Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sir John Hayes]

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

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

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

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

[Sir Julian Lewis]

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

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

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

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

[Sir John Hayes]

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

[Alex Burghart]

I also find that very difficult to believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morgan McSweeney said, “Yes.”

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

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

Morgan McSweeney replied:

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

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

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

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

That did not age well.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Can I take the hon. Gentleman back briefly to the Morgan McSweeney messages? On page 173 of the third volume, there are some messages that Morgan McSweeney has managed to provide from a group chat, which have been published, but not individual messages between himself and Peter Mandelson. If his phone was stolen, which I have no reason to doubt, how did he manage to provide these messages but not those other messages, unless, as the shadow Minister says, they do exist? Why have they been held back? I cannot imagine that it was on the grounds of national security.

[Alex Burghart]

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

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

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham Yardley) (Lab)]

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

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

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

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

[Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)]

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

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

[Sir John Hayes]

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

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

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

I call the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

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

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

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

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

and he

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

red tick-boxes, which were ticked—

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

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

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

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

He said,

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

well, it certainly did—

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

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

[Emily Thornberry]

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

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

that is the security man.

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

that is human resources—

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

Who knows? It continues:

“With regard to personal conduct”—

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

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

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

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

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

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

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--- Later in debate ---

[Darren Jones]

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

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

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

[Darren Jones]

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

[Alex Burghart]

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

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

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

[Darren Jones]

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

Lord Mandelson Humble Address: Government Response

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I thank the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister for advance sight of his statement. If the story in The Times is to be believed, he may be positioning himself to be the chief successor to the Prime Minister.

I also thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving me advance sight of the material that was published today, which I was fortunate enough to see this morning. However, it is important to put on record that only a very few Members of this House were able to see it this morning. It was available at 9.30 am, yet it was published only at 2 pm, so here we are today with hon. Members not having had a chance to read it and yet being expected to ask the right hon. Gentleman questions. I know the response will be that we are going to have a general debate on Wednesday, but as Government Members will know, if the Minister chooses not to take interventions in a general debate, there is no scrutiny at all. At worst, this is obfuscation; it is an attempt to deny scrutiny in a way that is unnecessary. The documents should have been published at 9.30 this morning in advance of this statement.

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It was on the news!

[Alex Burghart]

It was on the news. The case of Peter Mandelson’s appointment remains of the utmost national importance simply because it touches on national security and on the Prime Minister’s honesty, integrity and competence. I want to make two basic points about the material before us today: the first is about disclosure, and the second about the process by which Peter Mandelson was appointed.

On disclosure, although we have a huge number of documents, it is clear that very many are missing. Some have been withheld, some have been lost, and it is clear that some have probably been destroyed. Because of the approach the Government are taking, however, it is impossible for hon. Members to know which documents fall into which category. We are told that the Metropolitan police has requested that certain documents be retained, but the Government have refused to tell us which documents are being retained.

I respect the fact that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister has told us about three broad categories now—this is progress. We did ask for those categories some time ago and were told that we could not have them, but it turns out that we can have them. We know there is no good legal basis for the Government not to disclose to this House which documents are being withheld. The Government should tell us. Indeed, it would be possible for them to disclose those documents to the ISC or to certain Members of the House on Privy Council terms. Again, this is obfuscation. It is an unnecessary attempt to defer or deny scrutiny, and the Humble Address did not allow for the Government to redefine the request in this way. If the Government wish to retain documents because the Met police has asked them to do so, they should come back to the House and change the terms of the Humble Address. They have not done that and, consequently, they risk being in contempt.

Some Ministers have duly handed over their WhatsApp messages; it is clear that some have not. Are we to believe that there was no WhatsApp exchange at all between the Prime Minister and Peter Mandelson? We know that there was, because it has been reported in the press, and yet those messages reported in the press do not appear in the release today. It is clear that some messages have gone missing.

It is also the case that, in all these documents, the Prime Minister’s presence is almost non-existent. Despite the fact that he was appointing a man to be head of our most senior mission, we have almost nothing in his name. It is as though somehow he appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador without leaving any documentary trace of that decision at all. It really beggars belief.

Take, for example, the former Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, well known to be a friend and ally of Mandelson. He appears to have submitted a nil return on his WhatsApp messages. I hope the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will tell us why. Why was it that there were never any messages? That seems unlikely. Was it that those messages have been deleted? The House has a right to know. The House has a right to know in each case whether information has gone missing or it has not been handed over.

