Alex Burghart MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2026 · Historical Forced Adoption · Hansard source

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  I thank the Prime Minister for advance sight of his statement and for coming to the House to deliver the statement himself. On behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition, we welcome what he has said and agree that whenever the state makes grave errors, it has a deep responsibility to apologise for what it did to those it has wronged. One hundred and eighty-five thousand children grew up in Britain without their mothers because of bad decisions and fundamentally flawed beliefs that treated unmarried mothers with a shame and stigma that is mercifully alien to us today. Those decisions and beliefs left a permanent mark on each and every one of those lives: on children separated from their mothers, and on the mothers whose children were taken away. As the Prime Minister said, this is a stain on our history. Bonds between mothers and children are the foundation of security and identity; indeed, perhaps the foundation of all we have. While I know from much experience that the act of adopting a child is among the greatest kindness one person can show another, and that many of those children will have gone on to be raised by loving families, there can be no doubt that they will also have carried a great grief across many years. One cannot help but be moved by the powerful testimonies that some have given. I will mention just one mother’s experience: the journey back from the hospital “was the longest I held my daughter—it was two hours—and it was like everything suddenly made sense. I just felt like this was absolutely right, and I wouldn’t let go of her…a woman appeared and said, ‘It’s time’…and she was taken from my arms and handed over. And she howled—I assume I did…and the following week they sent me back to school.” Thousands upon thousands of such experiences happened every day in every corner of our country over many years. Thankfully, in the years since, a huge amount has been done to ensure that such things cannot happen again in our country; change in adoption law and modern courts and legislation make a repeat of these injustices much less likely. We welcome the steps that the Prime Minister has outlined today and the fact that the Education Secretary is writing to local authorities and agencies setting the expectation that requests for records should be swiftly responded to. I am glad that that builds on the steps the previous Government tried to take to improve access to adoption records, offer post-adoption counselling and improve the complaints procedure for agencies. We hope that all these steps will make a difference to some whose experiences lie in the past, and to many in the future. I would like to ask the Prime Minister two questions. The Education Committee called for an assessment of international redress schemes. Can the Prime Minister confirm whether the Government are considering that? I welcome his announcement of support groups for mothers and adopted adults. Who will be responsible for establishing this service and what budget will be set aside for it? I thank the Prime Minister very much for his statement and repeat what he has said to those affected: the shame was never yours.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Northern Ireland Office · Hansard source

