Peter Mandelson: Government Appointment

Paul Holmes Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Badenoch]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. He is absolutely right: it is extraordinary and it is shocking.

The Prime Minister might have refused to answer my question around his knowledge of Mandelson’s links to the Russian defence company Sistema yesterday, but that is only because he knows that we know the answer. It was there in the due diligence: his choice of ambassador retaining an interest in a Russian company linked to Vladimir Putin after the invasion of Crimea. And the Prime Minister’s response to seeing that information? According to Robbins, “constant pressure” on the Foreign Office to get the appointment done.

The Prime Minister, as my right hon. Friend has just mentioned, placed top secret intelligence in the hands of a man he knew to be a national security risk. He did so before the official security vetting not just knowingly but deliberately, and to an extent that left a senior civil servant with a distinguished career under the clear and obvious impression that the vetting must return only one possible outcome: that Peter Mandelson should be appointed. None of that was following full due process by the letter or the spirit of that phrase. This is no longer just about what the Prime Minister was or was not told; this is about what he did before the vetting process had even started.

And we now know that Mandelson was not a one-off. According to Sir Olly Robbins, No. 10 also asked for the disgraced Matthew Doyle, the Prime Minister’s then director of communications, to be made an ambassador. Astonishingly, the Prime Minister’s office even told Robbins to keep the request a secret from the Foreign Secretary. The idea that it is No. 10 who are the victims of others not following due process is, quite frankly, laughable.

The Prime Minister told Parliament yesterday that it was “staggering” that Olly Robbins had not shared the recommendations of UK Security Vetting with the then Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald. But today we learned from Robbins that he had never seen the original vetting file. If the Prime Minister is furious that Sir Olly Robbins did not share the vetting details with him or the former Cabinet Secretary, why is he not furious with the Cabinet Office for not sharing it? Put simply, why exactly did he sack Olly Robbins?

It is no surprise that the Prime Minister is not here today. These are difficult questions. He cannot claim not to have known about the risk that Mandelson posed, because, as he said yesterday, he saw the due diligence that disclosed it. I still find it inconceivable that, despite that failure of vetting being a front-page news story, no one in No. 10 was aware of it. He cannot deny that his decision put Britain at risk. The British public deserve to know how this failure happened and they deserve to hear it from the Prime Minister himself.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister had the chance to set the record straight, but Members on all sides—and no doubt the public—were left wholly unsatisfied with the answers he gave. I am sure they will share my deep disappointment that the Prime Minister has chosen not to be here today. There remain serious questions about the decisions that he took over the appointment of Peter Mandelson, but the Prime Minister does not want to answer any more questions today, so, in typical fashion, he has thrown someone else under the bus. I feel for the Minister sent out as a human shield for the Prime Minister. It is not this Minister who made the Mandelson appointment; that was above his pay grade. He cannot tell us what the Prime Minister was thinking when he made those decisions and he will not be able to provide this House with the answers that it deserves to hear.

This is simply what the Prime Minister does. Sue Gray, Matthew Doyle, Morgan McSweeney, Chris Wormald, Olly Robbins, Peter Mandelson—those appointments were the Prime Minister’s decision, people the Prime Minister chose to appoint and all people he then chose to sack. Are we meant to believe that all these people are the problem, rather than the Prime Minister’s judgment?

As usual, the Prime Minister’s explanations yesterday left us with even more questions than answers. He says that he was justified in appointing Mandelson before vetting because of advice he received from the then Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald. But how can that make sense, when that advice only came after the scandal had erupted? Post hoc advice is pointless. Soon after that, he then sacked Chris Wormald. Why is the Prime Minister now relying on the evidence of the very man he told us was doing so badly in the job that he sacked him?

Let us move on to the Prime Minister’s claim that no one in No. 10 was aware that Mandelson had failed his vetting. Enough people in Whitehall knew. Enough people knew for journalists from The Independent, the Mail and Sky News to find out. Journalists have released texts with the Prime Minister’s director of communications, where they made No. 10 aware of this fact. He did not deny that the story was true. Why not? Something simply does not add up. Despite this, the Prime Minister went on to assure the House and the public that Mandelson’s appointment was down to a failure of vetting. I cannot fathom how the Prime Minister can still claim not to have misled the House on this point.

It is telling that when given the opportunity yesterday to apologise for misleading the House, even inadvertently, by my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), the Prime Minister chose not to. I suspect that he chose not to do so because he knows that if he did, he would be bound by his own words and by the standards to which he held previous Prime Ministers from this very Dispatch Box. In 2022, he said that if the Prime Minister misleads the House, he must resign—either the Prime Minister is a man of his word, or he thinks there is one rule for him and another for everyone else.

