Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

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.

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

It is a genuine privilege to follow the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones). Knowledgeable and passionate Ministers are a huge asset to any Government, and she is a significant loss to this one. If I may say, the same can be said of the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), who sits next to her. The hon. Member for Pontypridd makes important points about the victims of Epstein, which I will not repeat, and she has added considerably to this debate.

I also take the opportunity to join in the tributes that were made earlier to Alan Haselhurst, Madam Deputy Speaker, who occupied your Chair with immense dignity and considerable rigour, but did so with deep warmth and kindness. He will be missed in both Chambers of this place.

Turning to the motion, I will say something about the process that has led to the publication of the documents we are now considering, and then something about their contents. On the process, I start by offering thanks to the officials of the Cabinet Office and the staff of the Intelligence and Security Committee. The whole House will now be conscious of the sheer scale of the task that lay before both those groups of people and the immense work that they all had to put in to turn the process around as quickly as they did. The House will also now appreciate that, given their nature, it was inevitable that a large number of those documents raised questions of either national security or international relations.

On behalf of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I want to make it very clear, as I have before, first that we are very grateful for the words of the Paymaster General, and indeed the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister on previous occasions, on the work that we have done. Secondly, I want to reassure the House that throughout the process, we were rigorous in our view that Government embarrassment was not sufficient cause for redaction of these documents. I hope the House can now see that that is the case, as there is plenty of Government embarrassment left unredacted.

The prejudice that we sought to establish in relation to international relations or national security needed to be real prejudice, and not the vague possibility of that prejudice. That is the way in which we approached the task. I am confident in the redactions that we agreed to make, and indeed in the decisions we took not to support the redactions that we refused to consent to.

In the process that we undertook—I have spoken about this before—two issues of process have arisen. The first is the question of who checks proposed redactions for reasons other than national security or international relations. I am very glad that the Government have agreed that my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) should fulfil that role, as he has now done. The second concerns the grounds for redaction beyond the protection of national security or international relations. As many who have heard these conversations before know, I have been and remain critical of the way the Government have maintained the unilateral right to redact for other reasons. I do not propose to go through all those arguments again. I take that position not because I do not think the Government have a good case to do so, but because I think it is wrong for the Government to assume Parliament’s consent to that case.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

For clarity, is the redaction done in Downing Street—in Government—and then sent to the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s Committee, or is it done by the Committee on grounds of national security and international relations?

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I am happy to give the right hon. Gentleman that clarity. The documents that we received were unredacted documents marked with the proposed redactions the Government sought to make for reasons of protecting national security or international relations. Where we agreed with the Government, we agreed that those redactions should be made; where we disagreed, those redactions were not made. We saw all the documents unredacted, and we decided whether to accept the Government’s proposals for redaction or not. The House made it clear that it wanted the final word on those redactions—yes or no—to be ours as a Committee, and not the Government’s. I hope that is of assistance to the right hon. Gentleman.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

For the sake of completeness, will my right hon. and learned Friend explain whether the Committee saw the third category of documents—those redacted or withheld because of the police inquiry—or whether the Committee labours under the same degree of ignorance as the rest of us?

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[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I think we may have to wait for the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to explain the position from the Government’s perspective. I can say only that what was put in front of us did not, I think, include the documents that the police had sought to have withheld. I cannot say that that is the case in every instance, but we do not believe that there has been complete disclosure yet. We think there will be further documents put before us, which the police currently have in their possession, so it may well be that there is further work for the Committee to do. My right hon. Friend will recognise from his long experience that we will apply the same degree of rigour and impartiality to any further documents put before us as to the documents we have already seen.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I just wanted to ask one more question for clarity, because this is incredibly useful. On the redactions that were made because of personal information, for example, did the Committee see the unredacted version of those documents, or had they been redacted by the time they got to the ISC?

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

The answer to the hon. Lady’s question is that we will have seen only the documents to which there were proposed redactions for the purposes of either national security or international relations. However, we may well also have seen other proposed redactions to the same documents. The reason that I have raised concerns in the past about the breadth of those proposed redactions for other reasons is that the Committee has seen some of those proposed redactions, but, of course, we have no way of knowing what proportion of such proposed redactions we have seen—if a document does not contain within it redactions that the Government have proposed for either international relations or national security reasons, the document would not have come before us at all.

[Kirsty Blackman]

The Paymaster General said that those redactions marked with three stars are the ones that were redacted with agreement from the Committee. Can the right hon. and learned Gentleman confirm that redactions marked by three stars relate to the ISC and that other redactions are marked differently?

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Yes, I can—and this is an important point. The Intelligence and Security Committee wanted to be extremely clear that we took responsibility only for the redactions that we had considered and agreed. The Government, to be fair to them, have always accepted that those redactions that the Government made without the involvement of my Committee would appear on the documents differently, and they do. The House will be able to see exactly the difference when the documents are considered.

