YouSaid · the spoken record
Emily Thornberry
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On the record 2005–2026
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This is everything the corpus holds for Emily Thornberry. It is not everything they have said on the record.
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“I learnt a great deal during my trip to Ukraine last month. I learnt that the Ukrainians see themselves as Europeans, that they know who their friends are and that they are incredibly grateful to Britain, but that they are also very disappointed as they hit this very difficult winter. We know that they will need about £90 billion to get through it. There are £200 billion-worth of Russian assets frozen in Europe; what can we in Britain do to ensure that those assets are unlocked and used in Ukraine? Might one answer be to lead by example? Is there something we can do about the £25 billion-worth of Russian assets that we have in the UK and—as we head towards the anniversary of Abramovich’s being told that he had to hand them over—the £2.5 billion-worth of Chelsea assets?”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When Pentonville Prison was built in 1842, I do not imagine anybody expected that today it would have twice the number of prisoners the Victorians thought ought to be kept there. Furthermore, Pentonville Prison is a London remand prison—people used to be there for six to eight months on remand in pretty terrible conditions, but now they are there for years because of the crisis in the criminal justice system. The question is this: when they are released, what should be done with them? I was speaking to the governor of the prison on Friday, and he said that if the Government wished them to, prison officers would be quite happy to be trained to put the tags on people themselves before releasing them.”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I welcome the calling out of what seem to be the IRGC’s actions in Fairford, not just by the UK but by more than 30 of our friends and partners, from Albania to the USA. I thank them for standing in solidarity with us. Much of the IRGC’s divisive work, whether it is feeding antisemitism or through bots wearing kilts, is done quietly in the shadows and often online. This time, it looks like the Iranians have been caught out through the diligence of a local resident. Does the Minister agree that our approach needs to change and that we need to be clear about what Iranian attempts to hurt our country look like—both offline and online, with more examples—so that the public are confident enough to identify such attacks, just as they did at Fairford?”
House of Commons13 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to the Prime Minister for treating concerted attempts to undermine our democracy with the seriousness they deserve. While it is always difficult to measure the success of such campaigns, it is also difficult to believe that Russia would bother if there was not at least a chance it might succeed. One thing is for sure: over the past 10 years, Russia has certainly got better at it, while at the same time, elements of the British state have been far too complacent about it. To hear the Prime Minister announce a new centre for information defence was encouraging. Can he assure the House that this centre will be publicly accountable and scrutinised by Parliament, and in particular by the Foreign Affairs Committee?”
House of Commons12 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Israeli Minister Ben Gvir has said, “It is time for the state of Israel to publicly recognise that the Falkland Islands are Argentine territory under occupation”, and that we, the British, are not merely occupying the territory but, in carrying out oil drilling there, are stealing money from the Argentine people. Does the Minister think he knows that the Argentine Government agree with him and, as a result, have filed criminal complaints against Navitas Petroleum, which is of course an Israeli company? Does she think he knows that the company was very happy to sign a deal with the UK to explore the Sea Lion oil project in the British Falkland Islands? Or does she think that Ben Gvir was just too busy thinking of new ways to inflict ever yet more cruelty on the Palestinian people?”
House of Commons8 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I congratulate the Foreign Secretary on taking such a brave stance, and on his powerful and moving statement. I am so proud that this has finally happened; but could Ministers and officials meet my Committee and me, and some of our officials, to discuss whether we can implement these sanctions as quickly as possible?”
House of Commons8 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“At last! I am so very happy to see a British Government—a Labour British Government—finally doing the right thing and taking a strong stance against the illegal building of settlements in the occupied territories of Palestine, no longer a bystander wringing their hands. The Foreign Affairs Committee called for this unanimously over a year ago. As I look around the Chamber, I see so many people who have spent years campaigning, and there are many more outside the House. We are all smiling today. Britain has an absolute obligation to take a strong, clear stance on this issue, as a country that played such a pivotal role in the establishment of Israel during our mandate but has frankly failed in the protection of the interests of the Palestinians.”