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  I will also begin by congratulating the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), on making sure that we got this debate. It is clear that without her and the support of her Committee, we would not be discussing this incredibly important issue on the Floor of the House. I repeat the remarks made by the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson): the Select Committee in this Parliament has been exemplary and given us high quality analysis, which has benefited debate on both sides of the House. We are here debating the estimate simply because the situation is becoming dire. As was said by the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray)—I fear that my pronunciation may be slightly out—this is not an abstract matter; it is having a genuine impact on public services today and on the planning of public services for tomorrow. Uncertainty is building and—I am sorry to say this—there is no suggestion that it will be alleviated any time soon. In fact, as the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) mentioned, it appears that we are further from agreement now than we were at the start of the year, because there is disagreement within Sinn Féin on the proposals put forward. That begs an important question for the Government: what will happen next? This is a debate about devolved issues, but I know that the Secretary of State and his officials from the Northern Ireland Office have been in talks with the Executive and their representatives. I very much hope that we will get an update on those talks. We must, however, ask what will happen if no agreement is forthcoming. As was said, we are now a quarter of the way through the financial year and there is no solution in sight. We cannot move to a position where overspend continues to be normalised, and it appears that the Executive are effectively saying, “We can’t solve this problem—we need more money.” That is not sustainable, and it cannot give anyone confidence in devolution as it is now. What is the Government’s plan if the current talks break down and we move into the summer without an agreed budget in Northern Ireland? I have a number of points to ask the Secretary of State about while I have the opportunity—most significantly, they are about legacy. He may have detected from some of our previous debates that Opposition Members are not in favour of what the Government are doing. That said, we think strongly that if the Government are to press ahead with their plans, given that it is acknowledged that those plans will create an additional burden on public services in Northern Ireland, on the police and on the legacy institutions, the Government should be prepared to meet that financial cost. It is not enough to say that £250 million is being made available. That £250 million was made available by a Conservative Government some time ago, and since it was granted inflation has probably degraded it to £200 million at most. It is clear that if the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is passed, it will increase the caseload of the ICRIR—the Legacy Commission, as it will become—but not increase the resources it has at its disposal, and it will increase the caseload that the PSNI is dealing with, but not increase the resources of the PSNI. The danger is that we will see a bottleneck in the Legacy Commission and very slow processing of cases, and an additional drain on the resources of the PSNI that will take more people away from frontline policing. We know that frontline policing in Northern Ireland has about 1,000 fewer officers than were expected when New Decade, New Approach was signed. That is a clear and present danger that the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill presents to financing in Northern Ireland, and I would be grateful if the Secretary of State could explain the Government’s position. I would also be interested to hear whether the Secretary of State has had any discussions with the heir presumptive to the Labour party leadership on the future of the troubles Bill, because the legislative timetable has obviously been pushed to the right again and it seems unlikely that we will have the legislation before the summer break. That being so, it will be a consideration for the next Prime Minister. Can the Secretary of State tell us what conversations he has had with the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) about this legislation, and whether the next Prime Minister, if that is what he is, is in favour of it? In the negotiations that any Government have with the Executive in Northern Ireland, I believe there is a duty to make the case that the Northern Ireland Executive should be prepared to raise revenue on top of the budget settlements that the Treasury gives. After the last Budget, I was prepared to say that I thought the Northern Ireland Office had acquired a reasonably good settlement from the Treasury for Northern Ireland. The key now is that that money should be well spent. If the Northern Ireland Executive want to spend more, they should be prepared to raise revenue, but they should also be prepared to deliver their public services more efficiently and effectively. I hope that His Majesty’s Government will work with the institutions in Northern Ireland to help that to happen.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Northern Ireland Office · Hansard source

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  I am pleased that the Government are looking at some sort of additional support for PSNI. I sense that the Secretary of State is about to move off legacy. I did ask him whether he had discussed the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill with the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) because, obviously, his view of the Bill will be critical for its future.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Northern Ireland Office · Hansard source

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  That’s why we funded it.

• 25 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I was just trying to be nice, Mr Speaker. We will do it privately. Given that we may have a new Prime Minister on 16 July, does the right hon. Gentleman think that that new Prime Minister should take questions in the House before he goes off for the summer break?

• 25 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  This may be the last time I come up against the right hon. Gentleman during parliamentary questions. When we first faced each other nine months ago, I said that he was one of the most able performers in Government, and I still believe that to be the case. I think there will come a time when his party regrets the fact that he did not stand in this leadership contest. I think he would have lost—

• 25 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I am very glad to be the one to break the news that the right hon. Gentleman wants to keep his current job and not move to another role. This is a serious question. Does the right hon. Gentleman think it would be appropriate for the new Prime Minister to answer questions before the summer break? If so, will he make representations to the next Prime Minister?

• 25 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson Humble Address: Government Response · Hansard source

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  Obviously the House does not want to do anything prejudicial to a case, but it appears that the Metropolitan police are saying that some documents could be released without that being prejudicial to the case. I know that things will soon move on, but the Humble Address will remain in force, even if there is a new Prime Minister. If there is a criminal trial—and even if there is not—it is likely that more information will be released. As this has been a particularly novel way of using and responding to a Humble Address, it is likely that there will be a Select Committee inquiry into how the process ran. Will the right hon. Gentleman give a commitment now, at the Dispatch Box, that there is no material that the Government have withheld that the Metropolitan police have not explicitly asked to be withheld?

