Jim Allister

I want to use the few minutes that I have to focus on how it could be that, just last Wednesday, the Prime Minister of this country came to tell this House that he had “confidence” in Lord Mandelson, the friend of the paedophile, in his role as a key ambassador for the Government. The Prime Minister said that not once but twice, when the Leader of the Opposition rightly asked him, declaring: “I have confidence in him”, and “I have confidence in the ambassador”.—[Official Report, 10 September 2025; Vol. 772, c. 860.] Those were his ringing endorsements of Lord Mandelson. I want to examine the circumstances that then prevailed when he said that he had confidence in Lord Mandelson. What is confidence? Confidence is having trust, faith and belief in someone. That is what the Prime Minister was telling this House in respect of Lord Mandelson last Wednesday, yet by Monday it was a matter of public knowledge that the Bloomberg emails had been published. The Prime Minister has since made some startling claims. He said that when he was answering Prime Minister’s questions he knew that questions were being asked, but he knew only about media inquiries about the emails and that questions were being put to Lord Mandelson. Our Prime Minister is a King’s Counsel. The natural instinct of a lawyer is to interrogate, and the training of a lawyer is to equip them to interrogate. However, this House is being told that when the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and said “I have confidence” in Lord Mandelson, even though he knew that questions were being asked, he did not interrogate them for himself or ask about what was being asked. When he told the House that he knew that there were media inquiries about emails, we are being asked to believe that he did not ask, “What emails? What did they say?”