Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Jeremy Wright

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

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

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

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

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

[Emily Thornberry]

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