• 25 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson Humble Address: Government Response · Hansard source

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  I am sure that danger and excitement await the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister in whatever comes next. The Government have always maintained that they have withheld material from the Mandelson case only at the request of the Metropolitan police, but a fortnight ago, a Daily Mail journalist spoke to the Metropolitan police, who insist that they did not ask for a crucial series of messages to be withheld. Can the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister explain why the Metropolitan police and the Government are saying different things?

• 9 Jun 2026 · Police Service of Northern Ireland Training College · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I will turn to it in a moment.

• 9 Jun 2026 · Police Service of Northern Ireland Training College · Hansard source

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  As ever, the hon. Gentleman makes an extremely astute observation. I suggest that we perhaps try to find the time to have a full Westminster Hall debate on the Barnett consequentials and formula with particular regard to Northern Ireland, as there are a great many technicalities that we could go into. Returning to the point made by the hon. Member for North Down, I simply mean something along the following lines: if the Treasury was minded to honour its 1998 obligation to provide a new training college, it would only be fair to require, in return, a very solemn undertaking by the Northern Ireland Executive that, within a short and fixed term, we would make up the current deficit of 1,000 officers. I think it would be quite wrong if a new facility were built at considerable cost—a necessary investment, in my opinion—but we were still here another 10 years down the line, with the hon. Gentleman’s constituents, and people across the United Kingdom, saying, “Why are the numbers in PSNI much lower than they should be?” If the Treasury chooses to enter into such negotiations, as I very much hope it will, there will need to be some reciprocal element from the Executive to ensure that any new facility is used to its maximum extent for the benefit of people not only in Northern Ireland but across the United Kingdom.

• 9 Jun 2026 · Police Service of Northern Ireland Training College · Hansard source

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  I should say at the outset that I associate myself with the remarks made by other hon. Members about the terrible attack in north Belfast last night. Although there are still many details to emerge from the case, it is very clear that the PSNI responded quickly and very bravely to what was an incredibly dangerous situation. I am proud to say that the people of north Belfast responded very bravely in the face of lethal force. It is very appropriate, then, that we should find ourselves debating this motion tabled by the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton). I congratulate him on securing this debate. I echo the remarks about the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s service not just to the people of Northern Ireland, but to the United Kingdom as a whole. PSNI has a national role in policing our land border, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out, but it also has a central role in our national security apparatus. It is right that hon. Members from Northern Ireland and Opposition Front Benchers should be able to question Ministers on that national security element. I have some sympathy with the remarks made by the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister). It is clear that the devolutionary settlement has been failing the people of Northern Ireland in policing terms, not because of any failure of the PSNI, but because of short-term, misguided decisions by some politicians in Northern Ireland. It is wrong that citizens in NI should see their police service about 1,000 officers short of where it should be, in contravention of agreements that the Conservative party made in government with counterparts in Northern Ireland. It is unsettling to realise, when we see this situation, that there is really no lever at our disposal to right this wrong. As I have said on previous occasions, there is more of a role for central Government in ensuring that the national security and border elements of policing in particular are given appropriate resource in Northern Ireland. I have listened closely to the sensible remarks made by all hon. Members. I believe that there is a deal to be struck here. Part of the benefit will accrue to the people of Northern Ireland, and part of it will accrue to the people of the United Kingdom more widely. It is not in the Minister’s power to make a deal on his own, because it is a Treasury matter, but I am sure that, as a rising star within the Labour party, he has great friends in the Treasury and will use those friendships and connections to mark out what that arrangement might look like.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Replacing the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State will have seen reports in the Belfast Telegraph that prior to 1985, a large part of the gelignite used in IRA bombs was routinely stolen from a single factory in County Meath in the Republic. The supply amounted to many tonnes of explosives, and it took the lives of many hundreds of people. At the time, British intelligence repeatedly raised concerns with Dublin. Nothing was done, despite the factory’s allegedly being in receipt of Irish state subsidy. Following those revelations, will the Secretary of State commit to writing to the Taoiseach to ask him to hold an urgent public inquiry into the Enfield explosives factory?

