Jonathan Freedland

And among its clients were Chinese and Russian corporations.

Kemi Bade, not leader of the opposition, asked about one of the Russian ones.

There's also been talk of the fact that Peter Mandelson had a share in a big Chinese pharmaceutical company.

So those things could have presented conflicts of interest for a UK ambassador sitting there in Washington getting very secret classified information across his desk about China, about Russia, about the US and UK allied posture against those countries.

Was he going to be conflicted?

That's the sort of thing you can imagine.

Again, we don't know.

that might have aroused the interest of those people doing that heavier, more intense developed or security vetting.

In a way, he fleshed out just more the centre of his case.

As a lawyer, he was advancing a case, and that case was essentially to point the finger at what he painted as an egregious, extraordinary decision and set of decisions by officials, particularly one then newly appointed permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Ollie Robbins.

He was saying that those decision-makers

had a power that until last week was barely known in Whitehall, including apparently by Downing Street, which was to receive the advice of the vetters, the security vetting agency, and then to overrule it.

So essentially, the people who did the vetting flashed a red light, said, do not appoint this guy.

Ollie Robbins sits at his desk and thinks, I'm going to overrule that, ignore that advice.

One thing Starmer said today, I don't think this was known before, is that other departments can't really do that, that the decision of the security vetting agencies is binding for other departments.

But through some quirk of Whitehall, the Foreign Office get the power to override it.

Top official at the...

Foreign Office, Ollie Robbins, decided first to override it and give security clearance to Mandelson anyway, and then not to tell anybody that he'd made that decision.

And I think what buttressed Keir Starmer's case, he made a lot of it, was the fact that even later on, once Mandelson had gone and Keir Starmer set up an inquiry, a review,

under the then Cabinet Secretary, the top civil servant for the whole country, Sir Chris Wormald.