We know that Peter Mandelson has refused to hand over his phone—it is in the document. We know that he was asked to give over his phone on 31 March, some time after the Humble Address. He has declined to do so, and it is simply not acceptable that the Government should allow this to pass without some sort of pushback. The Government has within their power the opportunity to take legal action to recover the exit payment they gave to Peter Mandelson if he is not playing ball with the Humble Address.

There is then the matter of redactions. There are acres and acres of white space, a constellation of asterisks—perhaps all too appropriate for a Labour document. It is clear from the reports in the press that the ISC has had serious concerns about the redaction process. I listened to what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said, and I will listen with interest to what members of the Committee say in a moment. There are a huge number of redactions under the heading “Third Party”. On what grounds have those redactions been made? For example, on page 251 of part III, Mandelson refers to someone who is “currently staying” with him in Government property. This name is redacted. Why has it been redacted? Why cannot the House be told who was staying in Government property with the ambassador?

On the national security vetting material, it seems once again that the Government are happier to provide The Guardian with more information than they are prepared to provide to Parliament. Preparation of the security vetting document for publication appeared in recess, leaked by someone in Government who was familiar with it, and then we have seen that The Guardian has multiple sources saying that concerns were raised by the vetting agency about Peter Mandelson’s foreign contacts with the Chinese Minister, with Oleg Deripaska, with Tamir Hayman and so on. There were multiple sources, and yet we are being asked to believe that this information was only seen by a tiny handful of people within Government. Someone somewhere is not being frank with us.

If we had time, and we will have time on Wednesday, we could talk about the concerning information about Chagos. We could talk about the fact that Peter Mandelson, after he had been appointed, asked whether he could do paid work in Shanghai on a private basis. We could talk about the fact that Peter Mandelson wrote to the then Foreign Secretary saying,

“if you were minded to appoint me I would make sure you never regret it.”

The truth is that we must return once again to the process by which Peter Mandelson was appointed. Everything in the documents released today shows that the Prime Minister did not follow the instructions he was given by the then Cabinet Secretary on 11 August 2024. He was told to get security vetting done before the appointment was confirmed, which he did not do. He was asked to do that because the Prime Minister had been provided with a due diligence document by the Cabinet Office that said that Peter Mandelson had an ongoing friendship with Epstein after he had been sent to prison, that he had been a director of a Russian defence company that had supplied arms to Putin during his invasion of Crimea, and that he had maintained unhealthy business relations in China.

Despite this, the Prime Minister did not get the security vetting done before he made the appointment: he went ahead and made it anyway. The rest of the system was then scrabbling around afterwards to try to make up for the error, but it was the Prime Minister’s error. It was clear that due diligence was not followed. It is a failure that is visible from space, it is a failure that will define this Prime Minister’s premiership and it is a failure that will be written as his political epitaph.

[Darren Jones]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his questions. There were three broad questions: first, on access to the documents; secondly, on what documents are available or not; and thirdly, on the redactions process.

On access to the documents, as I said in my response to the urgent question before the recess, I have been mindful of the fact that given the significant number of documents published today, we wanted to create as much time as possible for the House to scrutinise them and to be able to ask the Government questions. I agree that had I published these documents 45 minutes before standing up to give a statement for 45 minutes, that would have been insufficient in the circumstances. I hope that the hon. Gentleman welcomes the lengths that I and the Government have gone to, not only to provide the documents in advance to him, the Leader of the Opposition, the Chairs of the relevant Select Committees and other stakeholders, but to publish them much earlier than is normal, and to secure a general debate on Wednesday.

In respect of the documents that are available, as I said in my statement, this tranche plus the first tranche of documents represent the entirety of the documents that the Government have available for disclosure, except for those that have been made available to the Metropolitan police. The hon. Gentleman invited me to list the documents that have been given to the Metropolitan police. As I have said from the Dispatch Box before, I am acting on the advice of the Metropolitan police in not being able to do that, but I am pleased that he welcomes the commitment that we have secured from them to give a little more shape by setting out the categories of the documents that are being held. I remind him and the House that we have also shared the documents directly with the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, so that there is an additional check and balance within Parliament, without being able to share the documents more widely until the Met police tell us that we can do so.