I need to make it clear that I am not an enthusiast for the use of Humble Addresses to demand disclosure of documents at all, whichever party may choose to use them. That is simply because I think it is inappropriate to involve the monarch in a political argument, but if we are to have them, or indeed any other motions that demand the disclosure of material, we should be clear about the grounds on which the Government are entitled to redact that material.

[Hannah Spencer (Gorton and Denton) (Green)]

I have had the privilege of meeting some of the women who survived Epstein’s abuse, and I pay tribute to them and to those who are no longer with us. Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman agree that as we rightly discuss the processes that took place, we must also highlight the sheer bravery of those women, and that that should be front and centre in this debate? Does he agree that this appalling episode, in which the victims were overlooked and Mandelson was still appointed despite his links to Epstein, must lead to a fundamental change in political culture?

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I do agree with the point that the hon. Lady makes, and I think that that argument was put very forcefully and eloquently by the hon. Member for Pontypridd, which she may have heard a moment ago.

I want to return to the grounds on which the Government are entitled to redact material under a Humble Address motion or similar motions. It seems to me not only that Parliament should have clarity about the grounds on which the Government seek to redact such material but that the proper time to have that clarity is when such a motion is first agreed, not as documents begin to be disclosed in response to it.

I want to make a suggestion, and I hope that the Government will see it as a helpful one, because it is genuinely meant as such. I suggest that this House agrees standard rules by which a Government may make a redaction and the reasons for it, and that those should be used in all similar situations in the future so that we have clarity. The Government have relied on a variety of legislative and common practice routes to support their right to redact, or in some cases even to withhold documents altogether, in relation to this Humble Address. I think that the process would benefit from consolidation of those reasons into a single document that the House can then endorse. It would save this argument being rerun, or at least limit it to a discussion of any specific grounds for redaction that the Government seek to rely on beyond the agreed reasons.

I will turn to the content of the documents and what they tell us. I have said very little about them so far in order to, I hope, preserve the integrity of the process that the ISC has been conducting at the House’s instruction. There is, of course, lots of interest in the documents—in how, for example, the ambassador to the United States steadfastly refused to stay in his lane as a diplomat and instead offered his advice on almost every aspect of the Government’s activity; in the fact that he was held in such high regard, not to say awe, by so many members of the Government; and in the slapdash approach to secure communications, to which the Government, and perhaps also my Committee, will return.

It is important to remember that this whole exercise, as I think the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee said, was supposed to be about interrogating how Lord Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador came to be made. It would be churlish not to accept that Lord Mandelson had successes in the role. That indicates that he had merits as a candidate for the job that the Prime Minister was entitled to consider, but considering someone for a role is very different from appointing them to it—especially someone who had such obvious and well known risks, and especially to an appointment of such evident importance and sensitivity. That is why I find the process of making the appointment so concerning and so surprising.

I accept that it is unfashionable or even heretical to say it these days, but I have a soft spot for the Prime Minister. I do not think it is just because I like the idea of lawyers with knighthoods being in charge, though I do; it is really because I am an enthusiast for good government. The question of whether one supports a Government’s policies is one thing, but we should all be in favour of good government none the less. I want to see responsible decision making, considered judgments, a preference for evidence over instinct, and flashy ideas properly tested to ensure that they will actually work. That is good government to me, and I thought that in this Prime Minister’s Administration I would see it, but good government requires that where a sensitive appointment carries considerable risk, extra work is done to understand that risk and mitigate it. These documents do not show that.

Peter Mandelson’s letter to the then Foreign Secretary—now Deputy Prime Minister—has become famous for his assurance that the Government would not regret his appointment, and ranks up there with “peace for our time” and Michael Fish’s pre-hurricane weather forecast in the pantheon of poor predictions. But there is something else interesting about it, and that is its date—18 November 2024—which makes it clear that Lord Mandelson was at the very least under serious consideration for the ambassador position in mid-November. The vetting process did not begin until late December, with everyone then being told—this is very clear—that it should be completed in time for Mandelson to begin work in January. There are several mentions in the documents of the urgency of that from officials. We know already that the National Security Adviser considered the process strangely rushed, and in the latest drop of documents, we see that in volume II, part I, page 21 it says:

“The SPAD work has shown just how slick this can be when needed.”

Page 66 says:

“We have had quite a bit of senior interest in the processing of this case (not the details merely that it goes smoothly)”.

If officials had been asked to start that work earlier, they could have taken longer over it, and surely more time and consideration would have been beneficial in this complex and controversial case.

