Pippa Crerar

And even if they say that these jobs, these postings only proceed once somebody has got their secure vetting, he is almost a fait accompli by the time he arrived.

And so the vetting process was also already underway, though what he revealed was that the Foreign Office, not just during his time, but particularly under his predecessor, Philip Barton, had come under quite a lot of pressure from Downing Street to expedite that process.

Now, what Downing Street would say is because they wanted to get Peter Manderson to the embassy in Washington before Donald Trump or as soon as possible after Donald Trump entered the White House.

But nevertheless, it was absolutely clear to Ollie Robbins that the expectation from his bosses was that Peter Mandelson was going come what may.

Yeah, and I think that's really important point, Lucy, because ultimately that's at the heart of why this has become a big problem for the prime minister, is that all roads lead back to what one MP described to me as the original sin, which was Keir Starmer's decision to appoint Peter Mannington in the first place, despite knowing everything that we already knew about him initially.

and everything that was in the public domain about his business links, his personal relationships, particularly his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

You didn't need deep vetting to tell you that he was going to be a risky appointment.

So we all knew that.

And that's ultimately what it comes down to, is whether the prime minister's judgment on this was wrong.

And quite clearly, it was catastrophically so.

Yeah, we don't know all the details, of course, of what the deep vetting process found.

But what we do know is that the vetting officer, the individual responsible for carrying out those checks, for interviewing Mandelson twice and indeed people in his life and for sort of investigating his financial dealings, his personal life, his business dealings, came to the conclusion out of three options, low, medium and high, that appointing Peter Mandelson to the role would be a high risk and

And faced with three options of what his or her recommendation or advice would be to the foreign office.

One would be to agree to give security clearance and approve the vetting.

One would be to approve the vetting with mitigations and one would be to deny security clearance.

The recommendation was to deny it.

So we may not have known all the details.

And indeed, one of the fascinating things out of the hearing this morning was,

was that Ollie Robbins didn't know all the details.

Not the details that the vetting officer would have gleaned from interviews and Peter Munson's bank statements and so on, but apparently hadn't seen that sort of template decision that was produced by the vetting process or indeed any sort of summary documents explaining why.