• 3 Jun 2026 · Replacing the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 · Hansard source

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  With all due respect, the Secretary of State did not answer my question. This is an extraordinary missing piece of the puzzle in the story of the troubles—in the story of how the IRA obtained weapons that killed people in our country. The Secretary of State is perfectly within his rights to raise this with his opposite numbers, and to ask them to conduct a full public inquiry on behalf of the victims. Will he do so?

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady makes a good point. It may be because it was on a group message and somebody else had retained their phone, so he provided it. We have to assume that Morgan McSweeney’s messages have, in some part, been retained by the police. I suspect that we will not know why for some time. In the case of the Prime Minister’s messages, however, it is hard to understand why the police or the Government would block the publication of simple messages of praise, even though they fall within the scope of the Humble Address. We really do need further reassurances from the Government about their approach to disclosure.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Lady is making an important series of points. Does she not also think that the fact that the vetting was not done before Mandelson arrived in Washington, as we now know, means that somebody was in post in Washington seeing highly classified information which he was not fit to see, because there were no mitigations in place, even though the process subsequently threw up the fact that he would need them? Of course, as she is saying, he probably should not have had the job, given that the mitigations were warranted.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I thank the Paymaster General for his remarks and look forward to hearing what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister has to say at the end of the debate. As we made clear earlier in the week, we are not entirely happy with the way this has come together. However, just because, in the way that these debates take place, it is not automatic that we will get to ask Ministers questions if they decline to take interventions, I am very encouraged by how the Paymaster General has handled that, although Hansard should know that he said that nobody could follow the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn)—he shut down everyone else—and I know that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will want to follow his good lead. I hope that the Paymaster General will accept my sympathies on the loss of his mobile phone. I mean that genuinely, and it is very unfortunate that it was stolen five days after the phone of the former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was stolen. This, I believe, is an indication of how dangerous life is in Labour-run London, and I hope those responsible for looking after the Met police are listening to this. I say that genuinely because a lot of us have friends and colleagues who have experienced the same thing and it is a serious matter. The Paymaster General referred to his resurrection of the Humble Address as a political tool, and I hope that he is still proud of that achievement and that he does not rue it or regret it and that he is enjoying being on the other end of it. I remember this coming up in one of those Brexit years, I forget exactly which one, and I was reminded of it because he spoke about precedent and the Humble Address, and the truth is that his Humble Address breached precedent in a very serious way. It had been the case in “Erskine May” throughout the ages that Humble Addresses would not be used in order to take the opinions of Law Officers of the Crown and present them to the House. That was specifically carved out, yet his Humble Address struck right through it. When we talk about precedent and Humble Addresses, we must be very careful and be very clear that the instruction given by the House to the Government is sacrosanct. It is more important than anything, and it is not for the Government to redefine what the House has asked them to do. It is simply the Government’s job to comply in order to treat the House with respect, but also to avoid falling into contempt. So I will say again that the idea that potentially large classes of document should be retained and kept away from the House because the Metropolitan police are using them may be desirable, but that should not be done automatically without the agreement of the House. If the Government wish to change the terms of the motion that was presented to them, they can come back to the House and do that. A dangerous precedent is set when the Government decide they will reinterpret what the House has said, because maybe this has not been convenient for the Government, but it might be for a future Government, so we must be very careful with precedent and very careful with setting new precedent.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Lady on taking the opportunity to put that on the record. This is information that the House deserves to have. In what cases are we dealing with messages that never existed because no messages were sent, as in the hon. Lady’s case? In what cases was there auto-delete, which we know the Prime Minister had, because it was disclosed in the lobby briefing for journalists yesterday? In what cases have phones gone missing and back-ups were not done? In what cases has information been held by the police? It really ought to be possible to know that. I know that the police and the Government are, to a certain extent, understandably being sensitive about the police investigation. However, it really ought to be possible to say to the House, “X number of messages from the Prime Minister are being held by the police, as well as Y number of emails and Z number of text messages.” There is no way that any of that could possibly interfere with any police investigation, if we know roughly what the police know. We started to move in the right direction on that on Monday, when the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister told us the categories of document that we have, but there must be other ways of giving some guidance to the House on what is being held. We obviously have a huge amount of material that has been justifiably redacted for reasons of national security and international relations, but that does not mean that we do not have the headings. We often have email headings that say, “There was an email sent on this date from this person to that person.” We cannot see the subject, but we know that the email existed. Why can we not have the same thing for the messages that the Prime Minister sent to Peter Mandelson on this date, that date and the other date? We cannot see them, because they are part of a police investigation or subject to national security concerns. We have a discrepancy between different types of approaches to the disclosure of information.