Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Ian Sollom Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Commons Chamber

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

By any measure, this past week has been an extraordinary one in British public life. Within five days, two people have been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office: one a former member of the royal family, and the other a veteran Labour politician who we now understand to be the man who championed the first’s appointment to his public role.

This motion is not an attempt to prejudice a police investigation. We are clear that we must let the police do their work. That investigation must proceed on its own terms, free from political interference.

Criminal law and parliamentary accountability are not the same thing, and they have never been mutually exclusive. Parliament has its own duty to scrutinise public appointments, to follow public money, and to ensure that the institutions of state are answerable to the people they serve. That duty did not disappear when Thames Valley police opened their case files, so let us ask the question that this House should have been asking for years: how did Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor come to be appointed as Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment in 2001, and what did those responsible for that appointment know?

Here is what we do know. The appointment was, by multiple accounts, controversial from the start. Concerns were raised within Government, within the Foreign Office and, reportedly, within the royal family itself, yet he was appointed. For a decade he travelled the globe on the public purse, meeting Heads of State and billionaires, on expenses described by former officials as lavish and poorly scrutinised. He was effectively given a rubber stamp. All the while, his relationship with Epstein deepened—a relationship that the Epstein files now suggest may have been entangled with his official duties in ways that potentially breach both his duty of confidentiality and even the Official Secrets Act.

The documents that might answer those questions should by now be in the national archives under the 20-year rule, but they are not. Every available exemption has been deployed to keep them sealed—national security, international relations, and more. Some, we are told, have been locked away until 2065, and most of us in the Chamber will not be here to read them if they are. As the hon. Members for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber (Brendan O'Hara) and for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry)—she is no longer in her place—have said, the historian Andrew Lownie has spent years attempting to access those files through the proper channels. When asked what he made of that, he said simply:

“Every single reason has been deployed to stop those papers getting out…You have to ask why”.

Madam Deputy Speaker, we are asking why.

Some may ask why, if Parliament has had the tools to scrutinise this issue through a substantive motion, it is happening only now. That is a fair question. No party in over a decade successfully used the parliamentary mechanisms available to force this issue properly. That is not because the rules prevented it; it is because the cultural gravitational pull of deference was so strong that to too many people the sustained rigorous scrutiny of a public figure who happened to be a member of the royal family felt simply not the done thing. The unwritten convention was as powerful, if not more powerful, than the written rule. That is not a procedural failure; it is a failure of political culture, and it is precisely that culture that the motion challenges today.

I came to this place with a background in science, and in any field of systemic inquiry there is an important principle: we cannot correct a failure that we refuse to examine. Institutional failures do not disappear when we look away from them; they compound. The question of how Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor came to be appointed, against objections reportedly raised from multiple directions, and how he was then allowed to operate for a decade with expenses rubber-stamped and minimal oversight, is not ancient history. It is the context in which every subsequent failure of public appointment standards must be understood.

Beyond this motion the Liberal Democrats are calling for structural reforms that match the scale of what has been revealed so far. We want a genuinely independent ethics adviser who is able to initiate investigations, not to have to wait for permission from the Ministers they are supposed to scrutinise. We want an office of the whistleblower, with real legal protections, so that the civil servant who was overruled when they tried to question an expenses claim has somewhere to go. We want a rigorous, transparent confirmatory process for all significant public appointments, with proper parliamentary involvement from the outset, not as an afterthought, and not after the damage has already been done. We want an end to government by WhatsApp, with all official business on the record, all lobbying published, and no more deals done in the dark.

Deference is not respect, silence is not discretion, and secrecy in public life is not safety—it is the condition under which misconduct flourishes. The documents we are asking for should have been in the public domain years ago. This House has the power and responsibility to require their release, and it should do so today.