The hon. Gentleman asked me about notification of the Prime Minister’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador. I refer him to the first tranche and the document from the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary in No. 10 communicating that decision to both the Foreign Office and the palace.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked me about the redactions process. As I set out in detail in my statement, that process was predominately with the Intelligence and Security Committee, where the information relates to national security or international relations. Secondly, non-national security redactions were undertaken in line with established process and precedent, with the additional check provided this morning, again by the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, in relation to third parties. I understand that the Chair has confirmed that he is happy with the process that the Government have followed.

Lord Mandelson Humble Address: Government Response Update

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I thank the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister for advance sight of his statement and for taking this statement himself; it is good of him not to delegate. This was not his mess—that was the 2024 Budget—but I am afraid it is now his mess to clear up.

I have to ask: where are the documents? The Humble Address was nearly 12 weeks ago. I remind the right hon. Gentleman that on that occasion the House asked for a huge range of things: the due diligence document that was passed to No. 10; the conflict of interest form; the material that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Cabinet Office provided to UK Security Vetting about Peter Mandelson; papers for and minutes of meetings relating to the decision to appoint Lord Mandelson; electronic communications; and so on. Where are they? Since February, the Government have asserted that they are working with urgency and that everything will be available very shortly, that they are working, in that least reassuring of Government phrases, “at pace”, and—today’s favourite—that the information will be available as soon as possible. That is, no doubt, as soon as possible after the local elections.

In the documents that have been released, what we appear to see is either an enormous cover-up or a very significant breakdown in the expected process of government. We have seen nothing from the Prime Minister, nothing from his chief of staff and nothing from Peter Mandelson himself; we have seen no minutes of meetings, no billets-doux, no annotations and no box returns. The official civil service guidance on this matter says explicitly:

“Keep submissions with ministers’ comments. If ministers write on a hard copy, keep the minister’s handwritten comments. Keep correspondence reporting ministers’ responses along with background provided to ministers in the medium in which they were created”.

We have seen none of this. This is either a cover-up or a terrible return to the days of sofa government under Tony Blair.

Simon Case told the Prime Minister that in order to complete due process, there had to be security clearance before he made the appointment, and a conflict of interest declaration had to be made by Peter Mandelson. To date, we have seen none of that information. I am pleased to hear the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister say that material associated with Mandelson’s vetting is now being handed to the ISC, but where is the conflict of interest form? I hope it is not the case that this is being disguised as personal information of the sort that the right hon. Gentleman said would not be disclosed, and I would be grateful if he could confirm that it is not.

I would also like the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to confirm that that declaration of interest form exists. There is no good reason why he cannot tell us whether it does. Indeed, the former Attorney General wrote the other day in the papers that there is no legal reason why the Government cannot tell us which documents are being retained by the Metropolitan police. There should be a catalogue of all documents that exist; even if the House cannot look at them, we should be allowed to know what is out there and what will come to us in due course. The titles of documents will themselves not prejudice a trial.

The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister has today talked about the non-disclosure of personal information. I ask him again to tell us about the conflict of interest form and whether Peter Mandelson’s personal information is considered to be in scope of that ruling. Will he set out the Government’s precise approach to redactions vis-à-vis the documents that will be given to this House, rather than the ISC? It will be useful to understand his thinking.

On electronic communications, despite this being in the Humble Address on 4 February, I understand from the Cabinet Secretary, who wrote to me over the weekend, that there was no instruction to hand over non-corporate comms until 13 March—about five weeks after the Humble Address. Why this delay? Is the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister confident that no material was deleted in that five-week period? How can he be sure?

I again ask the right hon. Gentleman to confirm or deny whether the ISC release contains the information about Lord Mandelson’s interests. This is of specific concern to the House, given how Peter Mandelson may have behaved when he was ambassador in Washington and given the meetings that he may have taken the Prime Minister to.

It is time the Government come clean—not on their own terms or to their own timetable, but on the terms set down by the House. Will the right hon. Gentleman finally tell us a hard deadline for when these documents will be handed over?

[Darren Jones]

The hon. Gentleman asked me a number of questions, which I will take in turn. To the question of where the documents are, those in scope of the Humble Address are currently in one of three locations: first, with the Government waiting for the publication of the second tranche; secondly, with the Intelligence and Security Committee; and thirdly, with the Metropolitan police. We have sought to publish all those documents—those that the Government hold and those that the Intelligence and Security Committee are considering—in a combined bundle, in order to aid the House to see the documents in a chronological order. Otherwise, I suspect there would be questions about what documents were missing, subject to the conclusion of the Committee’s work.

