00:00On September the 11th last year, a journalist called David Maddox wrote to the Director of Communications at Number 10,
00:06Tim Allen,
00:07saying that he'd been told by two sources that Mandleton had not cleared vetting, asking for a comment.
00:15Here's Allen's reply. Basically, he says, vetting was done by the Foreign Office in a normal way.
00:21Was Allen being, as they say, economical with the truth, or did he just not know that there had been
00:29a problem with the vetting?
00:30You will have to ask those questions to Tim Allen and yourself. I'm not going to speak on behalf of
00:38him, and I don't think that's fair.
00:39He was responding for the Prime Minister to a journalist. The Prime Minister is now saying he didn't know anything
00:47about this vetting.
00:49Let me go back to what I said.
00:52All ministers were told that he had got developed vetting status.
00:57We were not told that the Foreign Office took that decision, whereas the UK security vetting advised against.
01:07We were not told that. We're just coming back to the same issue here, Trevor.
01:12And if we had known that, he wouldn't have been appointed in the first place.
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