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  That is entirely true. I believe that the ISC said as much in one of its responses to Government disclosure, saying it was very troubled by the fact that this guidance, which all Ministers are supposed to obey, was routinely being broken. My right hon. Friend and I were both Ministers at the time when that guidance was brought in, and it was brought in for a very good reason. It was to reflect the fact that there are new communications channels and Ministers will want to use them—some of them are very useful for Ministers—but to make it clear that that should not get in the way of the fact that the system needs to retain a record of how decisions are made and what the decisions are. That has clearly not been done in many cases here, not least, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) pointed out, in the fact that we have a lot of empty boxes and no record of the Prime Minister assenting to the appointment of Peter Mandelson, even though we know that he did.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is right. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will have heard his remarks, and I hope he will respond to them. Further to what my right hon. Friend said, the Humble Address was in February, but it was not until March that the Government asked Peter Mandelson for his phone, and Peter Mandelson then refused. As I and other Members said on Monday, the Government should seek to go after Peter Mandelson’s exit payment if he denies co-operation with the Humble Address. It is totally unacceptable that the House should be denied this critical information. We have some information that is retained, some information that appears to have been destroyed and some information that appears to have gone missing. I wish to turn to some remarks that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister made on Monday about his own messages, as he brought them up. I think that will be a useful case study. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said: “I do recall having some limited exchanges with Peter Mandelson over WhatsApp, including those I have already discussed…but these conversations did not involve transacting Government business and were in line with official guidance on the use of non-corporate communications channels at the time.” —[ Official Report , 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 853.] That is all well and good, but who decided that those messages fell into that category? Did the right hon. Gentleman decide that himself? Did he show them to officials, who then decided? Did he show them to the police? Who made the decision? Again, we must ask these questions of all Ministers who were asked to disclose information. Where is it that people have self-edited? Where is it that people have had auto-deletion on their phones? Where is it that people have refused to hand things over? We deserve to know. Something that I believe is missing throughout the three volumes we received on Monday is photos, videos, voice notes and, more significantly, attachments. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s explanation for the Government’s approach to those types of document. Let me draw attention in particular to document 33, from 15 September 2025. The email explicitly refers to an attachment, which is pertinent to the subject of the Humble Address, but that document is not available. I could have been led to believe that that document may have been retained by the police, were it not for the fact that all attachments seem to be missing and all photos, voicemails and videos are also missing. I cannot help but feel that it has accidentally fallen out of the full disclosure. May we have some clarity on that? Let me turn to Peter Mandelson’s declarations of interest, which are one of the most important classes of document; they are perhaps the most important class of document that we are yet to see. We now know that something definitely does exist—first, because the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister told us on Monday, and secondly, because there are references to a back-and-forth about Mandelson’s contacts in the release. Mandelson pushed back on a number of occasions, saying, “I know a lot of foreign people. I have a lot of contacts. I cannot be expected to disclose everything. There was a suggestion from one official not to worry about it too much, just to get on with it and give them a list.” We appear also to be seeing an absence of documents, such as the mitigations that the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury, referred to—Collard’s document. If we add it all together—the absence of the declaration of interests, the absence of the mitigations designed perhaps to handle Mandelson’s relationships with his business contacts when in office, the fact that the documents of certain members of the Cabinet are entirely absent, and the business interests that we know Mandelson had—I think we can reasonably hypothesise about what the police are looking at. That would be—this is speculation—an abuse of his position in Washington to support the interests of his business relations. It is very unfortunate that we will not see that information for some time, because it goes to the heart of one of the problems with the appointment of Mandelson in the first place. [ Interruption. ] I think Madam Deputy Speaker is encouraging me to wind up, so that I will do. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I can understand why the Government do not want me to ask them any more questions. In conclusion, there are a number of things that we need of the Government. Most importantly, we need a slightly fresh approach to disclosure where we are told a bit more about what the police have: how many documents in each category, how many WhatsApps and emails of the Prime Minister, Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, and so on. It is important that the House understands where things have gone missing and can start to put that picture together in its head. I say to the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that, once the police investigations are complete, it would be interesting for the police officers involved to come before the Select Committee—it may fall to another Committee as well—to discuss what their approach has been and why, and what lessons might be learned for future disclosures to Parliament. I end by turning, rather unfortunately, to the last speech that Peter Mandelson ever made in the Lords, where he said: “I feel very deeply that there will not be anything like the systematic undermining of the Civil Service that we have seen in recent years…when government policy was conducted by private WhatsApp, rather than on properly considered Civil Service advice.” —[ Official Report, House of Lords, 28 November 2024; Vol. 841, c. 830.] This scandal has taken the jobs of the ambassador to Washington, of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, of the Cabinet Secretary and of the chief official in the Foreign Office—and, ultimately, it will take the job of the Prime Minister.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  The reason I brought this up is that on Monday the right hon. Gentleman said: “I do recall having some limited exchanges with Peter Mandelson over WhatsApp, including those I have already discussed in the media”. —[ Official Report , 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 853.] I do not wish to push this point too far, but I do wish to understand: there were messages, so who decided that they were not to be submitted under the Humble Address? Please can he explain?