House of Commons8 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Minister refers to crypto’s anonymity of source. Does she not agree that it is difficult to know what the attraction of crypto is, other than the fact it allows someone to hide where the money comes from? Why not just be straightforward and simply ban its use? Not a temporary ban or a moratorium—just ban it. Why cannot people simply give old-fashioned cash to support political parties?”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The allegations that the hon. Lady makes are extremely serious, and should be based on robust evidence. To be told that “volunteers had reported” is not sufficient, and she must understand the implications of what she is saying, in terms of social coherence and undermining the very status of our democracy. I ask her to be a little more cautious, and to proceed on the basis of evidence.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“People can come to this country, live here, pay their taxes and get involved in our democracy. Then they can make donations. If they live somewhere else in a tax haven—tough, they cannot.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we have seven Ministers for disinformation, we have no Minister for disinformation, but disinformation is undermining our democracy right now, and it will get worse coming up to the next general election. There is not enough in the Bill to be able to deal with that. I ought to speak to my new clauses, including new clause 85, which are supported by the TUC and have been welcomed by Transparency International. I am proposing a complete ban on overseas voters donating to political parties. Why not? I do not understand why not. Rycroft says that foreign money is more difficult to trace and more difficult to ensure that it is clean. That is why he puts a £100,000 cap on it. Well, why do we not go further? We are the politicians. Why do we not just ban it?”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I recommend the report to Members, if they are in any doubt about the ways in which malign actors, either state or non-state, are trying to influence and undermine democracies across Europe, but if we think that we are free of that because we are on the other side of the channel, we have got another think coming. We are so complacent about the things that can happen, that have happened and that might happen to our country next. We must protect ourselves. We must take this seriously. There is not enough in this Bill to protect us. We must go further. I do not understand why we do not. For example, when it comes to disinformation from other countries trying to influence our democracy, how many Ministers do we have who are responsible for disinformation? We have seven.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I applaud the Government’s ambitions in this Bill and the fact that they want to fix politics and for it to be fair and free from foreign interference. There is much to be enthusiastic about in the Bill, although in the five minutes I have been given to speak, I cannot go through it all. This might be the only such legislation that we have before the next general election, and I believe that it is incumbent upon us to prepare ourselves and our constitution for the possibility, God forbid, that a populist party might take control of our country. We are allowing ourselves to be wide open to all kinds of things. The Foreign Affairs Committee did a report into foreign influence across Europe, and we saw a number of shocking things.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Although there are rumours that a group may discuss how much more we can do, will there really be enough legislative time to bring forward another Bill that will deal with the many problems we have? My predecessor, 180 years ago, was the MP for Finsbury, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe. He brought in the massive Chartist petition—3.3 million people wanting to be allowed to vote. So many people had signed it that they had to take the doors off the Chamber to get all the bits of paper through. Presumably it did not go into the Bag behind the Chair, but there was that much enthusiasm—that was what democracy was about. I do not want to be an MP for Finsbury who sits back complacently and allows our democracy to be undermined. We have to fight back.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“However, at the last local elections, the Greens registered candidates with the Electoral Commission as “first choice candidate” or “lead candidate”, so that, in an election with three votes, there was an instruction on the ballot paper as to who someone should vote for. That is an abuse, and it should be stopped. That is what that new clause is about. New clause 87 is about ballot papers always being in alphabetical order. I speak as a T. My constituents had to look very hard to find me, and fortunately they did, but when we vote in alphabetical order, the Ts are at the far end—and there were hardly any of us. It is definitely an advantage to be at the beginning of the alphabet. Why do we not have the Australian system, and just randomise it? There is so much more that we could do.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“No, I have only got two minutes. Come on! People should just pay their taxes and get involved. New clause 86 proposes that a donor would have to be a total citizen. It is not enough to come back to Britain and go, “Oh well, I’m here now. I’m going to pay a little bit of tax because there are various tax dodges and I can do that.” No, they have to be here paying their full whack of taxes, and then they can make donations to political parties. If they care so much about Britain and about democracy, they should come here and be a full citizen, in my opinion. My new clause 84 relates to descriptions on ballot papers. At the moment, instead of having just “the Labour party” on the ballot paper, it is possible to have “the Labour party, the party of equality and fairness”—fair enough.”
