Emily Thornberry

May I just finish? For instance, I said this: “if you had come before us, we would have looked on the internet—we would have googled—and we would have found that Channel 4 had done a documentary, ‘The Prince & the Paedophile’, that clearly highlighted Mandelson’s links with Epstein. We would have given consideration to the Financial Times and Guardian reports in June 2023 that referenced the JP Morgan internal investigation. In those reports, what was most damning of all was that Epstein was sentenced in 2008 to 18 months’ imprisonment for soliciting an underage girl, and Peter Mandelson goes to stay in his townhouse in Manhattan in 2009. At that time, Peter Mandelson was the Business Secretary. So we have the Business Secretary staying in the townhouse in Manhattan of someone convicted of paedophilia.” We would have asked those questions, and whatever answers would have been given, whether they were honest or not, would have been out there in public. The problem, I think, was that a decision was made in the haste of Donald Trump’s election to go for an “imaginative”, “inspiring” or “alternative” person to go to the United States, and not enough time was spent on it. The decision was therefore made to appoint, subject to—