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely right: there is no higher authority than Parliament and consequently the Government should bear that in mind when delivering not just on this Humble Address but any future Humble Address. I do not wish to go over all of the ground that we have already covered, but there are clearly some discrepancies between what has been said in public and what has appeared in the Humble Address. There may be good reasons for some of that, but some is much harder to explain. I shall start with the information that appeared in The Guardian last week regarding the contents of the ISC’s summary document. Obviously that has not appeared in this return, as the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), and my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who sits on the ISC, have pointed out. We now have a situation in which the readership of The Guardian has been privy to the information that a document contained concerns about Mandelson’s relationships with at least four individuals: a Chinese Minister; Oleg Deripaska; a former Israeli Minister; and an unnamed man with whom Mandelson is said to have had “a relationship”. This information has come out of what, by the Government’s own definition, is a highly secure document, which we were previously told very few people had seen. I suggest that if this is so secure, first, that information should not have come out in any form and, secondly, given that it has, there really ought to be a leak inquiry because this is nationally sensitive information. I hope we can get confirmation later on from the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister that that is what is happening. [Interruption.] I hear that from across on the Treasury Bench, but it would be good to have it formally on the record later. I turn now to the central element that has featured in all of our debates: the Prime Minister’s role and judgment in the process of the appointment of Peter Mandelson. The Opposition established after the first release of documents that the Prime Minister was shown a due diligence document in which he was told that Mandelson had maintained an unhealthy relationship with Epstein after Epstein had been sent to prison. We have often in this House rightly paid tribute to the victims and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, stating that they should always be in our thoughts, but the Prime Minister’s thoughts were not with the victims and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein after he had read that due diligence document, and I think we should put that clearly on the record.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I also find that very difficult to believe. We have these comments about the due diligence documents, and we have these comments about Epstein. We also have the comments about Mandelson’s directorship of a Russian company that owned a defence company that supplied Putin’s war effort in Crimea, and about his business relationships in China, to name but a few things in the due diligence document. It can be no accident that on the same day that the due diligence document was given to the Prime Minister, the then Cabinet Secretary said to the Prime Minister, “If you’re going to appoint this man, get the security vetting done first. Make sure that you have done the security vetting and had his disclosure of interests before you confirm his appointment.” But the Prime Minister went ahead and did it anyway. This was an enormous, historic and really terrible error of judgment. What we then witnessed in September 2025, when the Mandelson appointment had completely fallen apart and he had been fired, was that the civil service scrabbled to try to retrofit a justification for what had happened. Chris Wormald, the then Cabinet Secretary, did not do a bad job, but it was clearly inaccurate because we have in black and white what Simon Case had set down. We now have the due diligence document and the fact that the security vetting happened after the appointment. We also now know, thanks to the second return, that in January 2025, Mandelson was sitting in Washington looking at “highly classified” documents—the phrase “highly classified” is used in an email from January 2025— despite not having any security vetting and despite not having special treatment and restricted access procedures, or STRAP, clearance. This is a massive error of judgment and of government. It goes right to the heart of why the Conservative party has been fighting for transparency on this issue: to expose the failings of the senior people in the Labour party at that time. If we look at the second return, and at document 36 released on Monday, we can see that people such as Sir Olly Robbins were saying, while Chris Wormald was writing his note in September 2025, that they could not comment because they had not seen the relevant documentation. That makes one wonder who else had not seen the relevant documentation, because the relevant documentation is not in this release. Had Chris Wormald seen the relevant documentation, or was he