As he set out his defence to the House of Commons, Sir Keir Starmer was asked multiple times by MPs, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, about The Independent’s front page story on 12 September last year that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting.
More damaging still are the WhatsApp messages sent by this publication to the then director of communications in Downing Street, Tim Allan, raising the issue on 11 September.
This has been described by a number of civil servants and senior politicians as the “smoking gun” in the entire scandal, because it is at odds with the prime minister’s own assessment.
Sir Keir claimed that he, his ministers and Downing Street only found out about the security vetting failure last week. But doubt has been cast on this claim because The Independent informed Downing Street’s most senior communications official months before.
Added to that, it raises serious questions about what the prime minister was told in September by his then director of communications.
In normal circumstances these issues are raised through the system and lead to investigations into the truth. Most crucially they should have been a red flag raised with the prime minister.
But it seems that nothing happened and the warnings were ignored.
This is no small thing. Lord Mandelson spent months as the UK’s ambassador to Washington.
He was the most important UK diplomat in the United States, at a time when Britain was grappling with a difficult president in the White House.
As ambassador, he would have been party to a huge amount of information, some of it designed to be seen only by those who have passed the highest level of security vetting.
When the prime minister sacked him last September, he accused Lord Mandelson of lying to his officials during that process and said he had fired him when the full extent of his relationship emerged with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Then, crucially, in February, Sir Keir told journalists: “Security vetting, carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise that gave him clearance for the role. You have to go through that before you take up the post. Clearly, both the due diligence and the security vetting need to be looked at again.”
But this took place months after The Independent informed No 10 of the failure.
On Monday, the PM insisted that he should have been told last year that his former man in Washington had failed security clearance. But, of course, Downing Street was told this – by The Independent.
Last week, Sir Keir said he was “furious” when he found out and that it was unacceptable he was not told.
Within hours he had fired the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins. That, Sir Keir has been very clear about, was because he was aware of the recommendation not to give Lord Mandelson security clearance and did not inform the prime minister.
But Sir Keir still faces a key question, one which was summed up by the mother of the House, the long-time Labour MP Diane Abbott, who is currently suspended from the party and sits as an independent.
She cornered him in the Commons to ask: “It’s one thing to say, as [Starmer] insists on saying, ‘Nobody told me, nobody told me anything, nobody told me’. The question is, why didn’t the prime minister ask?”
