Peter Mandelson: Government Appointment

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Reform)]

The Prime Minister came to this House only yesterday saying,

“I will now set out the full timeline”,—[Official Report, 20 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 23.]

and later insisting that he had come to

“give the full account to the House”.—[Official Report, 20 April 2026; Vol. 784, c. 28.]

That followed Downing Street’s acceptance earlier in the day that his previous account had, at the very least, inadvertently misled Members. Yesterday was meant to be the great clean-up—the day of the full facts, full candour and full accountability.

Today, Sir Olly Robbins gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee and published a letter that blows a hole straight through the Prime Minister’s version of events. Many hon. Members have already exposed that. Obviously, the lack of curiosity on behalf of the Prime Minister was inexplicable and reprehensible. We have seen evasion, obfuscation and blame shifting, as well as blatant contradictions, and I want to point out one that has not yet surfaced this afternoon. The Prime Minister said that he was “astonished”, and that it was “incredible”, that information could have been withheld from him, but it is significant that Sir Olly Robbins’s letter says that the position conveyed to the Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2025—that

“Ministers…are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome”—

was “agreed with” the Cabinet Office and No. 10. In other words, the Prime Minister is now trying to dump the entire scandal on one official for acting on a position that Downing Street itself had signed off. That is not accountability; that is a stich-up.

Worse still, we learned today that, before Sir Olly even took over, due diligence on Mandelson’s appointment had been completed, approval had been given by His Majesty, the appointment had been announced, agrément had been secured from the United States, Mandelson had building and IT access, and he was already receiving highly classified briefings on a case-by-case basis. We have even learned that the Cabinet Office itself raised whether developed vetting was necessary, and the FCDO had to insist on it. So let us drop the pretence that this was some neutral, pristine process derailed by one mandarin misconducting himself. The appointment was politically driven from the top and forced through in an atmosphere of pressure.

Of course the Prime Minister’s position is untenable, as many Members have said, but it is possible that the Prime Minister’s honesty or position is not the most important thing about this saga. What matters even more is our system of government, for which the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is partly responsible. If the Prime Minister has been surprised to find that the civil service acts within processes that screen Ministers from information and from the power to make decisions, no one else is surprised about that. I think the Prime Minister has spent so long as a civil servant and then as a politician behaving like a civil servant that, when he finds that the system does not work, he has a sort of professional breakdown and starts spluttering about process and reviews, and reviews of the processes. Yes, we need process, but the fact is that appointments, like everything else the Government do, are political decisions.

Politics is simply the management of the common life of the community, and the management of trade-offs between different ideas and interests. We in this country have developed over many years a model of doing things—of doing politics—that is or was the best in the world: civil servants accountable to Ministers accountable to Parliament accountable to the public. Break those links of accountability, and instead of a hierarchy with the public at the top, ultimately in charge through the ballot box, and civil servants at the bottom—genuinely the servants of the democratically elected masters—we have unaccountable civil servants at the top, Ministers floundering around as this lot are, Parliament is pointless and the public are outraged.

What has to change is the great restoration of the principle that the civil service serves the public, and it does that by respecting the ultimate responsibility of Ministers as decision makers. It is absurd to have rules that shield the decision makers from the information they need to make a decision, and no other organisation would do that. This is why we need to restore the Armstrong principle set out by Robert Armstrong in 1985:

“The civil service…has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly elected Government of the day.”—[Official Report, 26 February 1985; Vol. 74, c. 129W.]

Yes, I want to see the back of this Prime Minister, but most of all I want to dismantle the cabal of permanent secretaries who run this country and to restore the proper authority of Parliament.

[Several hon. Members rose—]