Indeed, the haste with which things were being done was apparent elsewhere. In another document, an official points out that the Prime Minister had announced his choice for ambassador before agrément had been granted. In other words, the United States had not agreed to accept Lord Mandelson as ambassador at that point. That, the official says, should not have happened.

It is, and was, clear to everyone that this was a controversial appointment: perhaps high reward, but definitely high risk. There were substantial reasons to worry about it—we have heard several of them—and almost all of them were very public knowledge. That should have given everyone—perhaps especially the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office as the appointing Department—pause for thought, yet we know from page 106 of part III of this volume that UK Security Vetting informed the FCDO of its recommendation in the last week of January 2025 and the FCDO granted the developed vetting certificate on 29 January 2025. Not much pause for thought there. Worse still, as others have pointed out, we have not seen mitigations—ones that were clearly agreed to be necessary—evidenced anywhere. Good government this was not.

It has been said by many on the Government’s behalf that mistakes can be made, and that is of course true. When in opposition, the Prime Minister pointed out more than once that Prime Ministers are accountable for the tone and character of the Governments they lead and for how those Governments transact their business, and he was right. These documents show that in the making of this very important and sensitive decision, there was much wrong with the tone and character of this Government.

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[Sir John Hayes]

Indeed, you will chastise me if I do not stick to my chronology precisely, Madam Deputy Speaker.

As the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) said, there is some confusion about the character of mitigation. We certainly know that nothing has been provided in respect of mitigation or about the reaction to the flags about Mandelson’s associations with senior figures in foreign states or his personal circumstances, yet Sir Oliver Robbins gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee in April—its Chair has made this clear—in which he said that clearance could be approved if

“risks identified as of highest concern…could be managed and/or mitigated.”

Such mitigations were meant to have been noted in an email from Ian Collard, the Foreign Office head of security, noting the decision to grant Mandelson’s clearance. According to Sir Oliver Robbins, that email recorded

“the ways in which we would manage”

Mandelson’s clearance and “the mitigations”. Sir Oliver Robbins’s claim was supported by the top official in charge of gathering the Humble Address material, Cat Little. She told MPs that she had seen an email that

“sets out the decision to grant DV and some mitigations.”

There was certainly a stated need to manage the risks associated with Peter Mandelson’s appointment and an acknowledgment that that might be done through some process of mitigation, but we have heard no more. It may be that no detailed mitigation plan was drawn up. It is perfectly possible that that might have happened, for the very reason that these risks were so great that they could not have been mitigated. However, even if that were the case, surely there would have been box notes or communications in emails making all that clear between the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office, between UKSV and the Cabinet Office, and between Ministers and officials, yet we have seen nothing.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, in addition to the concern he has expressed that there is no evidence of mitigations being put in place, there is a concern that there was not much time to do those mitigations between the point at which UKSV recommendations were received and the decision by the Foreign Office to grant vetting? There really was not much time for mitigations, as well as very little evidence that they were provided.

[Sir John Hayes]

That is true. Indeed, that might have been reflected in some of the messages that I have suggested to the Department that it might, even at this late stage, make available to our Committee—perhaps that is the most sensible thing given the terms of the Humble Address—and subsequently, in a redacted form, more widely. Even if it were true that because of the pace of the appointment, a full plan could not be drawn up, I find it inconceivable and—I would go as far as to say—unbelievable that there were no communications of any kind associated with the measures referred to by Sir Olly Robbins and Ian Collard.

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[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I start, as I must, with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for raising the testimony of Lisa Phillips and naming one of Epstein’s victims. Those victims have names, they may be listening to the debate and they will find this whole process retraumatising and painful again and again.

Everything that has happened seems to have been because of an ultimate boys’ club situation: a boys’ club that surrounded Epstein, a boys’ club that surrounded Mandelson and a boys’ club that was in No. 10. Even today we have been drawn into its vortex. I do not like the fact that we are still having to be part of it and still saying his name when he did such dreadful things to so many people. I also pay tribute to the women and girls who were abused and exploited by him and his associates. They deserve truth and accountability, and to know that public institutions have learned lessons. Their bravery in speaking out is why this House keeps returning to questions of standards, judgment and transparency.

I ask the House to stand back a bit and look at the Humble Address process. As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I have been following the process very closely. I join the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) in saying that I am not an enthusiast for the Humble Address process. I think that it should be used but I have questions about it.

I have been very critical of the appointment of Peter Mandelson from the moment that appointing him was even thought about—it should never have gone further than that—through the due diligence process, the vetting process and the final decision. My constituents expect Ministers to be held to the highest standards and when those standards fall short, they expect answers.

