Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address

Ian Sollom Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister reminded the House on Monday that he had given 10 updates on the Mandelson affair to Parliament, and, as the Paymaster General reminded us earlier, it will be 11 today. There are more than 1,500 pages of documents in this release alone—the largest Government response to a Humble Address in parliamentary history—but there is still one account that we have not received.

In April, I said in this Chamber that when the Prime Minister simply says that he should not have appointed Peter Mandelson to the UK’s most important diplomatic posting—that it was, in his words, an “error of judgment”—he gives a description of an outcome, not an account of his judgment. I used the analogy of a driver saying, “I should not have crashed the car”, without ever accounting for the actions that led to the crash. That matters if we are to understand properly what went wrong, it matters to preventing it from happening again, and it matters to judging whether the driver should still be behind the wheel.

If the House will indulge me, I will extend that analogy. These 1,500 pages give us the crash scene in more detail than Parliament has ever received on any comparable matter. We have the vehicle’s full mechanical history, we have the account of every passenger, we have what the bystanders observed from the pavement, and we have what the recovery team found when they arrived—but what we still do not have, after all that, is the driver’s account. What did the Prime Minister weigh in making his decision, what did he conclude, and where does he now think he went wrong in his reasoning?

The Prime Minister received the due diligence in December 2024, which documented Mandelson’s association with Epstein and that he had stayed in Epstein’s home while Epstein was serving a prison sentence for sexual offences against a minor. The document described that as a “reputational risk”—not a moral question about what it means to appoint someone who maintained such a friendship, not a question about what message it sends to the victims and survivors of Epstein’s crimes, just a reputational risk to be managed. Did the Prime Minister consider any of those questions? We do not know. All we know is that he proceeded anyway.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) said on Monday, in these 1,500 pages, Epstein’s victims are not mentioned once in any document dated before Mandelson’s appointment. The only reference to them seems to be in an email written after he was sacked. The victims were not just an afterthought; they were given no thought at all.

The published documents also highlight failures once Mandelson was in post. The due diligence was explicit: Global Counsel interests would have to cease on appointment. During Mandelson’s seven months as ambassador, from February to September 2025, he retained a substantial shareholding in Global Counsel. In February 2025, weeks into his ambassadorial role with that shareholding intact, he accompanied the Prime Minister on a visit to Palantir’s Washington headquarters. No formal minutes of that meeting were taken. In July 2025, he wrote to No. 10 suggesting that the Prime Minister should meet Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel while in London.

Palantir was a Global Counsel client. How was an ambassador who retained a commercial stake in a lobbying firm permitted to accompany the Prime Minister to a meeting with one of that firm’s clients, with no formal record of what was discussed, and then suggest a further meeting with the firm’s founder? The due diligence said those interests should cease. They had not. Nothing in the published documents suggests that anyone asked why.

The documents also reveal that in February 2025 Mandelson advised the then Technology Secretary to include

“more positive language about AI”

in a speech to the Munich security conference. The then Secretary of State replied that it was

“all v good advice which I’ll action”—

in text speak, obviously. This, again, was while Mandelson retained his shareholding in a firm that represented OpenAI and Palantir, and while he described OpenAI’s chief executive as his “chief AI buddy”. My hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) has today written to the independent adviser on ministers’ interests calling for an investigation into that, and she is right to do so.

Those are only the conflicts that Parliament can currently see. The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, asked on Monday, and again today, whether there is any written evidence of mitigations being put in place for the other conflicts identified in the due diligence. Those include the connections to the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska; to Lan Fo’an, China’s Minister of Finance; and to Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence. They also include a £1 million loan to invest in an Israeli start-up. The Chief Secretary’s response was that those documents are with the Metropolitan police, so Parliament cannot yet see whether those warnings were taken seriously or set to one side.

The Liberal Democrats have consistently called for the reforms that this affair has made unavoidable. Government by WhatsApp must end. These documents show exactly what happens when significant business is conducted through channels that are imperfectly preserved and impossible to scrutinise. One senior Minister told Mandelson in writing that a sensitive matter was:

“A convo for the phone.”

That Minister warned:

“There is a pattern we must get out of.”

The review of non-corporate communications must produce enforceable rules, not just guidance.

The lobbying register also needs root and branch reform. An ambassador retained a commercial stake in a lobbying firm throughout his tenure, arranging meetings between the Prime Minister and clients of that firm, and it seems that the system had no mechanism to prevent it. The ministerial code must be placed in statute. Having a code the Prime Minister can choose whether to enforce is not accountability, but it appears to be, which is more corrosive.

Ultimately, those reforms will only address the system around the decision. The Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), observed on Monday that the Prime Minister has almost no presence in the 1,500 pages, comparing him with “The Man Who Never Was”. The response of the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister was that

“Prime Ministers do not sit at computers, sending emails from Outlook. They have officials who action their decisions on their behalf”.—[Official Report, 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 860.]

That may be true, but officials action decisions; they do not make them. The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was the Prime Minister’s—his judgment, his decision and his error, as he acknowledges—but the House has never received his account of that decision.

After 10 updates and 1,500 pages, the House might begin to wonder about the reasons for that absence, and I think there are three possibilities. Perhaps the Prime Minister genuinely does not know why he made the decision, and cannot reconstruct the reasoning that led him, having read the due diligence, to proceed. If so, that is alarming. A judgment of this sensitivity—involving national security, a convicted sex offender’s associate and known commercial conflicts of interest—should not be one whose reasoning evaporates without trace.

Perhaps the Prime Minister knows why he proceeded, but believes an honest answer to this House would be embarrassing, and that explaining his reasoning would require him to acknowledge something he would prefer left unexamined. If so, that is a choice to protect himself at the expense of Parliament’s right to hold him to account. Perhaps the Prime Minister may genuinely believe that repeatedly saying, “I made an error of judgment,” constitutes an adequate account of his judgment. If so, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what accountability to Parliament actually requires. None of those three possibilities reflects well on a Prime Minister who promised that integrity and accountability would define his Government.

Before taking up his post, Peter Mandelson wrote to the then Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), that if appointed, he would make sure the Prime Minister never regretted it. The Prime Minister has now expressed regret, but regret without explanation is not accountability. This House, and Epstein’s victims, deserve more than that: they deserve an answer.