just doing what a Cabinet Secretary in a crisis might do, which was trying to protect the Prime Minister? What we do know, again from document 36, is that No. 10 itself signed off Chris Wormald’s note. No. 10 itself approved—and had been given an opportunity to edit—the Cabinet Secretary’s note. Again, this feels wrong. It feels as though the process was very obviously being commissioned by No. 10 and interfered with by No. 10 in order to give the answer that No. 10 wanted, rather than the truth. It was a bogus process. It was designed to get the Prime Minister off the hook, but transparency shows that he was very clearly on the hook. Turning to the broader material, we have some things that have appeared and some things that we can deduce have been retained by the police. We have some things that we know have been destroyed and some things that may have gone missing. I hope that, during the course of this debate, we can get to the bottom of which documents may fall into which category. In April this year, the Foreign Affairs Committee had Morgan McSweeney before it, and the Chair and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) asked him a number of questions about his messages. This was some time after the theft of his phone in October 2025. In question 970, the Chair said: “Are any of your text messages to Peter Mandelson—or not—going to be available in the Humble Address?” Morgan McSweeney said, “Yes.” In question 1117, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon, fearing that the theft of the phone might mean that information had been lost, asked: “Can we take it that your phone would have contained quite a lot of communications, either with Peter Mandelson or about Peter Mandelson’s appointment?” Morgan McSweeney replied: “Probably not much about his appointment that hasn’t already been available to No. 10, because when he was sacked, No. 10 did its own—I don’t want to say investigation, but its own research on what happened and why it happened and, as part of that process, I was asked to share messages and emails about the appointment and also to be interviewed”. So we know that, in April of this year, those messages still existed, that they were not affected by the theft of McSweeney’s phone and that they must have been available to the Government, but they are not in this this tranche of releases. We must therefore conclude that this is because they have been retained by the police, so let us assume that the McSweeney emails fall into that category, unless the Minister wishes to tell us that he has received any subsequent information to say that those messages were irretrievable. We then have the messages from the Prime Minister—or rather, we do not have any messages from the Prime Minister. It seems highly unlikely that the Prime Minister did not exchange any messages with Peter Mandelson at all, at any point. In fact, we must strongly suspect that he did, because there was a report in April in The Spectator by Tim Shipman, which quoted from some of those messages. We might think that those messages would have ended up being retained by the police, but when we look at the quotes that Tim Shipman had, they are incredibly anodyne. It is very unlikely that those messages would have been kept on grounds of national security or because they would be useful to a police investigation. Shipman says that “there is a text message which Keir Starmer sent the night before he made the announcement. ‘You’ll be brilliant in challenging circumstances,’ he told Mandelson. ‘And after many years of our discussions, we get to work together side by side. I really look forward to that.’” That did not age well.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  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.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I open my remarks by paying tribute to Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, who we learned had passed away during this debate. He was an incredible public servant who gave an enormous amount to his country. He was incredibly wise and generous, and I know that everyone in this House will miss him very much. In all these parliamentary encounters, we have been talking about a seeping of a great poison. The evil of Epstein seeped into his relationship with Peter Mandelson, which seeped into Mandelson’s influence on Government, which is still seeping into the way in which the Government have allowed themselves to behave. It is time for that to stop. Although we are approaching the point when we might be able to draw a line, that point is still quite a long way away, because we are dependent on the police releasing their documents. With that in mind, I ask the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to try a new approach: for us to build on what has already happened and go further, so that the House can be more reassured about what it is and is not being given sight of. As far as anyone can see, there is no good reason why the Government cannot tell the House more at the high level. As I said earlier, on Monday the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister