Lisa Smart

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention, and to her constituent who has contacted her about that important point. My view, and the view of the Liberal Democrats, is that we should get to the bottom of how this role was created and the vetting that was done before the appointment, in order to understand the extent—or lack of extent—of that vetting. If somebody is being paid from the public purse, they should be held to an extremely high standard and there should be transparency about their role and the creation of that role, so I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The public deserve to know whether sections of their Government at the time put in place systems to shield Mountbatten-Windsor from accountability, even at a cost to the national interest. Of course the police must undertake their work unimpeded, and of course anybody who has committed a crime should face justice if they are found to have committed that crime, but a police investigation—no matter what prosecution it leads to—is not enough. It is essential for the strength of our constitution and our social fabric that we go further and clean up the broken system that facilitated this scandal in the first place.