House of Commons2 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I begin by welcoming the Foreign Secretary and his new team to their places. In particular, I welcome the Minister; I am cross with her for leaving the Foreign Affairs Committee and we will miss her very much. She was a formidable member of our Committee, and I am proud to see her take such a well-deserved place on the Front Bench. Now to the work. On the issue of islands that the UK— and now supposedly the United States—takes a great interest in, will the Minister provide an official response to President Trump’s latest nonsense that he might withdraw support for UK sovereignty over the Falklands?”
House of Commons1 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Prime Minister is absolutely right: we must free our politics and bring back trust, and it seems to me that we could start doing it tomorrow. We could take foreign influence out of our politics by banning foreign money from our politics. I welcome the fact that the Government are going to amend the Representation of the People Act 1983 and cap such donations at £100,000, but given what has happened since the Rycroft review, I worry that the cap is not strong enough, and I think that the public agree with me. Given that this will probably be our last chance to protect our democracy before the next general election, will the Prime Minister give serious consideration to supporting my new clause 85, which would ban all foreign donations?”
House of Commons1 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“May I associate myself with the Minister’s condemnation of Iran’s attacks on its neighbours? Does he agree that at least part of the problem in the fragility of the deal is its very ambiguity? It is a deal that was negotiated in haste, at a distance and through third parties, and it inevitably does not reflect agreement, but rather fudges some of the deep differences between the parties. Does he agree that we need a sustainable deal that is thoroughly negotiated, has more detail and includes recognition that, inevitably, concessions are needed on both sides?”
House of Commons9 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My predecessor in 1848 presented to this place the huge Chartist petition calling for more democracy, and with the cry, “No taxation without representation!” I say this: “No outsize representation without paying your blinking taxes!””
House of Commons6 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“As a contributor to the Rycroft review—I just asked to go and see him—I very much welcome the reforms that have been announced. Just as we do not want companies to take the mickey and be vehicles either for dishonestly obtained funds or for foreign money into our democracy, we also have to be careful about individuals, and my question is about individuals returning to the UK. Will they be properly here—in other words, will they be here in the sense that they pay taxes? Surely any crypto billionaire coming from, say, Thailand to a farmhouse in Hampshire, who has developed a deep interest in our country, would also want to help pay for our schools, our roads and our hospitals.”
House of Commons6 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I recently read an interesting letter from the Dutch Foreign Minister to the Speaker of their Parliament. In it, he said that his Government had carefully weighed the efficiency, the effectiveness, the proportionality, the enforceability and the administrative burden of introducing a full trade ban on Israeli goods coming from the illegal settlements in the west bank. He said that, having looked at all of that, the Netherlands had decided that the right thing to do and the legal thing to do was to push for a full trade ban with the settlements—and so has Ireland, and Norway, and Spain, and Slovenia, and Belgium, and Luxembourg, and Portugal, and Finland and Poland. My question is: when are we going to join them?”
House of Commons1 July 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The political murder of Jo Cox was deeply affecting for many of us—and, frankly, none of us should ever recover from it. She was not only brave and principled; she was also funny. If I ever need to cheer myself up, I simply remember her throwing her little body into the interparliamentary tug-of-war and how very funny it was—and she knew it. My Committee and the Philip Rycroft review have found that the UK is already experiencing Russian disinformation warfare and that our defences to it are worryingly weak. We have both recommended a statutory, public-facing national counter-disinformation centre to ensure a co-ordinated response. The French have done it. The Swedes have done it. The Ukrainians have done it. I wonder whether the Minister can hold out hope that, someday soon, Britain might do it too.”
House of Commons16 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If Members google “Caledonian Road”, which is in my constituency, they might think it is a river, but it is not. Over the past decade, Thames Water has delivered to Islington seven major floods. Since privatisation, it has delivered to shareholders £7 billion. Last year, it delivered to my constituents a 31% increase in water rates. Residents are fed up, businesses are fed up, I am fed up, and I am sure that the Government are fed up. How much more do we have to take before Thames Water is finally given the boot?”
