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The process that should take months, but was telescoped into weeks, resulted in the failure of Peter Mandelson to pass Developed Vetting for one of the most sensitive jobs for Britain in the world.
Its main focus is to exposure liars and anyone vulnerable to blackmail.
The vetting system is intentionally intrusive. It is believed to cost at least £80,000 per person, and involves cross checking every detail of the subject’s personal lives.
Those who have been through it know that the key is candour when faced with the searching questions in interviews about the use of porn, your sex life, drug and drinking experiences and habits, affairs, kinks, family contacts, travel history.
Agents for the United Kingdom Security Vetting service will use every possible resource, overt and covert, to scrutinize candidates.
Open source information on friendships abroad, foreign contacts, financial relationships, associations with known convicted criminals would emerge. So would gaps in financial reporting, unexplained loads and gifts would be highlighted.
“These are all the necessary parts of making sure that whatever is in someone’s background that makes them vulnerable – we know about it – so that they are less likely to be pressed into betraying their country for financial gain or through blackmail,” said a UK based former civil servant who has gone through the vetting process.
“You can admit to some quite dodgy stuff and still pass – but lying is a red flag fail.”
Mandelson, who was known anyway to have been friends with Jeffrey Epstein prior to the latter’s convictions for sex crimes, was announced as the British ambassador to Washington on December 20 2025.
He was in post by February 25 the following year – which meant that his clearance was pushed up the queue or others in less exalted positions.
Typically, security sources have explained to The Independent, that involve the urgent interviewing of close friends and associates of Mandelson by officials from the vetting agency.
They ask probing and, for ordinary civilians, often highly intrusive questions about candidates. These answers are then used to check the honesty of what the candidate says in their own interviews.
Mandelson would, it should be assumed, have been asked to explain the receipt of several payments from Jeffrey Epstein as well as payments from the alleged people trafficker to his now husband – after Epstein’s conviction.
Mandelson has said publicly that he cannot recall these payments – it is not clear that such an answer would have satisfied UKSV.
He has further denied an impropriety amid allegations, revealed in the Epstein files published in the US, that allegedly suggest he lobbied the UK government on banking and other financial issues that Epstein had an interest in – and that he forwarded market sensitive government material to Epstein while he was Business Secretary in 2009.
Mandelson’s flights at Epstein’s expense, his stays on Epstein’s property, would have, or should have, been known about and explained in DV interviews with the UKSV as they were recorded in flight logs.
Emails between the two men, and these other details, led to Mandelson being fired as ambassador to Washington.
Sir Olly Robbins, who was the civil service head of the foreign office when Mandelson took over, has resigned over his department’s decision to overrule the UKSV and give Mandelson access to the most secret of secrets and most secret relationships that any British official could encounter.
Mandelson’s day to day job involved being privy to bilateral intelligence of the kind even hidden from the Five Eyes shared system of the Anglosphere involving the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
He would have been present for, or hosted, informal chats with top American intelligence officials and the heads of British intelligence agencies.
Tories have, inevitably, called for the head of the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer. Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP for Tonbridge is a former security minister and as an officer in military intelligence and as military assistant to the then Chief of the General Staff, general David Richards, he went through the DV process.
“Our government, rightly, spends millions on vetting. It’s not perfect but it’s the only rational response to the very real threat of espionage, corruption and blackmail,” he said on X.
“It’s intrusive and not pleasant, and it takes months; but it’s necessary. Holding a clearance is limiting but losing one is career-ending, as it should be.
“I’ve been vetted and responsible for vetting as a soldier and minister. I’ve never heard of anyone who failed vetting getting a senior position, or any position of sensitivity.
“Given the essential oversight of the intelligence sharing and commercial relationship between the US and UK, it’s hard to think of a more sensitive position.”
He went on to explain that the kind of waiver that was given Lord Mandelson would, usually, have involved a ministerial sign off.
They are necessarily issued when there is an urgent need to include an unvetted agent into a secret process or include someone in the secret realm when his clearance was in the pipeline.
“It is extraordinary to suggest that our ambassador to the US not only held no ministerial waiver for the temporary absence of his vetting clearance but, worse, had actually been vetted and found to be personally a risk to the security of the UK and appointed anyway,” Tughendat said.