I can confirm that documents that relate to Peter Mandelson’s security vetting have been passed to the Intelligence and Security Committee today, and that we intend to publish those as part of the second tranche, subject to discussions with the Intelligence and Security Committee.

I was asked specifically about the documents that have been given to the Metropolitan police. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I have been advised by the Metropolitan police that I am unable to list those documents, and so I will not seek to do so. He asked me about redactions policy; obviously the key redactions policy is in relation to information that the Government consider to be prejudicial to national security or international relations. That goes through the Intelligence and Security Committee for consideration. If there is a disagreement between the Government and the Committee, there is a process of redactions hearings between them to resolve that.

As I mentioned in my statement, other redactions relate merely to information such as the names and contact details of junior officials, in line with established freedom of information policy as it relates to the publication of Humble Addresses.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Paragraph 1.6.c of the ministerial code states:

“It is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.”

Yesterday, the Prime Minister said to the House 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.]

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.”

Sir Olly said “that” pressure, not “any” pressure. The Prime Minister materially changed Sir Olly’s meaning. Robbins was clear that he had been put under pressure. Does the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister know whether the Prime Minister intends to correct the record?

[Darren Jones]

I think the difference between the words “that” and “any” is not of material relevance to the question that the shadow Minister is putting to the House. The Prime Minister has not misled the House. The testimony of the Prime Minister and of Sir Olly Robbins is very clearly on the record, and that makes the case.

[Alex Burghart]

The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is perfectly intelligent enough to know that there is an enormous difference between those two words. I will remind him that the Prime Minister is bound by the ministerial code.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister also told the House:

“Sir Olly was absolutely clear that nobody put pressure on him to make this appointment”—[Official Report, 22 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 316.]

but that is not what Sir Olly said to the Foreign Affairs Committee. He actually said:

“Throughout January, honestly, my office and the Foreign Secretary’s office were under constant pressure.”

Again, he said that

“while I think the Department felt under pressure, we were proud of the fact that we had not bowed to that pressure.”

Again, he said that Philip Barton’s handover to him

“contributed to my strong sense that there was an atmosphere of pressure”.

To avoid being in breach of the ministerial code, Ministers must correct the record at the earliest available opportunity. At the very latest, the earliest opportunity is now. Will the Prime Minister correct the record?

[Darren Jones]

It is not the view of the Prime Minister or the Government that the Prime Minister needs to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Last week, someone in the heart of Government leaked some extremely sensitive documents to The Guardian. This appears potentially to be a crime under the National Security Act 2023. Has the Cabinet Office reported it to the Metropolitan police?

[Darren Jones]

As I confirmed to the House, I think, a day or so ago, a leak inquiry has begun. When further facts are established, we reserve the right to do so.

[Alex Burghart]

Cat Little, the permanent secretary, has just told the Foreign Affairs Committee that a very, very small number of people have actually seen the document in question. Will the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister commit to the House that when he has identified who leaked it, he will report them to the Metropolitan police?

[Darren Jones]

I can confirm that we take this matter deeply seriously and, as I say, we reserve the right to do so once the facts have been established through the inquiry.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

The Secretary of State says that there is no such thing as vexatious prosecutions. I think that he would do well to remember the cases of Phil Shiner.

In 1991, the SAS shot and killed three members of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade in Coagh. The coroner originally found that the soldier’s use of force was reasonable and proportionate, and that the IRA men in question had the intent to murder. A judicial review was brought against these findings, but in October last year it was thrown out by the High Court in Belfast, with the judge saying that the case was “ludicrous” and

“utterly divorced from the reality”.

Depressingly, this morning we hear that that case is to continue 35 years after the incident and after the soldier in question has been investigated for years. How can the Secretary of State think that is right?

[Hilary Benn]

Any citizen of the United Kingdom, as the hon. Member is well aware, has a right to bring a judicial review against any decision that has been made. It is for the courts to determine that. Having seen what the original judge said in throwing out the case, and given the fact that the inquest found that the use of force in that case was lawful, perhaps it is not surprising that the judge threw it out as having no merit whatsoever. If the case is continuing, we will have to leave it to the judicial process to decide what happens, but I have confidence in our courts.

[Alex Burghart]

Does not this case absolutely exemplify why the Government’s solution is entirely wrong? It reopens the door to vexatious litigation, which allows our veterans to be dragged through the courts, even when the courts themselves say that the case is ludicrous. It also exposes the absurdity of the fact that legal aid is paying for these challenges against our veterans—we are all literally paying for lawyers to bring vexatious litigation against our troops. The Government seem rightly to have paused their Bill. Will they please use this opportunity to think again and take a new approach that guarantees genuine protections for those who serve?

