Tories urge govt to publish Mandelson vetting information

ODN

The Conservatives will bring a vote in Parliament to call for vetting information surrounding Peter Mandelson's appointment as US Ambassador to be released, Alex Burghart revealed. The Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said: "We need to see what the prime minister saw when so we can all understand just how bad his judgement was in this case."   Report by Kennedyl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

Transcript

00:00This is deeply concerning because it means that people at the highest levels were actually aware of these problems

00:06before they appointed Peter Mandelson and sent him to be our ambassador in Washington.

00:11And, you know, I worked in number 10.

00:13What will have happened is that the vetting services, security services, will have produced a report,

00:18often in conjunction with the person in question,

00:21and then that information has to go to the person who makes the decision on the appointment,

00:26which in this case is the Prime Minister.

00:28So it is very, very likely that the Prime Minister, his Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney,

00:33and the then Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, all knew that there were problems.

00:38And yet they went ahead with the appointment anyway.

00:41And then when these problems came to light, they hesitated for 24 hours before sacking him.

00:46We're calling on the government to publish all of this information.

00:49There's no problem with security now because the fact of the matter is a lot of this information is in the public domain anyway.

00:56We need to see what the Prime Minister saw when so that we can all understand just how bad his judgment was in this case.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended