Sir Julian Lewis: As the right hon. Gentleman is going to talk about process, I would be very grateful if he could clear up one matter. I have a high regard for the right hon. Gentleman’s integrity, and so I hope he will not dance around this subject, as has been done by others in the past.
In the first tranche of documents there were a number of notes sent by private secretaries to the Prime Minister. If I were allowed to use a prop, I would open the documents to pages 3 and 8, where Members would see notes discussing the situation as regards how to appoint the ambassador, Peter Mandelson and so forth. Under those notes are big boxes headed “Prime Minister Comments”. The normal course of action when a Prime Minister receives a document of that sort is that he notes down his response to it. These boxes are totally blank. My simple question to the right hon. Gentleman is this: are they blank because the Prime Minister made no notes whatsoever or because any notes that the Prime Minister made have been redacted and removed? The Intelligence and Security Committee deals routinely with even more sensitive material, and every time there is a redaction in a publication, there are three asterisks to show that the redaction has taken place. Have there been redactions of the Prime Minister’s notes on these memorandums that were sent to him for decision?
[The Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office (Nick Thomas-Symonds): The answer is that they are blank now because they were blank then. The formal decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as the ambassador was conveyed by the Prime Minister’s then principal private secretary in a letter to the Foreign Office. I know that the right hon. Gentleman is referring to the empty box notes, and the reason that they are empty is that there was nothing to redact. I hope that is a sufficiently clear answer.]
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Sir Julian Lewis: I want to clear up the point about precedents. It may be that I am wrong about this, but I do not think there is any precedent for the House deciding that the Intelligence and Security Committee specifically should look at material that was to be redacted before it went to the public. The Intelligence and Security Committee, as the Minister well knows, was founded in 1994. Since that time, there has never been even one leak from the Committee. So there is no comparison between making things available to the Intelligence and Security Committee – the only parliamentary body entitled to see highly classified material, and one which never leaks – and to any other body. While he says, “This is all led by officials. It is okay for the officials to see it, but not to release it to anyone else,” the reason the ISC was chosen for the motion is that it is within the ring of secrecy, and that is unaffected by any precedents regarding bodies that do not have that special status.
[Nick Thomas-Symonds: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. It is just that if he looks at the wording of the Humble Address, he will see that it lists a series of classes of documents, and then it says, “except papers” – those that were referred to the ISC. That is our compliance with the motion.
Let me turn back to the process, which, as I said, was undertaken by officials. They sought returns from all Government Departments, including material, as has been referred to, on non-corporate communication channels. There were multiple rounds of discovery to ensure that searches returned material relevant to the full scope of the motion. Some documents were assessed as likely prejudicial to national security or international relations – the point I was just making – and, as I committed to the House in February, they were then referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee.
Due to the wide scope of the motion and the significant volume of material that needed to be located and reviewed, the first publication, on 11 March, was focused on the parts of the motion that were of most urgent interest to the House: Peter Mandelson’s appointment, his withdrawal and the severance. The second tranche, which was published on Monday, contains material relevant to the parts of the motion that cover communications and documents concerning Peter Mandelson’s appointment and vetting, and messages between Peter Mandelson and Ministers, special advisers and senior civil servants in the months prior to and throughout his tenure as ambassador. All documents held by the Government have now been disclosed, save those that are being withheld on the request of the Metropolitan police.]
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Sir Julian Lewis: I think it is worth just putting on the record the actual words from that due diligence note, which can be found on page 11 of the first volume. It talks about a 2019 report commissioned by JPMorgan:
“The report cited Epstein’s personal records which showed contact beginning in 2002 and continuing throughout the 2000s.
After Epstein was first convicted of procuring an underage girl in 2008, their relationship continued across 2009-2011, beginning when Lord Mandelson was business minister and continuing after the end of the Labour government. Mandelson reportedly stayed in Epstein’s House while he was in jail in June 2009.”
That is from a document which it is not in doubt the Prime Minister saw, yet he went ahead with making this appointment.
[Alex Burghart (Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster): I thank my right hon. Friend for that timely spelling out of exactly what the Prime Minister read – and yet he went ahead and made the appointment anyway. I take the remarks of the Paymaster General and other Ministers totally at face value and totally sincerely, but it is clear that the Prime Minister was not thinking in that way.]
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Sir Julian Lewis: At the beginning of her speech, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee said most powerfully that what happened in relation to Epstein should alone have been a sufficient bar for anything to go further, but even if that had not happened, it was already in the due diligence document, purely on foreign policy grounds: the Prime Minister was told that Mandelson gave a speech at the University of Hong Kong where he claimed that the rule of law and independence of the judiciary remain intact there. In November 2024, I personally challenged the proposed appointment on the grounds that Mandelson had said in a radio interview that the basis for a settlement with Ukraine would be that Ukraine should give up to Russia all the land that Russia had so far occupied, and that Ukraine should give up any hope of ever belonging to the NATO alliance. These were political grounds that should have ruled him out. The Prime Minister knew about them, but nothing seemed to prevent him from following through on his intent to appoint such an unsuitable individual.
[Emily Thornberry (Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee): 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. …]
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Sir Julian Lewis: I disagree with the right hon. Lady’s analysis because the whole point of what we have been saying from the Opposition Benches is that the Prime Minister himself knew about these points: he knew what Mandelson had done in relation to Epstein; he knew what he had said in relation to justice in Hong Kong; and he knew what Mandelson had said in that radio interview because I had challenged him about it. I must say, although it may not meet the high standards of court litigation, that when the Prime Minister brushed aside my challenge to him on 21 November, he sat down with a very notable and ingratiating grin, and I turned to the person sitting next to me and said, “He’s definitely going to appoint Mandelson.” It was his decision.