[Hilary Benn]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that there will be genuine protections. On the question of legal aid in Northern Ireland, that is a matter, as he well knows, for the Northern Ireland Executive. Given the case that he has cited, I was not aware that the previous Government at any point considered removing the right to bring judicial review against any decisions at all. If he is now advancing the argument that judicial review should not be available in certain cases, I would say good luck to him because that is a foundation of our legal system.

Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Alex Burghart Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Hon. Members will be delighted to hear that I will speak only briefly, because the Opposition do not intend to oppose the legislation. My contribution is already substantially longer than that made by my predecessor, Teddy Taylor, in 1975, when the legislation originally came to the House, who said only 14 words before sitting down.

Although the Conservatives do not oppose the measure, I have a few questions based on issues raised by my hon. Friends. The next Conservative Government intend to reduce the size of Government and, in due course, reduce the number of Ministers that the Government require. On principle, we think that Ministers ought to be paid. However, referring back to the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden), the former Deputy Prime Minister, it would be good to have a Dispatch Box commitment that there will be no more unpaid Ministers under this Government. I understand that the Bill has not been drafted in that way and that the Government intend to bring forward amendments only in Committee, but such a commitment would reassure the House that this is not just going to be an ever-increasing problem, and that unpaid Ministers will be added to paid Ministers, and so on.

It would be helpful if the Minister set out for the House the Government’s intention for the additional Secretary of State salary. That will command some interest, both inside and outside this place. It is pretty obvious that the Government have something in mind and it would be useful to air that at this stage.

As I have said, we believe that those who serve as Ministers ought to be paid. It is not really right that Prime Ministers should ask people to be a Minister of the Crown without offering them a salary, and I think our constituents would feel the same way. While our approach would be slightly different, we will not oppose the legislation today.

Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[The First Deputy Chairman]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I have just a few short remarks. First, it would be helpful if the Minister set out how the Government have come to the totals that they have come to: why one, four and nine in total? Why not fewer, and why not more? Secondly, I did not quite get the Dispatch Box commitment I was looking for that this would mark an end to unpaid ministerial posts in this Government. [Interruption.] There is a little bit of a debate on the Government Front Bench about whether that commitment was made, but if the Paymaster General would be crystal clear, we can all go home happy.

Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister if he will make a statement on the Government’s compliance with the Humble Address of 4 February 2026 relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as His Majesty’s ambassador to the United States of America.

[The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister (Darren Jones)]

I updated the House last Wednesday on the Government’s response to the Humble Address motion of 4 February, after the first tranche of documents were laid in both Houses in response to that motion. The Government have been clear that they are committed to publishing all documents relevant to the Humble Address, and that further material will be published in due course as officials work through its full scope.

The first tranche, as the title of the document made clear, represented,

“Part of a Return to an Address of the Honourable the House of Commons dated 4 February 2026”.

It responded directly to a number of specific elements contained in that motion, namely papers relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment as His Majesty’s ambassador and the discussions that subsequently led to his dismissal. As the Government have said previously, there are specific documents that we would like to disclose but which the Metropolitan police has asked us not to in order to avoid prejudicing the ongoing criminal investigation into Peter Mandelson. The Government have agreed to that request. We will publish those documents in the future once the Metropolitan police has confirmed that it will no longer prejudice its investigation.

As a consequence of that, and as I set out to the House on 11 March, the Government have therefore taken the extraordinary step, as agreed with Mr Speaker, of briefing the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), on terms agreed by the Metropolitan police to ensure that there is as much transparency to the House as possible.

As the House understands, the Government must carefully assess the risk of prejudicing UK national security or international relations posed by the release of any official documents. Again, this process is subject to parliamentary oversight. Any such material will be and is in the process of being referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. I thank the Committee for its assistance and can confirm that this process was also followed regarding the first tranche of material published last week. Outside of this arrangement, the important and well-established constitutional principle that national security and international relations judgments are ultimately for the Government has not changed.

We are continuing the disclosure process for other documents across Government within the scope of the address. Given the breadth of the motion agreed by the House and the large number of materials and Departments involved, this process will take time and necessarily requires careful consideration. Where relevant documents are held, they are being prepared for release through an established process, including the appropriate checks relating to national security, international relations, legal privilege and the protection of personal data.

