Lord Mandelson

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Wendy Morton

Wednesday 4th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. Yes, I have read the letter—I am afraid I did not have it at my fingertips—but I think it is important to put all this information before the House.

The next question is, what does “vetting” mean? I appreciate that there are other processes that we cannot go into here, and it would not be appropriate to do so, but I hope it will be of help to the House to share another answer from the Foreign Affairs Committee session. In question 269, I said:

“The foundation of it seems to be that they have a form to fill in, you take it in good faith that they are filling that in correctly, and then you check what it is that they have said, so if they have omitted anything, no one is looking outside what is on the form.”

Sir Oliver Robbins then said:

“That is broadly correct, yes.”

That is vetting.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I will touch on vetting in my contribution later, but as someone who was vetted by the Foreign Office many years ago, I would like to seek clarity as to whether Peter Mandelson went through the full vetting process that a normal member of the diplomatic service would undergo ahead of taking up such a post, or did he simply undergo what is known in political terms—in Chief Whip terms—as the “pet process” undertaken by the Cabinet Office, because full vetting takes a long time?

[Emily Thornberry]

I understand what the right hon. Lady is saying. Obviously, I do not know. All I can do to help the House is point out that when it was announced in mid-December that Lord Mandelson would be the ambassador, pressure was being applied to make sure that we were all clear that he was going to be the ambassador in time for the swearing in of the President a month later. The Committee did everything that we could to try to get to the bottom of how many questions were asked and what the questions were, and we all did our utmost to try to get to the truth of this. If Members read the transcript, they will see that we were not “mandarined”.