Unbelievably, half the permanent secretaries who were in post when Labour took office less than two years ago have now gone. The sacking of senior civil servants to carry the can for the Prime Minister’s failures has already cost taxpayers more than £1.5 million in payouts—that is before the sacking of Sir Olly Robbins. It is quite something for the former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell to warn that the Prime Minister has created

“one of the worst crises in relations between ministers and mandarins of modern times”,

adding that the sacking of Sir Olly Robbins

“risks having a serious and sustained chilling effect on serving and prospective civil servants”.

Another former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, has said that the Prime Minister put Sir Olly in an “impossible” position. These are serious people who are calling out the Prime Minister’s behaviour. The former head of propriety and ethics and deputy Cabinet Secretary, Helen MacNamara, has called the decision to sack Robbins “unacceptable”. She said that if the Government had published the papers that Parliament demanded back in February, this argument would be so much easier for everyone because we would all be operating on the basis of the same facts, and she is right.

The delay in publishing the information required by the Humble Address is shocking. Where are the key annotations, decisions and meeting records—the box returns, as they are called in Downing Street? Why are crucial forms left blank? These missing documents add to the mystery. Why are the Government still trying to cover this up?

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend will remember that I asked the Prime Minister yesterday about the box note of 11 November 2024, in which Simon Case recommended that vetting be gone through before the appointment was made. The Prime Minister’s decision note did not include the Prime Minister’s decision, which has been redacted from the conditions of the Humble Address. Does my right hon. Friend think that the redacted information would show what the Prime Minister was trying to achieve by appointing Peter Mandelson without the appropriate vetting?

[Mrs Badenoch]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Why were the Prime Minister’s words redacted? These key pieces of information would help to solve this mystery—they would be much easier for us to understand than the words he gave at the Dispatch Box. I note that no Labour MPs have intervened on me, which is very unusual; when I am speaking in a debate, they are normally bobbing left, right and centre.

I am raising these concerns because of the seriousness of the situation the country is now in. With war in Europe, war in the middle east, a cost of living crisis and a global energy shock, we need a Prime Minister who has a grip on national security. Yet last week, the former Labour Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary-General, Lord Robertson, warned that the Prime Minister has shown “corrosive complacency” when it comes to defence. The same man who wrote the Prime Minister’s strategic defence review is now ringing the alarm bell to warn us of the grave consequences of the Government refusing to take the tough choices needed to increase defence spending.

This matters, because if we cannot trust our Prime Minister to tell the whole, full truth about this ambassadorial appointment—a key appointment in Britain’s national security architecture—it calls into question the assurances he gives us on everything else. It calls into question his promises to control taxes, which he has broken, his promises not to raise borrowing, which he has broken, and his promises to back business, protect our veterans, defend our farmers and prioritise growth, all of which he has broken. He has broken them because at his core, he is a man with no idea what he believes. Worse still, he appears to have no interest in doing the job of Prime Minister—just in being the Prime Minister. Curiosity is what drives serious leadership; without curiosity, problems are neither fully understood nor solved.

This whole affair just goes to show why this country is heading in such a woeful direction under the Prime Minister’s incurious regime. His defence yesterday summed it up: he said that no one told him and that he never thought to ask. This is, in his own words, incredible. However, even if we take the Prime Minister at his word—even if we believe the unbelievable—it is no better. He appointed Mandelson despite knowing that he was a threat to our national security; he said that due process was followed, having failed to follow that process himself; and he pressured the Foreign Office into signing off on this appointment. In 2022, the Prime Minister said:

“I believe that if you’re the leader, the buck stops with you. I will always stand up for my team, but I will also take responsibility for everything they do. That is what leadership is.”

How has he taken responsibility?

It is clear that the Prime Minister has no intention of facing up to his mistakes. It is clear now that he is not a leader and that he has no intention of doing the honourable thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jon Trickett]

Those two Prime Ministers in particular—the chaotic and the exotic—left this country in a disastrous situation. I do think that a Prime Minister who comes to the House and implies that he relies on a culture simply of process is mistaken. The Gordon Brown model, flawed as it was, will turn out to be far better than the one we have heard from this Prime Minister. I am sorry to say that, because I want to support a Labour Government who are effective, but that is the case. I saw it with my own eyes back then—I saw the vetting, the decisions, the pressure, and the tumult. I saw a Prime Minister struggling with their party to deliver a different kind of society and economy.

