Tory chief Kemi Badenoch set out six questions for Sir Keir Starmer to answer, but the Prime Minister struggled to answer clearly and was instead jeered and laughed at by MPs in Parliament
Sir Keir Starmer was accused of hiding behind a broken record script on Monday afternoon as he dodged six bruising questions over the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal.
In a high-stakes Commons showdown, Tory chief Kemi Badenoch cornered the Prime Minister with a dossier of “uncomfortable truths” – but Starmer stuck to his guns, insisting he knew nothing of the failed vetting checks.
The PM claimed he was “staggered” to only find out last Tuesday that Mandelson had actually failed his top-level security checks.
Badenoch demanded to know:
- Does Starmer accept his claim that “full due process was followed” was not true?
- Why did Downing Street not deny allegations from The Independent’s David Maddox in September last year that Mandelson had failed security vetting?
- Why did he say nobody in Number 10 was aware about Mandelson failing vetting, despite Maddox’s question?
- Why is the PM “furious” with the vetting process, when one of his ministers told the Commons back in September that “the national security vetting process is rightly independent of ministers who are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome”?
- How could Starmer insist in the Commons that Mandelson’s vetting revealed his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, when he had not seen the details of the vetting?
- Did Starmer know Mandelson allegedly remained a director of a Russian defence company linked to Vladimir Putin when Crimea was invaded?
Instead of answering, Sir Keir went into full repeat mode. He insisted: “If I had known… I would not have gone ahead with the appointment.”
He threw civil servants under the bus, claiming it “beggars belief” that Foreign Office officials didn’t tell him Mandelson was a security risk. He even fired Sir Olly Robbins over the mess – despite allies of the civil servant insisting the law forbids ministers from seeing private vetting data.
“I simply do not accept that Foreign Office officials could not have informed me,” Starmer said at the dispatch box.
Ministerial code in tatters?
But Badenoch wasn’t buying the clueless act. She accused the PM of a bombshell breach of the Ministerial Code, claiming he “inadvertently misled” the House and failed to correct the record for nearly a week.
“The Prime Minister has chosen not to repeat the truth from the dispatch box,” she blasted, as the PM looked on all red-faced.
Despite the grilling, Starmer refused to budge from his script.
Kemi Badenoch said the PM is blaming everyone other than himself. She said: “The prime minister has thrown his staff and his officials under the bus. This is a man who once said: ‘I will carry the can for the mistakes of any organisation I lead’.
“Instead, he has sacked his cabinet secretary, he has sacked his director of communications, he has sacked his chief of staff, and he has now sacked the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office. All of these people fired for a decision.”
Dianne Abbott asked: “It’s one thing to say, as he insists on saying: ‘Nobody told me, nobody told me anything, nobody told me.’ The question is, why didn’t the Prime Minister ask?”
Senior Labour MP John McDonnell alleged the prime minister gave an “unspoken message” to civil servants to appoint Peter Mandelson whatever issues there were. “The message that unspoken message to civil servants was what Mandelson wants, Mandelson gets,” he says.