out last January. So when he told us today that Downing Street put the Foreign Office under “constant pressure” to clear Peter Mandelson, that No. 10 showed a “dismissive approach” to Mandelson’s vetting process, that it would have been “very difficult indeed” to deny clearance and that doing so would have “damaged US-UK relationships”, we know he is giving us only the slightest indication of how bad things were. And that there was actually an overwhelming drive from the Prime Minister’s office to ensure Peter Mandelson was installed as ambassador.

Sir Olly Robbins has told us that No. 10 showed no interest in the vetting—no desire to wait and ensure that due process was followed. In fact, the Cabinet Office even questioned the need for Peter Mandelson to be vetted at all: the same Cabinet Office that had discovered Mandelson’s links to Epstein, China and Russia in its due diligence—the Cabinet Office that the Minister is in charge of right now. Instead, according to Robbins,

“The focus was on getting Mandelson out to Washington quickly”,

and before the vetting even started Peter Mandelson had already been granted access to

“highly classified briefing on a case-by-case basis”.

This is what the Prime Minister calls full due process.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

Did my right hon. Friend not find it astonishing that in the testimony today the ex-leader of the Foreign Office said that he was made to understand that before they had completed their clearances, Mandelson already had STRAP clearance, which gave him access to the most secure and most dangerous information held by Government?

[Mrs Badenoch]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. He is absolutely right: it is extraordinary and it is shocking.

The Prime Minister might have refused to answer my question around his knowledge of Mandelson’s links to the Russian defence company Sistema yesterday, but that is only because he knows that we know the answer. It was there in the due diligence: his choice of ambassador retaining an interest in a Russian company linked to Vladimir Putin after the invasion of Crimea. And the Prime Minister’s response to seeing that information? According to Robbins, “constant pressure” on the Foreign Office to get the appointment done.

The Prime Minister, as my right hon. Friend has just mentioned, placed top secret intelligence in the hands of a man he knew to be a national security risk. He did so before the official security vetting not just knowingly but deliberately, and to an extent that left a senior civil servant with a distinguished career under the clear and obvious impression that the vetting must return only one possible outcome: that Peter Mandelson should be appointed. None of that was following full due process by the letter or the spirit of that phrase. This is no longer just about what the Prime Minister was or was not told; this is about what he did before the vetting process had even started.

And we now know that Mandelson was not a one-off. According to Sir Olly Robbins, No. 10 also asked for the disgraced Matthew Doyle, the Prime Minister’s then director of communications, to be made an ambassador. Astonishingly, the Prime Minister’s office even told Robbins to keep the request a secret from the Foreign Secretary. The idea that it is No. 10 who are the victims of others not following due process is, quite frankly, laughable.

The Prime Minister told Parliament yesterday that it was “staggering” that Olly Robbins had not shared the recommendations of UK Security Vetting with the then Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald. But today we learned from Robbins that he had never seen the original vetting file. If the Prime Minister is furious that Sir Olly Robbins did not share the vetting details with him or the former Cabinet Secretary, why is he not furious with the Cabinet Office for not sharing it? Put simply, why exactly did he sack Olly Robbins?

It is no surprise that the Prime Minister is not here today. These are difficult questions. He cannot claim not to have known about the risk that Mandelson posed, because, as he said yesterday, he saw the due diligence that disclosed it. I still find it inconceivable that, despite that failure of vetting being a front-page news story, no one in No. 10 was aware of it. He cannot deny that his decision put Britain at risk. The British public deserve to know how this failure happened and they deserve to hear it from the Prime Minister himself.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister had the chance to set the record straight, but Members on all sides—and no doubt the public—were left wholly unsatisfied with the answers he gave. I am sure they will share my deep disappointment that the Prime Minister has chosen not to be here today. There remain serious questions about the decisions that he took over the appointment of Peter Mandelson, but the Prime Minister does not want to answer any more questions today, so, in typical fashion, he has thrown someone else under the bus. I feel for the Minister sent out as a human shield for the Prime Minister. It is not this Minister who made the Mandelson appointment; that was above his pay grade. He cannot tell us what the Prime Minister was thinking when he made those decisions and he will not be able to provide this House with the answers that it deserves to hear.

This is simply what the Prime Minister does. Sue Gray, Matthew Doyle, Morgan McSweeney, Chris Wormald, Olly Robbins, Peter Mandelson—those appointments were the Prime Minister’s decision, people the Prime Minister chose to appoint and all people he then chose to sack. Are we meant to believe that all these people are the problem, rather than the Prime Minister’s judgment?

As usual, the Prime Minister’s explanations yesterday left us with even more questions than answers. He says that he was justified in appointing Mandelson before vetting because of advice he received from the then Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald. But how can that make sense, when that advice only came after the scandal had erupted? Post hoc advice is pointless. Soon after that, he then sacked Chris Wormald. Why is the Prime Minister now relying on the evidence of the very man he told us was doing so badly in the job that he sacked him?