House of Commons16 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In 2017, someone who went to Harrods Estates would be able to buy a box for £2.5 million. In 2023, Kay & Co were selling a box for £3 million. A row of four stalls seats was advertised recently at £600,000. I laugh when the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) says that we should be grateful for the assistance of the people who now own these boxes and these seats for giving us a couple of thousand pounds a year to help with the ongoing costs of the Royal Albert Hall, because I think he is getting things out of proportion.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If anyone had asked me three years ago, “How does the Albert Hall work?” I would have said that it was publicly owned, and that it put on events and collected the ticket money, and the money was spent on enabling people to continue to use the Albert Hall. However, it is not a bit like that. The Albert Hall is a charity, but it is also a business. It is both things at once. It is a charity to the extent that it was bailed out by the Government during covid, but it is a business in that a fifth of the seats were bought by people who, I am sure, were assisting in getting the Albert Hall built at a time when there was not sufficient funding for the construction to be completed. So some people bought seats, and they bought them at £100 each. A box of ten would cost £1,000, and a box of five would be £500.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I have heard the hon. Gentleman make some good points in the past, but he has not made one tonight. If you lend some money to a business that is about to go under, you are bailing it out. Yes, it may pay you back later, but, really, we are talking about what colour angel is dancing on top of a pin.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The truth is, what the trustees have here is a magic money tree, and they do not want to give it up. The corporation said that the amendment passed in the Lords was “unnecessarily restrictive and financially punitive”, but one might say that charging £6,000 to see Ed Sheeran is also pretty restrictive and is not something that he appreciates, as he has made clear. I urge my colleagues to reject this Bill as it currently stands and to instead secure some much-needed reform to the board of trustees, which seems to have forgotten who it is meant to serve.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“To have that amendment struck out and replaced by a commitment that the trustees will be transparent about their profiteering, rather than cease it, is disappointing and inappropriate, to say the least. I also note that although family members are included in that commitment, other individuals are not, making it still perfectly above board for a trustee to give their tickets to friends and associates, who can in turn go ahead and sell them instead. I know the corporation is desperate to get this Bill through so that it can protect itself against legal challenge, but I want us to stop and think about who it really benefits. Who benefits from striking out the amendments? Not the public—that is for sure. Publishing some information on some of the profits of some of the sales on a website once a year just does not cut it.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson) for all the work that she has done in this area over the years. She has exposed some really shocking examples of ticket abuse, including by one of the hall’s vice-presidents, who offered tickets for the publicly funded BBC Proms for up to 10 times what the hall thought they were worth. It is the most outrageous profiteering that has led to this Bill being amended in the House of Lords. Peers did not ask for that much in the House of Lords—it was pretty tame, frankly—but the amendment said that trustees should use the ticket return scheme that the hall runs, not sell their tickets in backroom deals while the hall gets a pittance and has to beg the public for bailouts.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We have a charity event run by a charity, yet those running that so-called charity are allowed to make a profit out of it. It is scandalous, and it should be stopped. I know that Conservative Members will say that it is the trustees’ right and that they should be allowed to do what they like with private property. Well, they can go ahead and sell their seats to make a bunch of profit for themselves, if that is what they want to do, but I do not see why Parliament’s time should be used to help facilitate that. If the trustees of a charity are supposed to be running it, why are they thinking about how they can generate the most money and the most profit for themselves? It is quite obvious that there is a conflict of interest at the centre of all this, and it is not an appropriate use of this House. At this stage, I thank my hon.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I appreciate that that may be uncomfortable for some people, but I do not see why Members of this House should spend their time promoting legislation that simply looks after the interests of a small number of people who already make a great deal of money out of owning seats in the Royal Albert Hall. It seems to me that we should be demanding that the Royal Albert Hall change its governance processes, stop the way in which it sells tickets, and get on and deal with itself in a way that is 21st century and not anything else. Why it is appropriate that whereas the rest of the tickets for a charity event are sold for the sake of the charity, such as the Teenage Cancer Trust, trustees on the board of the Royal Albert Hall—a so-called charity—can sell the tickets to line their own pockets?”