Emily Thornberry
MP for Islington South and Finsbury · Labour · United Kingdom
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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 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.”
The complete record
Every one of 612 lines we hold for Emily Thornberry, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 1 of 13.
“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?”
“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!””
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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?”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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”.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The right hon. Gentleman tempts me down a path that I was not going to go down, although I have gone down it for quite some length in the Committee hearings. It seems to me that all these papers tend to show one thing: the Prime Minister was not particularly interested in the appointment of the ambassador to the United States. He was certainly not a good friend of his: there is no correspondence between them, there are no chatty messages and there is no attempt to get the Prime Minister to vote for Mandelson when he was standing for chancellor of the University of Oxford—I mean, there is not a friendship at all. The criticism that I make, and I make openly, is that I think the decision was subcontracted to others who were close to Mandelson.”
“We may be talking about the same thing. Another way of putting it is that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff had taken responsibility for it on his behalf and was pushing it, and the power that the chief of staff had was because he was the chief of staff to the Prime Minister. It is borderline one way or the other.”
“That obviously strikes members of the Committee as odd”— well, it certainly did— “but in all my years as a civil servant—many of them as a relatively senior one—I have never seen a UKSV document, other than the ones that I have filled in myself.” It is ridiculous. If he is putting down mitigations in order to deal with legitimate concerns and a security threat, he needs to know what that security threat is, and to understand that UKSV is saying that it is very serious and that Mandelson should not be given the job—yet he says, “I didn’t know. I just thought it was borderline, leaning the other way.” I mean, this is Alice in Wonderland.”
“I suspect that the latter bit is an interpretation—a way in which, it was hoped, the difficulty that Mandelson was essentially being refused vetting could be slid over into “He can be given the job, so long as there are robust mitigations.” But where are those mitigations? When Sir Olly gave evidence to our Committee, I said to him, “I do not really follow why you would not know the contents of the UKSV document and their concerns or even that they said that there was high concern about Peter Mandelson. I do not understand how you can not know that if you are considering what the mitigations are. You cannot have the mitigations without knowing what the problem is.” He said, “The risks were explained to me, but I have not seen the underlying documentation. That is what I am saying.”
“He accepts that UKSV’s statement was “‘this case presents as a high concern’ with a recommendation of ‘clearance denied or withdrawn’”, and he “noted that, as well as the tick boxes”— red tick-boxes, which were ticked— “UKSV stated in the final case assessment: ‘Overall, I believe that this is a very borderline case…If a clearance was awarded to the individual by the Department, it is recommended that a very robust risk management model is put in place’”. I do not know whether that is just Ian Collard’s memory of what he may or may not have read—well, I know that he did not read it, because he says that he did not read it at that stage. I do not understand how the UKSV paper can say, “Don’t give him the job”, and then it can also be believed to be a very borderline case with robust risk management recommended.”
“It may be that those behaving in this way did so because they felt under huge amounts of political pressure, but how does someone whose case was of high concern and for whom it was recommended that clearance be denied become interpreted as a borderline case, leaning against? How do we bridge that gap? The only way that gap is bridged is through mitigations, so I spend my time looking for mitigations, and I cannot find any. Ian Collard, who was one of the security men speaking to Olly Robbins—who, at the time, was the permanent under-secretary—mentioned the importance of mitigations 10 times in his written evidence to us, and Olly Robbins talked about it six times. It is at the forefront of their evidence. I have already referred to an aide-mémoire that Ian Collard made in September. He says that he looked again at the summary.”
“I will move on, but before I do so, I will say something that I think any fair-minded person will know. Presumably the job of being Prime Minister means that there is so much on your desk, and if someone comes to you and says, “Don’t worry about this, I’ll take it and sort it”, there is a temptation to go, “Okay, you do that, because I have 7,000 other things that I have to deal with today.” I do not know—I have never been Prime Minister—but I would assume that that is the reality of the situation. The question is how somebody who is so manifestly inappropriate gets appointed.”
“I do not know whether anybody is in a position to be able to enlighten me one way or the other, or whether we will have to wait for the police to give us the document.”
“We have that email, which is about as pathetic as it can be. There might be something in the nine-page summary that some Members sitting in this Chamber have seen. It might be that that summary showing the security concerns has a page or so at the end—it is a blank page—asking the Foreign Office for its response. UKSV is giving a recommendation saying, “Mandelson should not be given the job, he is a security risk.” The process might be that the Foreign Office has to write something on that form saying, “We have read this. We don’t agree with you. We think he should be appointed, and we’re going to put in the following mitigations”, and then list them. It might be that the Foreign Office did not fill that in properly, and it might be that that bit of the form remains blank.”