Let us move on to the Prime Minister’s claim that no one in No. 10 was aware that Mandelson had failed his vetting. Enough people in Whitehall knew. Enough people knew for journalists from The Independent, the Mail and Sky News to find out. Journalists have released texts with the Prime Minister’s director of communications, where they made No. 10 aware of this fact. He did not deny that the story was true. Why not? Something simply does not add up. Despite this, the Prime Minister went on to assure the House and the public that Mandelson’s appointment was down to a failure of vetting. I cannot fathom how the Prime Minister can still claim not to have misled the House on this point.

It is telling that when given the opportunity yesterday to apologise for misleading the House, even inadvertently, by my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), the Prime Minister chose not to. I suspect that he chose not to do so because he knows that if he did, he would be bound by his own words and by the standards to which he held previous Prime Ministers from this very Dispatch Box. In 2022, he said that if the Prime Minister misleads the House, he must resign—either the Prime Minister is a man of his word, or he thinks there is one rule for him and another for everyone else.

Unbelievably, half the permanent secretaries who were in post when Labour took office less than two years ago have now gone. The sacking of senior civil servants to carry the can for the Prime Minister’s failures has already cost taxpayers more than £1.5 million in payouts—that is before the sacking of Sir Olly Robbins. It is quite something for the former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell to warn that the Prime Minister has created

“one of the worst crises in relations between ministers and mandarins of modern times”,

adding that the sacking of Sir Olly Robbins

“risks having a serious and sustained chilling effect on serving and prospective civil servants”.

Another former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, has said that the Prime Minister put Sir Olly in an “impossible” position. These are serious people who are calling out the Prime Minister’s behaviour. The former head of propriety and ethics and deputy Cabinet Secretary, Helen MacNamara, has called the decision to sack Robbins “unacceptable”. She said that if the Government had published the papers that Parliament demanded back in February, this argument would be so much easier for everyone because we would all be operating on the basis of the same facts, and she is right.

The delay in publishing the information required by the Humble Address is shocking. Where are the key annotations, decisions and meeting records—the box returns, as they are called in Downing Street? Why are crucial forms left blank? These missing documents add to the mystery. Why are the Government still trying to cover this up?

Ambassador to the United States

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Kemi Badenoch

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Badenoch]

The hon. Gentleman asks a very good question, and I hope the Minister can provide an answer, because all of us across the House want to know.

We want to know how Lord Mandelson’s appointment happened in the first place. As I see it, there are only three possibilities. The first is that it was a failure of vetting, but are we really supposed to believe that this is the fault of the security services? I do not think so. Did they not drag up the intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which was discussed last week? The second possibility—a bit more likely—is that the Prime Minister’s advisers kept information from him. If that happened, it would be incredibly serious.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that no matter what happened or did not happen, a Prime Minister—a leader—has to shoulder the responsibility? It is absolutely appalling that they would then blame the staff around them. It is their responsibility, and they answer to the House—no excuse.

[Mrs Badenoch]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. This is a Prime Minister who hides behind everybody else; whether his advisers, his junior Ministers or his Back Benchers, that is what he does. If he wants to blame advisers, which one was it? Who kept it from him? Why have they not apologised and resigned? No one is taking responsibility.

Thirdly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington alluded to, the most likely but most worrying reason of all is that the Prime Minister had plenty of information to suggest that Lord Mandelson should not be appointed but chose to appoint him anyway. Even at the time, eyebrows were raised about this appointment and there were many critics; I remember it from the time. Now we read in the papers that the Prime Minister overruled security advice not to appoint Lord Mandelson. Is that true? The Minister should tell us.

It is time for the Prime Minister to come clean. He needs to come out of hiding. This issue will not go away. The Government cannot play for time as we will be back here again and again until all these documents are published. We will be back until someone takes responsibility.

This is a political crisis on top of an economic crisis all of the Government’s own making. They are distracted now, but they came into office with no plan for the country, no idea what they stood for and no vision for what they wanted to achieve. Because of that, they have been lurching from disaster to disaster, with winter fuel, tax rises, welfare chaos, scandal, and the Prime Minister’s failing leadership rebooted after just one year. The only plan they came into office with was a promise they made again and again to the British public: that they would restore honesty and integrity to Government. That was their defining mission, that was their grand plan, and it is in tatters.

So far, in one year, we have had an anti-corruption Minister sacked for corruption, a homelessness Minister sacked for evicting tenants, a Housing Secretary sacked for dodging housing tax, a Transport Secretary sacked for fraud and a director of strategy—apparently the speechwriter—lost only yesterday in scandal.