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“They then thought, “Oh, we cannot do that”, so they wanted to introduce legislation. They then pulled that bit of the legislation, but not before it was advertised online that there were going to be 12-seat boxes. Someone was going to make a lot of money out of this. They then ditched that bit but have kept this other bit, which makes a technical point: seat owners are restricted from selling seats for every and any event. For example, people will be glad to hear that no one is making a profit from the Remembrance Sunday commemoration at the Royal Albert Hall. Those seats are sold properly through the box office, and none of this nonsense is allowed on that night. There was a limited number, which the owners then agreed that they would increase, and a small number of people challenged that in court.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is undermining everything. If members of the public thought that such a beloved institution as the Royal Albert Hall had such a racket going on, they would be outraged, as I was when I first heard about it. I told the representatives of the Royal Albert Hall, when they came to see me three years ago, that unless they brought in those changes in legislation, I would object, and I am just keeping to my word. Let us look back at the history. Originally, the legislation was going to be about the fact that extra seats were put into the boxes, contrary to the rules. The owners thought, “We are going to get into trouble here”. They wanted to bring in legislation to allow boxes of 12 instead of boxes of 10, because boxes of 10 were within the rules and they were putting 12 seats in them, and making that much more profit as a result.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I hope that I am not disclosing any confidences, but I made it perfectly clear to them that if they were going to bring any legislation before this place and ask us to spend our time looking at legislation relating to the Royal Albert Hall, we needed to sort this out. We could put this into legislation. The Royal Albert Hall cannot change unless we put it into legislation, because that is the way in which the Royal Albert Hall was originally put together. We must sort out the governance, and we must sort out the fact that these people are selling their seats on the black market. They are selling them to ticket touts. Those seats should only be sold through the ticket office, as they are at the Royal Opera House and at theatres. Why should these people have the benefit of being able to sell their these seats on the black market?”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Gentleman knows the views of Victoria Prentis, who was Attorney General in 2024. She is now in the other place, and is a very sound woman. She has said: “It is widely acknowledged that the constitution of the Corporation of the Hall of Arts and Sciences”— that is, the Royal Albert Hall— “gives rise to a potential conflict between the private interests of seat-holding trustees and the Corporation’s charitable objects. This potential conflict is of significant concern to the Charity Commission and many well-informed observers.” So that is what the problem is. When I was shadow Attorney General, representatives of the Royal Albert Hall came to see me.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is bad enough for there to be a black market for ticket touts, but tickets being sold by the people who own the seats in the Royal Albert Hall takes that to a new level—and it goes further. Not only do those people own the seats and trade them among themselves, and sell them for large amounts of money; according to the constitution of the Royal Albert Hall, they are the people who need to run the Royal Albert Hall. So there we are: it is a charity when it comes to getting public money as a bail-out, but when it comes to anything else, it is somehow a business. I do not understand how it cannot be an obvious and manifest conflict of interest for people who benefit from the Royal Albert Hall to be running the Royal Albert Hall, and for it still to remain a charity, and I am not alone. I am sure that the right hon.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The right hon. Gentleman has told us how many seats are owned privately. Let us suppose that £2 million were to be divvied up among them, bearing in mind that it is possible to buy a box for £2.5 million or £3 million, or to buy six seats for £600,000. As I have said, we need to get this into proportion. Not only do these people own the seats; the reason they own them and they are worth so much money is that they can sell them, and they can sell them on the black market, and they can sell them for whatever price they want. I hear the right hon. Gentleman saying that sometimes those seats do not go for a lot of money, but tell that to Ed Sheeran. The seats for his performances were being sold at £6,000 a night, and he complained, as did a large number of other artists who have appeared at the Royal Albert Hall.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Is my hon. Friend aware that the House of Lords has struggled with this? Part of the problem is that the long title of the Bill is so restrictive that very little can be added to ensure that the governance of the Royal Albert Hall is sorted out.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) is aware that I have given the Albert Hall’s representatives several dates to meet me, but they have not been in touch.”
House of Commons15 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, and I share the Government’s condemnation of the illegal settlements that are systematically destroying any prospect of a Palestinian state. Of course, settlements do not build themselves; they require money, insurance and trade, and I therefore welcome the changed guidance to British citizens that they should not conduct any economic or financial activity in the settlements, but the question really is, “What happens if they do?” Currently, the truth is that British companies are bankrolling annexations one settlement at a time. If the Government can recognise that settlements are illegal, why do they not just issue a ban on all trade in goods and services with the settlements, rather than more guidance? Are we in danger of doing too little, too late?”