gave us something more high-level in the four categories, but we can go further. There is no good reason why the information that has been given to the police cannot be given to the ISC. The Government could unilaterally decide to do that; they do not need to ask anyone’s permission. As has been raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) who used to be Chair of the Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who is not in his place, who is a current member of the Committee, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who is still on the Committee, this House has complete trust in the ISC. It entrusts it with the most confidential material that the state has on offer—STRAP-level material—so I do not think anyone here would believe that sharing the material given to the police with the ISC would in any way run the risk of prejudicing a trial. Consequently, I genuinely invite the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister to give the House that. All of us, even those who are not members of the ISC, should be entitled to know a bit more. We should be entitled to know about the number of messages being withheld. We should be given a degree of detail, because there is no reason why that would prejudice an investigation or a trial. I will go through a few points and then I will sit down and let the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister respond. I want to return to the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister’s own messages, not because I think he has done anything wrong—I do not believe he has—but because he disclosed to us the other day that he had messages that he did not feel were relevant and I wonder if he could tell us about them. They are obviously not in the returns, but because the Humble Address required the disclosure of messages between Ministers and Peter Mandelson, we need to know the process that was gone through with messages that were not in the Humble Address returns. Were they deleted? Were they deleted after they had been shown to officials? Were they shown to officials and it was decided they were not to be disclosed? It would be very good to have clarity, because it might give us insight into how other such messages were treated. Secondly, on the question of Morgan McSweeney’s messages, which we know still existed in April this year when he talked to the Foreign Affairs Committee about them and said that they were already in the possession of the Government because of the inquiry that Wormald had done in September last year, will the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister confirm that the process discovered those messages and consequently that Morgan McSweeney was telling the truth to that Committee? Do those messages exist? I do not think it prejudices an investigation or trial to know that those messages exist. Similarly, with Morgan McSweeney’s messages, the Prime Minister’s messages, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s messages, and so on, we deserve to know how many messages are being withheld. There is nothing in that data that would prejudice an investigation or a trial. That is what we care about—I know that is what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister cares about—and if the Government were to co-operate in that way, it would show a willingness and a transparency that we have not previously had. Related to that is the issue that I and several Back Benchers raised about other forms of electronic communication, particularly pictures, videos, voice recordings and attachments, none of which have made their way into the Humble Address returns. It seems very unlikely that all of them have been retained by the police, particularly when the messages they are related to are in the Humble Address returns. It feels like they have slipped through the net. Can the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister tell us a bit more about that? Lastly, to return to the point made by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and by my right hon. Friends, during the course of this debate I believe we have ascertained that the ISC did not see the mitigations. The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has not been able to detect any mitigations. I think we deserve to know whether there were any mitigations. Even if we cannot be told what they were, and even if we are told that they are being retained by the police, there is no good reason why we should not be told whether or not they exist. There is nothing in that information that would prejudice an investigation or a trial. It is time for the Government to take us to the next level of transparency. I very much hope that that is what the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister wants to do, because ultimately, all of this will come out in due course. If it does, and it turns out that the Government were unnecessarily withholding information, the scandal will continue again and again and it will infect more and more people. It does not need to do that. Let’s clear this up now.