The Government have acknowledged that the documents published reveal that the appointment process fell short of what is required. As previously set out, the independent adviser looked last week at the process and concluded that he saw no grounds for the investigation that the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), has requested, but as the Prime Minister set out this morning, the inherited process itself was not strong enough. That is why the Prime Minister has already strengthened the process and is committed to strengthening it further in the future. This forms part of wider changes that the Government are bringing forward to improve the system, including a review by the Ethics and Integrity Commission relating to financial disclosures, transparency around lobbying, and the business appointment rules, alongside a review of the national security vetting system.

As I have said, and I know Members across the House will agree, Jeffrey Epstein was a disgusting individual, and Peter Mandelson’s decision to put their relationship before his victims and the vulnerable was reprehensible. That is why there is cross-party consensus across the House for transparency and accountability and why the Government are committed to publishing all material relevant to the Humble Address. I will continue to keep the House updated as a matter of priority, as I have done to date, and I commend this statement to the House.

[Alex Burghart]

Since last Wednesday, it has become increasingly clear that either the Government did not follow due process in their appointment of Peter Mandelson or that they have not disclosed all the relevant documents. In different terms, either the Prime Minister’s assurances that full due process was followed were misleading, or the Government have not complied with the Humble Address. Either would be a contempt of Parliament.

Last Wednesday, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said:

“All the documents that are available in relation to Peter Mandelson’s appointment and dismissal are published…today, subject to those that have been held back by the Metropolitan police.”—[Official Report, 11 March 2026; Vol. 782, c. 371.]

But many, many documents are missing. I have detailed 56 documents in a letter that I sent him. To give a few examples, there is no prime ministerial readout on the advice that the Prime Minister received. This is a breach of protocol. A prime ministerial decision, even if made orally, should be formally recorded. Where is that record? It starts to stink of the sofa government that we had under Tony Blair.

There are no minutes of any meeting at which this appointment was discussed, by anyone, at any time. Were there really no meetings about this? Most suspiciously of all, we have no material from the Prime Minister, from his chief of staff or from Peter Mandelson: no box returns, no emails, no forms, no WhatsApps—nothing. It is as though their fingerprints have been forensically removed.

To narrow this down, on 11 November 2024 the Cabinet Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted to make a political appointment, the civil service would

“develop a plan for…the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential Conflicts of Interest”.

That was the process, so let me ask the Chief Secretary two very specific questions. First, did Peter Mandelson receive security clearance, and if so, on what date? There was no such document in the release. Secondly, did Peter Mandelson make a full declaration of his interests? Again, there was no such document in the release.

I remind the Chief Secretary that noting the existence of a document does not prejudice an investigation in any way. The Government have already told us about one document that they are holding back at the request of the Met police; they are more than able to tell us about others. It is time for the Government to level with us. What is missing, and why?

[Darren Jones]

As I informed the House last week, the documents that pertain to tranche 1 are the documents the Government own, and they have been published in line with the Humble Address. The shadow Minister asks about the process followed for the appointment of Peter Mandelson. As the Prime Minister and the Government have said, the process that was followed was the process that was inherited; however, this has shown that that process is not sufficient, which is why it is being strengthened.

The shadow Minister made reference to questions about WhatsApps and other messages. I can confirm that those types of documents will be subject to a further tranche being published in due course. He also asked me about security clearance for Peter Mandelson. I refer him to the answer I gave last week in respect of that question, and to further comments from the Foreign Office.

Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address Motion

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for your remarks at the outset of this statement. I also thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement, which I received at 1.30 pm. This whole business is really about transparency. The Government have had to be dragged to do this by Members on both sides of this House, so producing a 135-page document and putting it online 23 minutes before this debate is really not acceptable at all. I respect the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister for coming to the Chamber and making this statement, but it really ought to be the Prime Minister sitting there, because all of this is about the Prime Minister’s judgment. It is very convenient that this document was published after Prime Minister’s questions, during which the man who made the decision—the man whose judgment is in question—could have been put under scrutiny by hon. Members. Very many questions arise from the documents published. I will put a few on record, and then return to the central theme.