House of Commons9 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Instead of it being completely unacceptable for Israel to invade and threaten the Lebanese people south of the Litani river, it seems to have been long understood that providing it did not cross the river, there would not be any particular consequences—as if there was a modern-day Rubicon. Now it has crossed, and now Israel and Hezbollah are fighting out their ancient hatred in the middle of a country, and deliberately trying to destabilise Lebanon. That is completely unacceptable. When my Committee visits the country this month, I expect that we will hear many requests for more assistance to the Lebanese army, so that it can make real progress in disarming Hezbollah and defending its people. Can the Minister confirm that such assistance is going in? Can he give us more details of the plans?”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am interested in the mitigations, which are the reason we have this great gap between what would seem to be a security threat and Peter Mandelson being appointed. I cannot find any documents about that, but I have found that in written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2025—after the appointment, and when it was about to be withdrawn—Ian Collard said that he had requested a copy of the vetting summary. He made some notes based on the summary as an aide-mémoire, in case it was needed, and submitted them for the Humble Address. I am interested in seeing what the notes are of the mitigations: the man responsible for the mitigations took a note—presumably of what he had seen—and put it in for the Humble Address, yet it is not in the papers.”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I want to make it clear that the document I referred to is not part of the original decision making; it is an aide-mémoire that Ian Collard made. If I cannot see the original documents, can I at least see that later one?”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It may be that I am just lacking in imagination, but I do not understand why the police would not allow us to see the letter from the Foreign Office to Peter Mandelson saying, “You are given this job subject to not having anything to do with x, y and z”, or whatever the mitigations were. At the moment, we just do not have anything at all and so it is very difficult to understand why he was appointed. We are told that we need to wait for some time in the future—there is no date by which that will be disclosed—and at that stage all will become clear. It is as if the central point of the investigation and all these thousands of pages do not amount to anything until the police eventually decide to give us those crucial documents.”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is a lot of gossip and other stuff, the tittle-tattle and things that obviously the Westminster village loves, but the serious point is: how could we have got it so wrong and how did this happen?”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is not just that: we have also learned that Peter Mandelson was friends with Russian oligarchs, Chinese Finance Ministers and former Israeli security chiefs; he had a loan of £1 million from an unknown source, which he used to buy shares in a secretive Israeli company; and, of course, there are all the issues in relation to his business dealings. Given that it is the job of the Foreign Affairs Committee to try to ensure that the Foreign Office is as good as it possibly can be, the Committee has tried to remain focused on why it was that a man like that—when it came to developed vetting, it was decided that he was a case of high concern and that his clearance for vetting should be denied—was nevertheless appointed.”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We are a very long way from one of the original aspects of this scandal, which was an allegation that the Prime Minister knew when appointing Peter Mandelson that he had failed his developed vetting. We have moved a long way from that, but one thing we have not moved away from is that the man who was appointed was a “best pal” of the world’s most notorious paedophile, that he remained his “best pal” when he was in prison, and that he stayed in his house. Personally, I found it so profoundly shocking when I heard that was what happened. It is a matter of good character to stand by friends when they are in trouble, but when they are convicted of a terrible crime like that, you do not stand with them, you do not stay in their house and they should not be your “best pal”.”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I think the appointment was being pushed and I think that it was being pushed by his then chief of staff, who has a style—and that style is, “When I want to do something, I will go for it hard, I will go for it fast and I will push everybody out of the way.” Once Mandelson had not been elected chancellor at Oxford, someone who should have been a marginal candidate—and had been, as I understand it, just in November 2024—suddenly, within two weeks, moved from being a borderline candidate to being the main person in the frame.”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The criticism that one can level at the Prime Minister is that he delegated and he did not watch sufficiently what was going on, essentially giving power to others who then abused it—I think that is central. That is not very flattering to the Prime Minister, but it is an honest assessment of the evidence that I have heard.”
House of Commons3 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