Let me turn to the present events and what we learned from Sir Olly today. There are a few things that matter. First, the security department tended towards refusing the vetting of Mandelson when Sir Olly first arrived, while others thought that he did not need vetting of any kind. Then, while the vetting process was going on, the Government appeared to proceed with the appointment of Mandelson, and even the King and the United States Administration were told that he would be the ambassador.

The British state then conspired to deliver a positive vetting outcome, because that is what they believed the Government wanted. It was expressed in repeated phone calls from the private office in No. 10, which I was very familiar with in the years I served in government, to Sir Olly’s private office. The witness we saw this morning looked credible and made a very serious case that he was under pressure to proceed.

[Paul Holmes]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Jon Trickett]

No, I will make progress; there are many Members on both sides wanting to speak. The hon. Member may well be pleased with some of the things I am going to say. I am developing an argument, and I want to proceed with it.

The question I have not heard answered is why a group of people in No. 10—possibly the Prime Minister as well—felt that that level of pressure should be placed on the Foreign Office in favour of appointing Mandelson. There are two possible answers, but I will focus on one. The political unit in No. 10, possibly the Prime Minister too, wanted Mandelson because he was their close political ally and because he was plugged into a vast international network of what we might call the billionaire class. The truth is that much of the nexus of wealth that Mandelson was plugged into—so was the US President, by the way—was centred around Epstein. Let me pause for a second to say that none of these facts would have emerged were it not for the courage, bravery and resistance of the women who were treated so appallingly on Epstein island.

Getting Mandelson into Washington as part of that network—a political network of billionaires—was of the highest priority. All this leaves a bad taste. The Government promised the people change, but the change that they sought was to further accelerate the integration of the British state and Government into the networks of the richest people. People in our country—certainly those in my constituency—did not vote for that. They wanted change in their ordinary lives: a better NHS, improvements to the cost of living and so on. We have a long way to go to deliver that. What we have delivered is a disaster with the appointment of Mandelson.

I have raised the question of unemployment four times in recent months. There is growing unemployment in our area. It is hard to see how the time that the Government spent ingratiating themselves to Washington helped the unemployed and poor.

Just think about Mandelson’s involvement with Russian and Chinese business. So obnoxious is China supposed to be that this place has banned all Chinese-based networks, as though they were the agencies of an enemy state. How can it be that Mandelson’s links were seen to be of such low risk? This House has spent literally hours discussing the appalling behaviour of Putin and Russia in relation to eastern Europe. All these things should have counted against Mandelson, but when they were weighed in the balance, they counted less than the opportunity that Mandelson offered of access to a network of people, which included the US President.

I will make one final point. Mandelson played a key role in a faction that sought to change the strategic direction of the Labour party and the Government. The truth is that they wanted to change the Labour party into something it never was.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Western]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, my friend. I was simply addressing the point made by the Leader of the Opposition, who suggested that the operation at No. 10 was the worst in living memory. It is quite obvious that that is absolutely not the case. We have had two very recent examples, in 2019-22 and then 2022-23, under Johnson and Truss.

I want to make it quite clear that the way I see it, the mistake that may have been made by No. 10 is the clear delegation to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who was at the heart of an inner circle in No. 10 that no longer exists of Peter Mandelson, Morgan McSweeney and Matthew Doyle. As has come to light just this morning, Matthew Doyle was also part of the problem.

[Paul Holmes]

There must be a reshuffle coming, because no one would seriously make a speech like this at such serious times. The hon. Gentleman says that the Prime Minister was a stickler for process and claims that the Prime Minister somehow delegated responsibility for the appointment. Why did the former Cabinet Secretary—the chief adviser to the Prime Minister and chief civil servant—give that advice in the box note? Will the hon. Gentleman defend the Prime Minister’s decision not to follow that advice from the person who was making the decisions?

[Matt Western]

I am not close to those operations. I have never been a Minister—that is the honest truth—and to answer the hon. Gentleman’s point, I do not wish to be one either. I am not close enough to that, so I cannot answer that honestly, but what I can say is that I heard from Sir Olly Robbins this morning about how he was leant on and also what documents he may have had access to, including the vetting report.

What we have heard today is that the chief of staff leant on the Foreign Office, whether it was about Matthew Doyle or the appointment of Peter Mandelson. That is the issue. The Prime Minister, in my experience of having known him since 2017, is absolutely as straight as a die. He may have accepted the advice and maybe that advice has now proven to be wrong, but he has been let down by those around him. He made a mistake. He understands and has accepted that.