Peter Mandelson was not subject to security vetting before being named as ambassador to the US, nor was the Foreign Office asked to weigh in on due diligence that took place before the appointment was announced, the foreign secretary has said.
In a letter to the Foreign Affairs Committee, Yvette Cooper and Foreign Office permanent secretary Sir Olly Robbins said the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team had undertaken “a due diligence process” before Lord Mandelson's appointment as ambassador was announced, but that security vetting did not happen until after the announcement in December.
They said the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was not asked to contribute to the pre-appointment due diligence and “no issues were raised with the FCDO as a result of this process”.
They did not give details of what the due-diligence process entailed but stressed that it “was not a security check”.
Cooper and Robbins were responding to a series of questions from the Foreign Affairs Committee, raised in a letter by committee chair Dame Emily Thornberry last week.
Mandelson was sacked by Keir Starmer last week after emails emerged showing that the peer’s friendship with – and support for – convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein had continued much longer than had previously been thought.
On Monday, the prime minister said he would never have appointed Mandelson “had I known then what I know now”.
The select committee has also called for Robbins to give evidence on the appointment at a hearing, alongside the head of the Cabinet Office's propriety and ethics team. In a statement earlier this week, Thornberry said Mandelson’s dismissal “raises serious questions about the integrity of our vetting and security processes”.
Thornberry’s letter, dated 12 September, raised a series of concerns about whether security concerns had arisen during the vetting process, how they had been dealt with, and whether security vetting had been rushed or watered down to speed up the process.
In their reply yesterday, Cooper and Robbins said Mandelson’s security vetting began the day his appointment was announced and was “conducted to the usual standard set for Developed Vetting in line with established Cabinet Office policy”.
The checks were completed by the time Mandelson took on the role in February, they said.
They said the FCDO had requested a “priority clearance process for a swifter decision” to enable Mandelson to take on the job quickly.
However, they said priority clearances are a standard offer by UK Security Vetting and involve the same checks and are carried out to the same standard as other Developed Vetting clearances.
Thornberry also asked whether any conditions had been imposed on the remit of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to mitigate any security concerns raised during the appointment and vetting process.
Cooper and Robbins declined to answer this question, citing confidentiality around personal information and “long-established practice” not to comment on individual National Security Vetting cases.
They also declined to say whether a decision had been taken to dismiss any security concerns that had arisen, for the same reasons.
However, they specified that the process did not involve No.10 – responding to Thornberry’s query about whether the FCDO or No.10 had taken any such decisions.
Yesterday, Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty told the House of Commons that Mandelson “should not and would not have been appointed as ambassador in the light of the shocking information that came to light in the past week”.
He said it was “not the case” – as some critics have said – that the extent of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein “was clear all along”, citing the peer’s other high-profile appointments outside government.
“If the full depth and extent of this relationship had been so obvious I hardly think that Lord Mandelson would have been one of the leading candidates to become chancellor of Oxford University and I highly doubt that he would have been offered the job as presenter on Times Radio,” he said.
He also stressed that the national security vetting process is “rightly independent of ministers, who are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome”.