“It continues: “With regard to personal conduct”— I think that is hanging out with oligarchs, being friends with the Finance Minister, borrowing money and who knows what else— “I understand that Lord Mandelson has received a letter from Mervyn Thomas, informing him of his responsibilities as an FCDO employee, including under the Diplomatic Service Regulations.” Is that it? He got a letter from a man telling him to behave himself! We have not seen the letter, and I do not know what it is. The email continues: “Matters pertaining to his overseas contacts will certainly be reviewed by the STRAP authorities.” STRAP is another issue, and we should not be distracted by STRAP. Mandelson needed to follow the developed vetting before getting anywhere near the latest STRAP stuff. It is important that we take these things in order.”
“I really do not know. The Foreign Office got the UKSV clearance on 29 January 2025, and it says that it did something about it, but we cannot see what that is. An email on page 72 of part I is the nearest thing to mitigations I have been able to find, and Ian Collard referred to it in his evidence. It is an email he wrote on 30 January, and I think it is the mitigations, but I just do not think it is a robust set of mitigations to deal with serious security concerns. The email states: “As part of the usual clearance policy process, UKSV identified some areas in his application for ESND to review”— that is the security man. “I understand that Lord Mandelson’s private sector engagements are being managed by HRD”— that is human resources— “and the Legal Directorate through the conflict of interest process.” Who knows?”
“I suspect that the ISC may have been entrusted with it—that is what I am trying to say. I am hoping that if the form is blank, it is not necessarily the case that anything of particular security interest was being disclosed, and it is just a process issue, where the Foreign Office did not follow process as it should have and at least put on that form, “Yes, we have done these things.” I am just trying to do my job, holding the Government to account. Why did Britain employ a man who was a security risk to this really important job? We did so because of the mitigations, but nobody will tell us the mitigations. After all these thousands of bits of paper, and after my poor right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West coming to the Chamber 11 times, we still cannot get to the root of it.”
“We have been “mandarined”; we have been given partial answers; we have been given nonsense by people believing that it is not for us to know. Well, it is for us to know, and it is for us to know because we are trying to make our Government better, and it is our job as Back Benchers to do that.”
“Is that it? Is that the action that they took, or is there something else? Surely there was a letter written to Peter Mandelson saying, “You have the job, but only if you do x, y and z.” This cannot be dealt with by way of a WhatsApp message or a phone call. This is very serious. This is about the security of our nation, and it should be in a letter. I certainly hope that the reason that I have not seen it is that it exists but the police have it, but I do not know one way or the other. I know that others will be dealing with this later, and I want to draw my remarks to a close, but the Foreign Affairs Committee has been trying to do its job to the best of its ability to try to ensure that such a mistake does not happen again, and we have been doing that in good faith. It has been difficult.”
“Well, that is very helpful; I thank the right hon. Gentleman very much. Let us move on. Is there a record of the decision? When Sir Oliver Robbins appeared before the Committee, and indeed when other people appeared before it, I kept coming back to the same question: “Where is the record of your decision? What was the process that you went through before doing this? Why are there no notes? Why is there no record? How can we hold you to account if you really, genuinely are not making any notes at all?” Given that a decision was made to give Peter Mandelson the job subject to mitigations, where is the record of the decision? Do the police have it? Is it in the papers and I have missed it? I do not think so. Was there never a written record of the decision? Surely someone would have made a record of the action taken—or is that the email?”
“I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way—I hope this is helpful. In the written evidence that Collard gave to us, on point 6 in answer to the question, “When was the report received by the department?” he said that they had “received an email from UKSV at 1.52pm on 29 January informing PST that the report was ready for the FCDO to review.” That was the date he heard about the developed vetting. The email, which is the nearest thing we have to anything that has any mitigations, is dated 30 January at 10.12 am.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on her thoughtful and important contribution. We need to ensure that if we use a Humble Address again, we use it as effectively as we can. We have talked about the amount of money, but will she also highlight the opportunity costs? We heard in the Committee from the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office about the amount of time that civil servants were spending on this. One particular gentleman had come back from Iran and was an expert on that, but he was spending his time on this issue, rather than being able to give the right sort of assistance to the Foreign Office on what we should be doing on Iran.”
“Is there not another argument? Certain people are thinking again about applying for jobs for which they may need to undergo developed vetting. Those people may well be women, people from ethnic minorities or people who are gay, for whom any disclosure would be so profoundly embarrassing that they would rather just not get the job.”