Ed Davey

Mr Speaker, I can see from your restlessness in the Chair that you do not necessarily want me to go down that particular avenue, but I hope I speak for others when I reflect on how incredibly depressing it is that nothing has really changed. The British people are facing a cost of living emergency. They need a Government focused on tackling it and a Government they can trust, but instead this is what we have. We have a Prime Minister who promised to be different, who promised to turn the page and who promised, above everything else, change. He has now mired this Government in the same endless cycle of chaos and scandal as the last one. He is a Prime Minister who appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, even though his links to Jeffrey Epstein had been widely reported, even though those reports had been brought directly to the Prime Minister’s attention and even though the Cabinet Secretary had advised him that security clearance should be acquired before the choice was confirmed. He is a Prime Minister who, despite all that, still told the House repeatedly that “full due process” was followed. He is a Prime Minister who says that “No pressure existed whatsoever” to appoint Mandelson, despite all the evidence we have heard to the contrary, as the right hon. Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) set out in her speech. We have a Prime Minister who desperately claims that he would not have appointed Mandelson if he had known about UK Security Vetting’s recommendation. The Prime Minister said that we would find what he told us to be “incredible”, and we do, but that last part is the most incredible of all. Does he really expect us to believe that after all of that—ignoring the clear warnings from the propriety and ethics team, ignoring the advice of his then Cabinet Secretary to get the security vetting done first, and ignoring everything we already knew about Peter Mandelson and announcing his appointment to the world before the vetting had been done—if he had been given the same recommendation as Olly Robbins received that it was a borderline case, he would have cancelled the appointment? Do Members on the Government Benches really believe that is what would have happened? That claim is all that is left of the Prime Minister’s case for the defence, and I am afraid that it just does not stand up. I will finish not with my own words, but with those of another Member four years ago—the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner). I know that her words carry a lot of weight on the Labour Benches. She said that “the only way to get to the bottom of this issue and regain public confidence in our democracy is by respecting the processes that have been created to enshrine the rules of our Parliament. I point out that the process we are following today is in place only because the Prime Minister has failed to do the decent thing and resign. I repeat: honesty, integrity and the truth matter in our politics. Today, MPs across the House have the opportunity to defend those principles and to vote to support our democracy.”—[Official Report, 21 April 2022; Vol. 712, c. 425.] The right hon. Lady was right back then. That is the opportunity before MPs today, and I urge us all to take it.