Contribution
My right hon. Friend is right. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister will have heard his remarks, and I hope he will respond to them.
Further to what my right hon. Friend said, the Humble Address was in February, but it was not until March that the Government asked Peter Mandelson for his phone, and Peter Mandelson then refused. As I and other Members said on Monday, the Government should seek to go after Peter Mandelson’s exit payment if he denies co-operation with the Humble Address. It is totally unacceptable that the House should be denied this critical information. We have some information that is retained, some information that appears to have been destroyed and some information that appears to have gone missing.
I wish to turn to some remarks that the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister made on Monday about his own messages, as he brought them up. I think that will be a useful case study. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said:
“I do recall having some limited exchanges with Peter Mandelson over WhatsApp, including those I have already discussed…but these conversations did not involve transacting Government business and were in line with official guidance on the use of non-corporate communications channels at the time.”—[Official Report, 1 June 2026; Vol. 786, c. 853.]
That is all well and good, but who decided that those messages fell into that category? Did the right hon. Gentleman decide that himself? Did he show them to officials, who then decided? Did he show them to the police? Who made the decision? Again, we must ask these questions of all Ministers who were asked to disclose information. Where is it that people have self-edited? Where is it that people have had auto-deletion on their phones? Where is it that people have refused to hand things over? We deserve to know.
Something that I believe is missing throughout the three volumes we received on Monday is photos, videos, voice notes and, more significantly, attachments. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s explanation for the Government’s approach to those types of document. Let me draw attention in particular to document 33, from 15 September 2025. The email explicitly refers to an attachment, which is pertinent to the subject of the Humble Address, but that document is not available. I could have been led to believe that that document may have been retained by the police, were it not for the fact that all attachments seem to be missing and all photos, voicemails and videos are also missing. I cannot help but feel that it has accidentally fallen out of the full disclosure. May we have some clarity on that?
Let me turn to Peter Mandelson’s declarations of interest, which are one of the most important classes of document; they are perhaps the most important class of document that we are yet to see. We now know that something definitely does exist—first, because the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister told us on Monday, and secondly, because there are references to a back-and-forth about Mandelson’s contacts in the release. Mandelson pushed back on a number of occasions, saying, “I know a lot of foreign people. I have a lot of contacts. I cannot be expected to disclose everything. There was a suggestion from one official not to worry about it too much, just to get on with it and give them a list.”
We appear also to be seeing an absence of documents, such as the mitigations that the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury, referred to—Collard’s document. If we add it all together—the absence of the declaration of interests, the absence of the mitigations designed perhaps to handle Mandelson’s relationships with his business contacts when in office, the fact that the documents of certain members of the Cabinet are entirely absent, and the business interests that we know Mandelson had—I think we can reasonably hypothesise about what the police are looking at. That would be—this is speculation—an abuse of his position in Washington to support the interests of his business relations. It is very unfortunate that we will not see that information for some time, because it goes to the heart of one of the problems with the appointment of Mandelson in the first place. [Interruption.] I think Madam Deputy Speaker is encouraging me to wind up, so that I will do. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I can understand why the Government do not want me to ask them any more questions.
In conclusion, there are a number of things that we need of the Government. Most importantly, we need a slightly fresh approach to disclosure where we are told a bit more about what the police have: how many documents in each category, how many WhatsApps and emails of the Prime Minister, Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, and so on. It is important that the House understands where things have gone missing and can start to put that picture together in its head. I say to the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that, once the police investigations are complete, it would be interesting for the police officers involved to come before the Select Committee—it may fall to another Committee as well—to discuss what their approach has been and why, and what lessons might be learned for future disclosures to Parliament.
I end by turning, rather unfortunately, to the last speech that Peter Mandelson ever made in the Lords, where he said:
“I feel very deeply that there will not be anything like the systematic undermining of the Civil Service that we have seen in recent years…when government policy was conducted by private WhatsApp, rather than on properly considered Civil Service advice.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 28 November 2024; Vol. 841, c. 830.]
This scandal has taken the jobs of the ambassador to Washington, of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, of the Cabinet Secretary and of the chief official in the Foreign Office—and, ultimately, it will take the job of the Prime Minister.