Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)

There is going to be a review, and I hope it is very quick. I do not know about anyone else, but I would certainly like to draw a line under this. We need to understand what went wrong here. Mr el-Fattah was given British citizenship under the previous Government. The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, asked me about this and I did not give him an answer, so I will do that now. It takes a lot for us to remove someone’s citizenship. I was asked whether we look at the previous social media of everyone we provide consular assistance to. No, we do not do that routinely. There may be occasions where that is appropriate. Some of our fellow citizens—how shall I put this diplomatically?—have views that we do not particularly appreciate, but that does not mean that we do not try to help them. We do not make a judgment in all cases about why they went somewhere we told them not to go to, or got themselves in a situation we would prefer they had not got into. We provide assistance judgment free, if you like. This situation is slightly different because of its high-profile nature and because of ministerial involvement over successive Governments from all parties, so it is right that we look at exactly what went wrong here and why we did not know, because we may have made slightly different judgments at different points along the way. That is what this review is about. I hope it is quick so that we can share the findings and perhaps avoid this sort of situation in future.