Some areas about which I have particular concerns have already been raised by Members during the debate. There need to be changes to the appointment system. This process tested that system to the limit. It was an extreme circumstance, with a new Government, a high-profile position, an appointment made very quickly and a rare political appointment to an ambassador role, but a system needs to be tested to the utmost for such a situation. In future, I hope the Foreign Affairs Committee will be given the opportunity to meet candidates who are being considered for political appointment. There may never be any more political appointments after this one, but if there are, they need to be made differently and we need to hear that that will happen.

I have questions about the due diligence process. I have asked officials whether it is a pass or fail process. Due diligence is just a part of the process and it cannot be failed, and I think that should be looked at. If there are enough red flags in the due diligence process, why would we go ahead with vetting? In this case, there were a couple of red flags: Epstein, and Russia and China. To me, those are pretty big red flags, so that part of the process should be looked at.

The Humble Address process is an important tool for the Opposition to gain transparency. It is an appeal to the King over the Heads of Government, once used for ceremonial messages but now more commonly used as a tool to gain information. In February, the Humble Address process was used for the publication of papers relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. When in opposition, the Labour party unsuccessfully requested Humble Addresses on the cost of the Rwanda plan and the asylum system and on the safety of school buildings, for example, and successfully asked for Humble Addresses on Brexit in 2018 and on Lebedev in 2022. It is a useful tool, but seeking answers is not the same as backing any process regardless of cost or consequence, and so far in this debate, there has been no mention of the cost—the financial cost, and the time cost to civil servants.

I would argue that this Humble Address has not been a good process—it has been disproportionate. The Humble Address was drafted so widely that it has become a catch-all, not a focused request for information, which is why many of us are finding the process very frustrating.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, and I agree with the case she is making. She is right that wide Humble Addresses are deleterious, both because there is an opportunity cost—while civil servants are looking at that, they are not looking at something else—and a real financial cost. However, does she agree that the right moment to push back on an excessively broad Humble Address is when it is being decided on? The Government have a majority; it is there so that the Government can get their way. Would it not have been better for them to have said on 4 February, “This is too broad. We will only agree to something narrower”?

[Fleur Anderson]

I will come to that point later in my argument. I hope that my speech today will be something we can learn from, to learn the lessons from this Humble Address and try to make future ones better.

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[Fleur Anderson]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention—it is helpful to understand what happens inside the process. It has to be between the person and the vetting officer, and they must not think that it will be shared further. That is absolutely at the heart of it.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fleur Anderson]

I give way for the last time.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I am extremely grateful; the hon. Lady is being very generous with her time. I want to develop the point from a slightly different angle. What we are really interested in are the conclusions of the vetting process, not the material that leads to the conclusions. It is therefore entirely possible that we could give all the reassurances that she and the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) have made clear are important to those who contribute to the vetting process, but also make sure that, in the interests of disclosure on occasions such as this, the House can be clear about the conclusions of the vetting process without being told the raw information on which those conclusions are based.

[Fleur Anderson]

I thank the right hon. and learned Member. I have honestly enjoyed these interventions and I appreciate the spirit of dialogue in the House today. We are tackling a very difficult issue and we want to get it right.

I agree that the public need the outcome of the vetting: who was consulted, what risks were identified, what decisions were taken, whether a proper process was followed, and what on earth the mitigations were. The Cabinet Secretary or relevant permanent secretary can be called to a Select Committee to answer those questions directly, as the Foreign Affairs Committee has done. That is scrutiny, but publishing the raw documents is counterproductive.

To conclude, I remain appalled by, and very critical of, the Mandelson appointment. My constituents deserve full answers, and I await the documents being released by the Metropolitan police after its investigation, but we need to review this process that has cost so much, financially and in the opportunity cost. We also need to put some guardrails around the use of the Humble Address for any future requests, so that they stay focused on the issues that are meant to be investigated. We must make sure that when we demand accountability, we do it in a way that is effective, responsible and sustainable.

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[Darren Jones]

I have said repeatedly that the summary has been given to the Intelligence and Security Committee. I think the hon. Lady may be confusing the summary and the recommendation from the interview information that was collected between the UKSV official and Peter Mandelson. This is important because, as the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells said, when someone goes into an interview with a UKSV specialist and they say, “You must tell me everything, and it will go no further,” if that were to be handed over to a politician—even a politician on the Intelligence and Security Committee—it would undermine the very basis of that work.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

We need to be very clear about this: the arguments the Minister is making are right, but as the hon. Lady points out, they are not a response to the arguments we are making. The argument that has been made to him by the Intelligence and Security Committee, as he knows, is that there is no harm to be found in the disclosure of the conclusions of the vetting process. We accept absolutely that the contributing material that led to those conclusions should not be disclosed. I need him to be very clear that it is our view that the conclusions could be disclosed, and there is no harm to be done to national security, which there would be if the contributing material were disclosed, by the disclosure of the conclusions. Will he confirm that?

[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.