[Emily Thornberry: I will move on, but before I do so, I will say something that I think any fair-minded person will know. Presumably the job of being Prime Minister means that there is so much on your desk, and if someone comes to you and says, “Don’t worry about this, I’ll take it and sort it”, there is a temptation to go, “Okay, you do that, because I have 7,000 other things that I have to deal with today.” I do not know – I have never been Prime Minister – but I would assume that that is the reality of the situation. …]
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[Emily Thornberry: … There might be something in the nine-page summary that some Members sitting in this Chamber have seen. It might be that that summary showing the security concerns has a page or so at the end – it is a blank page – asking the Foreign Office for its response. UKSV [United Kingdom Security Vetting] is giving a recommendation saying, “Mandelson should not be given the job, he is a security risk.” The process might be that the Foreign Office has to write something on that form saying, “We have read this. We don’t agree with you. We think he should be appointed, and we’re going to put in the following mitigations”, and then list them. It might be that the Foreign Office did not fill that in properly, and it might be that that bit of the form remains blank. I do not know whether anybody is in a position to be able to enlighten me one way or the other, or whether we will have to wait for the police to give us the document.]
Sir Julian Lewis rose –
[Emily Thornberry: I do not think the right hon. Gentleman is one of the people I am referring to, but I give way.]
Sir Julian Lewis: Surely that information would be precisely the kind that could be safely entrusted to the ISC, and it ought to have been entrusted with it.
[Emily Thornberry: I suspect that the ISC may have been entrusted with it – that is what I am trying to say. I am hoping that if the form is blank, it is not necessarily the case that anything of particular security interest was being disclosed, and it is just a process issue, where the Foreign Office did not follow process as it should have and at least put on that form, “Yes, we have done these things.”…]
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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?
[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.]
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Sir Julian Lewis: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way again. She could still develop her case if she talked about parliamentary Committees in general, but I chaired the ISC for four years, and, as I said in an earlier intervention, the ISC has been in existence since 1994. The ISC never leaks. If it did leak, the person who leaked anything would be criminally prosecuted. There is no question, if these vetting documents were shown to the ISC, of its having a chilling effect on anything, because the ISC is hermetically sealed. It does not leak about far more important things than the miserable private life of Peter Mandelson.
[Fleur Anderson: I thank the right hon. Member for his comment about the ISC. I will continue to take advice from that vetting process: it needs to be even more hermetically sealed. We need to take real care over this. Any over-sharing will have an effect on everyone who is asked to sit down and give the frankest and most private information, and we need to make sure that they are doing that so that their potential risk to our security as a country is very well known. We cannot allow self-censoring because of this process. We do not need those far-reaching unintended consequences.]
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Sir Julian Lewis: I entirely agree with what the hon. Lady is saying. Does she agree with me about this? We have established clearly that those blank boxes, in which the Prime Minister could have made a comment when he was given the crucial information and the options leading up to the appointment of Mandelson, were intentionally blank. They are there precisely for the Prime Minister to record his response and, indeed, his decision. The fact that they were not redacted, but were genuinely blank, suggests to me – I cannot think of any other explanation – that the Prime Minister did not want to fill them in because he knew that there was something shameful about the appointment he was about to approve, and he did not want it on the record.
[Kirsty Blackman (Chief Whip of the Scottish National Party): It is also clear that the Prime Minister had made up his mind, and it almost did not matter what people said. There was an awareness of the article that had been published saying that Peter Mandelson stayed in Jeffrey Epstein’s house while Jeffrey Epstein was in prison – it does not get much worse than that. The Prime Minister had made the decision, as we can see from a whole lot of this documentation. …]
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Sir Julian Lewis: The Minister has shown once again what a decent man he is, and he is doing a very difficult job in defence of somebody who knew a lot more than he did. He was not chief of staff at the time that the Mandelson appointment was being carried out. On page 8 of the first bundle, we have the note from the private secretary to the Prime Minister, which says:
“We have sought a due diligence review…and your Chief of Staff” –
Morgan McSweeney at the time –
“has discussed Peter’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein which we will go through with you, but your Director of Communications is satisfied with his responses to questions about contact.”
However, we also know from earlier in the bundle that the Prime Minister specifically knew that Mandelson had stayed in Epstein’s flat while Epstein was in jail for the abuse of an under-age girl. The Prime Minister knew all that at the time. What is the purpose of having a box at the end marked for the Prime Minister’s comments on the alternatives he has been given when in fact, as we now know and as has been clearly explained by the Paymaster General, there has been no redaction – the Prime Minister did not comment? Why did the Prime Minister withhold any remarks on this highly contentious matter? Where did he comment? Where did he give his decision? He certainly did not do it in the place that he was supposed to do it.
[The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister (Darren Jones): In relation to the first part of the right hon. Gentleman’s question, he will know, because I have confirmed it to the House at the Dispatch Box previously, that questions were put by the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff to Peter Mandelson following the due diligence report to seek further information about the stories reported in the newspaper. He will also know that Peter Mandelson replied to those questions, and that information was then considered by those in No. 10.
As I have confirmed to the House, that document – the question and its answers – is one of the documents being held by the Metropolitan police. I have been advised repeatedly that I am not permitted to disclose what I have seen in that document on the Floor of the House, so I am afraid it will have to be one of those questions that remains until such a time as the Metropolitan police publishes its documentation. In relation to the second part of the right hon. Gentleman’s question, I refer him to the Paymaster General’s answer earlier today. That is the answer to that question. …]