There is the issue of severance pay, to which the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister referred. Why did Ministers agree to any severance pay, given what had happened? Many of our constituents will be disgusted that Peter Mandelson received £70,000. Will his full declaration of interests, which he was supposed to have handed over when he was appointed, be published? I do not believe that they are included in the tranche of documents published today. Is that because of a police request, or is it for some other reason? Will the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister publish a register of withheld and delayed documents, so that the House can be aware of what is being held back? Will he give us a little more information, either now or in the future, on redactions? It is important that this House understands who is deciding on what will be redacted.

This awful saga involving Jeffrey Epstein continues. I understand that, as this House meets, one of his ranches in New Mexico is being investigated because there are reports that bodies are buried there. At the centre of this scandal was a very rich and powerful man who despicably abused his position, and he was helped to become rich and powerful by his associates, one of whom was Peter Mandelson. Although I of course associate myself with the remarks made by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister about Epstein’s victims, it is very clear that those victims were not in the Prime Minister’s mind when he appointed Peter Mandelson. The Prime Minister has already admitted that he knew Mandelson had maintained his friendship with Epstein even after the latter’s conviction for his terrible crimes. That was a bad choice, and it is a choice that we can now read about in black and white on page 11 of the publication. It says:

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

The Prime Minister claims that he was lied to; he was not lied to by this due diligence document. It may be that Mandelson denied those claims, and if so, perhaps the Prime Minister was lied to, but by an inveterate liar who had been fired twice before. We are supposed to believe that the Prime Minister, who was once the chief prosecutor in this country, could not see through this nonsense. It beggars belief.

Over the coming hours and days, we will see whether these documents reveal why the Prime Minister’s judgment failed so badly, but we must suspect that it was because his then chief of staff was Mandelson’s protégé. Morgan McSweeney had set up Labour Together, the Prime Minister’s private campaigning organisation. Peter Mandelson had advised Morgan McSweeney on the establishment of that organisation, which had been responsible for breaking electoral law so that it could hide the sources of its funds from the public and from the Labour party. Labour Together then sought to intimidate and smear journalists who revealed that wrongdoing, and it provided hundreds of Labour MPs and many of the top brass in the Cabinet with free money and free services. This was the ultimate “jobs for the boys”. The Prime Minister knew all that he needed to know. It was on him; it is on him now. He let his party and his country down. I very much doubt that either will trust him again.

[Darren Jones]

The shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster asked me a number of questions, which I shall take in turn. The first was on the severance payment. He asked me why that payment had been made, and who approved it. As I set out in my opening statement, Peter Mandelson was employed as a civil servant, not as a Minister. That meant that on his summary dismissal by the Prime Minister, he had the right to take a claim to the employment tribunal. As we can see in the documents, Peter Mandelson asked for a much larger sum, with the implied threat that there would be legal proceedings, with associated costs. The Government would not have wanted to pay £1 to Peter Mandelson, but they reluctantly agreed to the award, given the contrast between the cost to the taxpayer of employment tribunal legal fees, and the cost of a payment; in the advice, the latter cost would have been higher than the amount that was given. The Prime Minister has since said that Peter Mandelson should either return that money or donate it.

On the question of who approved the severance payment, the House will see from the documents that the request from the Foreign Office was made to the Treasury. The payment was approved, in line with Treasury business rules, albeit reluctantly, and with an express condition that a non-disclosure agreement was not allowed in these circumstances. For the sake of completeness, there is reference in the bundle to that business case requiring my approval. I can confirm to the House that I did not receive that request, or indeed approve it.

The shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster asked me about some of the documents, namely about redactions and a register of withheld documents. On the question of a register of withheld documents, I would need to take advice from lawyers in the Metropolitan police before I could say whether these documents are being held for their criminal investigation. I hope that the House is somewhat reassured by the mechanism that we have been able to establish with the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which has sight of these documents, albeit in a contained and controlled way. Government redactions to the documents are to protect only the names and contact details of junior civil servants, as is the practice. Other redactions that relate to international security and international relations are done with the approval of the Intelligence and Security Committee.

Lastly, the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster asked me about the report from the Cabinet Office to the Prime Minister. As I said in my opening statement, the Prime Minister did ask subsequent questions of Peter Mandelson following that report being submitted by the Cabinet Office. His advisers at No. 10 undertook to answer those questions. Although that is a document that we cannot publish at this time, the Prime Minister is very clear that he regrets having believed the lies that Peter Mandelson put before him.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Opposition spokesperson.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

On his visit to Washington in February last year, the Prime Minister and Peter Mandelson had an undisclosed meeting with US data company Palantir. Palantir at the time was a client of Global Counsel, the company in which Peter Mandelson retained a commanding share. Later that year, Palantir received a direct award for £240 million from this Government. Given the apparent conflict of interests, will the Minister agree to publish full details of that meeting in February last year, and explain why it was not disclosed at the time?

