Kirsty Blackman

This has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate, but at times it has been painful to listen to, because we are talking about a really terrible decision that was made by the Prime Minister, and about the retraumatising of victims, who have to keep hearing about this issue without seeing justice. If we were talking about a way to get justice, that would be different. The hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) made an excellent speech, and I agree that she has been a consistent champion of women’s safety, particularly online, but these issues have been constantly raised. Throughout the debate, hon. Members—not the hon. Member for Pontypridd—have waved or thrown around a significant number of dead cats. In fact, for anyone who has spent a lot of time going through the documents, perhaps it should be red boxes that have been waved around, especially ones with “President of the United States” written on them. An awful lot of time seems to have been dedicated to getting a red box for the President of the United States—that is civil servant time that could have been better spent being more transparent, rather than chasing the specific maker of red boxes and getting them to print things on one. One of the dead cats, or red boxes, is about the mitigations. It is important that there should have been mitigations, and that point was made when the Prime Minister was first given a document about whether Peter Mandelson should be appointed. Its advice was that mitigations would need to be put in place. The problem is not that mitigations were not put in place—I am not saying that they were put in place, or that we know or do not know which ones were put in place; the problem is that the Prime Minister made the decision in the first place. The information on the bit of paper that was given to the Prime Minister talked about the “reputational risk” of appointing somebody who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein. It was not a reputational risk; it was just a risk—a risk of retraumatising victims and a risk of giving somebody who had close links to various companies and to Russia a position of power. The Prime Minister knew about those problems, and it was incredibly cute of the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee to try to say that the Prime Minister really was not responsible for this, because he delegated it to other people. The Prime Minister made the decision—the Prime Minister has held up his hands and said that he made the decision—and nobody in the House can say that the fault was that the mitigations were not put in place. The fault is with the Prime Minister for making a political appointment and choosing somebody he knew—he was told it—was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.