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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Chapter 2: What is the Mandelson vetting saga about?
Today, Keir Starmer and the never-ending Peter Mandelson saga. It's a long-established rule of British government that if a minister says something false or misleading in the debating chamber, they have to return to correct the record.
Chapter 3: What did Keir Starmer say about the vetting failure?
Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
On Monday afternoon, it was Keir Starmer's turn.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. With permission, I'd like to provide the House with information that I now have about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as our ambassador to the United States.
Standing up before during MPs, Storm insisted he hadn't lied previously when he'd said that full due process had been followed. It was the Foreign Office, he said, that had misled him by not telling him that Mandelson had failed vetting procedures.
It beggars belief that throughout the whole timeline of events, officials in the Foreign Office saw fit to withhold this information from the most senior ministers in our system in government.
If he'd known, he said repeatedly, he would not have appointed him.
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Chapter 4: How did the opposition respond to Starmer's statements?
This was not a lack of asking. This wasn't an oversight. It was a decision. It was a... It was a decision taken not to share that information on repeated occasions. The opposition were not convinced. The Prime Minister appointed a national security risk to our most sensitive diplomatic post.
Instead of taking responsibility for the decisions he made, the Prime Minister has thrown his staff and his officials under the bus. He says he had no idea. He gives every impression of a prime minister in office, but not in power.
Has Starmer done enough to silence calls for him to step down?
Chapter 5: What was the original sin of Starmer's appointment of Mandelson?
And what does all of this tell us about his judgement and his authority as the prime minister? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, can Starmer survive the Maddelson scandal? Jonathan Freeland, welcome back to Today in Focus.
Good to be with you, Helen.
So you are, of course, a columnist at The Guardian and the host of our sister podcast, Politics Weekly America, and you are, for your sins, a long-time Peter Mandelson watcher on both sides of the Atlantic. And we're recording with you just after Keir Starmer's address to Parliament. How do you think he came across?
He looked sober and serious and for a while I thought he was getting through with the kind of command of the House and they were listening, hearing him out. A turning point came actually in this moment when he said lots of people here, members, will find it incredible.
Mr Speaker, I know many members across the House will find these facts to be incredible.
Yes.
Because, of course, it opened up the door for them to indeed say they did find his account incredible and for there to be jeers. And thereafter, it opened the door for a whole series of questions that were difficult, led by quite a good performance by leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, who just went in with more precision than she often has.
And so I think having started well, it went less well for him because there are quite a few questions there. And at the centre of it is his own admission of grave misjudgment.
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Chapter 6: Why did Mandelson fail the vetting process?
And we're going to come on to talk about the questions that he did answer and those that remain hanging. But before we go there, let's do a quick recap for those at the back, starting with what's been called the original sin of this scandal. Starmer appointing Peter Manelson to be the UK ambassador to the US back in December 2024.
This is a guy, of course, who was nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, a man who Donald Trump called Sneaky Pete. Why on earth did Starmer want such a controversial figure to have such a plum job?
In a way, it's partly the faults that drew him. I mean, it is partly that reputation for the black arts that has given Peter Mandelson what many in the public would think of as a negative reputation. But inside politics, people still believed until really these latest revelations. that he had an almost magical power.
He could understand politics and how it operated in a way that lesser mortals could not. He himself perpetuated that reputation. You know, you refer to me as a long-time Peter Mandelson watcher, and it is true.
Chapter 7: What did Starmer clarify in Parliament regarding the vetting?
The very first time I met him was weeks or months into the new Labour government of 1997. He greeted me by saying, Behold the Prince of Darkness, about himself. It was quite clear that he reveled in that reputation. He liked the idea that he could pull off outcomes that others thought were impossible.
And with the particular circumstance, namely the return of Donald Trump to the White House, they believed only somebody extraordinary could handle this extraordinary president. To catch a rogue, a maverick, it would take someone who was himself an out-of-the-box player. And for a while, let's remember two things.
One, when the appointment was announced, greeted almost universally across the Westminster Village as a moment of inspiration. Across the newspapers, media, lots of people said, this is a brainwave.
masterstroke but also it did seem to go well that he did get access to the trump administration trump seemed to have some kind of affection that was a positive nickname by trump standards and they did get that initial us uk trade deal people like us me the guardian thought it might not be worth the paper it's written on but it was a deal so at first that black arts master magician thing seemed to be working
And yet, he only managed seven months in the job, didn't he, before Starmer sacked him over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which he continued after Epstein's conviction for sexual offences.
And let's fast forward to last week and The Guardian's front page scoop, which said that Mandelson had failed developed vetting clearance in late January 2025, only for that advice to be overruled by the Foreign Office so that he could take up the post. Are we any clearer now why he failed that vetting? There are so many skeletons in his closet.
Which ones do you think did for him in terms of the security vetting?
Yeah, we don't know. And that's obviously this question of knowledge is central to the whole scandal. Keir Starmer is not actually saying that he knows now or that even he should have known. He's just saying I should have been given the up or down verdict.
The reasoning is legitimate that that stays secret because that could be all kinds of personal circumstances that, you know, no one would deserve to be made public. The suspicion around the place is that this wasn't Epstein-related. That, in a way, was already out there.
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Chapter 8: What unanswered questions remain for Keir Starmer?
This was the security vetting that went afterwards. This is likelier, so people say. They may not know. to relate to his business dealings, particularly with China and with Russia, through this company that Peter Mandelson set up in his post-government life called Global Council, very highly paid sort of strategic advice consultancy. And among its clients were Chinese and Russian corporations.
Kemi Bade, not leader of the opposition, asked about one of the Russian ones.
Systema is a Russian defense company closely linked to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin's war machine.
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.
But the truth is, we still have not had a definitive explanation, have we, from Keir Starmer on why he failed the security vetting. So let's talk a bit more about what Starmer did clear up in Parliament on Monday. What do you think we learned about why he was left in the dark about Mandelson failing the 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...
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