[Darren Jones]

I thank the hon. Member for raising that particular contract, and since he last asked the Government that question we have done some research. The original contract was awarded by a Mr A. Burghart, under the previous Administration, with a direct ministerial award for the contract that was then renewed at the subsequent awarding that he refers to. He asked me for the disclosure of information, and that will of course be done under the Humble Address.

[Alex Burghart]

I never had an undisclosed meeting with Palantir, with a person—[Interruption.] I never had an undisclosed meeting with Palantir, with a man who was advising that company. This is something entirely different, as the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister knows full well. There was an undisclosed meeting between the Prime Minister and that company in February last year. That should not have happened. This looks, to all intents and purposes, like a conflict of interests. Will the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister agree to publish that information? He says it is within the scope of the Humble Address, but the Humble Address was about the appointment of Lord Mandelson. This is not about the appointment of Lord Mandelson; this is about a meeting that the Prime Minister and Mandelson had in February 2025. Will the Minister please publish the details of that meeting, and ensure that the new Cabinet Secretary looks into what happened at that meeting, and everything between that meeting and the direct award?

[Darren Jones]

The Humble Address deals with the matters in question, but I remind the hon. Member that he is asking about the extension of a contract that was awarded under the previous Government. To suggest that it was a new contract that had been in any way related to the meeting is incorrect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

Yesterday, in the light of the new China spy case, I asked the Security Minister to place China on the enhanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme. He told us that FIRS is “a relatively new tool”, and that the Government

“are seeking to ensure that we can derive the maximum operational capability from it.”—[Official Report, 4 March 2026; Vol. 781, c. 817.]

That is wonderful Whitehall language, but will he please tell us what it means?

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Dan Jarvis)]

The arguments about FIRS are well rehearsed, but I am old enough to remember when Conservative Members said that we would not introduce FIRS. Then they said that we would introduce it later than we had said we would. We introduced FIRS on time, but it is still a relatively new capability. I think that it offers considerable potential, in terms of what it will deliver for our country, but we are looking very closely at how we can ensure its maximum operational capability. I think that is pretty clear in any language.

[Alex Burghart]

Well, it is not very clear, because FIRS is three years old. This morning, I spoke to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), who established FIRS. When he was establishing it, MI5 told him that it was essential for understanding the operation of the Chinese state in the UK. The enhanced tier would impose mandatory registration and transparency requirements on individuals and organisations in the UK working with Chinese entities. I think most people in this House would now agree that that is entirely necessary. It is there to help our security services protect our country. Please will the Security Minister give us a date by which he will come back to this House to tell us definitively whether he will put China on the enhanced tier, and to set out his explanation?

[Dan Jarvis]

On a simple point of fact, FIRS is not three years old. When we came into government, FIRS was not a properly developed system. [Interruption.] Opposition Members may groan, but it is a statement of truth that FIRS was not ready to go. This Government got a grip and introduced that tool. It came into force, in effect, on 1 October last year. We have already placed two countries on the enhanced tier. We take these decisions very carefully, but I give the hon. Gentleman a commitment that I will come back, when there is a requirement to do so, and update the House on any further decisions that we seek to make on FIRS.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I am happy to look into the individual case, but I repeat that the Government reserve their right under both of these contracts, whether it is the existing Capita contract or MyCSP’s previous responsibilities, to take these matters up.

[Alex Burghart]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am sorry to return to this subject. It is very clear that the Government do not wish to have an investigation into what happened at the meeting between Lord Mandelson, the Prime Minister and Palantir, and everything that occurred between that meeting and the direct award given to Palantir later in the year. This is clearly a possible conflict of interest. Given that the Government do not wish to investigate the matter, what options are at the disposal of the House to force such an investigation?

[Mr Speaker]

I think you already know. I thank the hon. Member for his point of order. As we all know, he is a very experienced Member of the House, and I know that he has already tabled a written parliamentary question on this matter. I expect Ministers to give a full and frank answer. If he requires further advice on the options available to him, I am happy to pursue this matter with the Clerks and the Table Office, and I am always happy to meet him to see how we can move things forward. I believe the answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question will be honest and open. The only other thing I would expect is for it to be an early answer, and for it not to get lost in the system.