Sir Chris went on to explain the government would comply with the terms of the humble address “in full” before seeking to manage expectations on the speed of the process.<\/p>\n
After Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh warned it could be “years before we see any of these papers”, Sir Chris said: “I want to make sure that we move as fast as we possibly can, but I also want to make sure that justice does happen, and I don’t want to do anything that would undermine the police investigations.<\/p>\n
“I hope that they will be able to move as swiftly as possible and we will certainly co-operate with them as swiftly as possible.<\/p>\n
“It’s worth bearing in mind that the documents that might be envisaged in this are mostly 25-years-old. Some of them are a bit earlier. They may be substantial in number and many of them will be in hard copy.”<\/p>\n
For the Conservatives, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Alex Burghart advised ministers about “how bad it will look” if the government “does not provide information as swiftly as possible”.<\/p>\n
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed, speaking in the Commons, described the Epstein scandal as “truly global” but also “a deeply British scandal reaching right to the top of the British establishment”.<\/p>\n
In 2011, when he was a business minister, Sir Ed said Andrew was doing an “excellent job” as trade envoy and dismissed concerns around him at the time as “innuendo”.<\/p>\n
Asked about his defence of Andrew during a previous parliamentary debate, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “First of all can I apologise to all those victims of Epstein who may have read those words and been upset by them. I really regret them.”<\/p>\n
Sir Ed said he “wasn’t really over the brief” and added “no MP mentioned Epstein in that debate and I think that tells a tale about how Parliament and MPs don’t hold the Royal Family, didn’t hold [the former] Prince Andrew in that really privileged position, properly to account”.<\/p>\n
Andrew was appointed to the unpaid trade role under Tony Blair’s Labour government.<\/p>\n
He was officially appointed by the then Queen after consultation with the Cabinet Office, Foreign Office and British Trade International.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, MPs on the Business and Trade Select Committee said any inquiry into the role of UK trade envoys could only begin once legal proceedings against Andrew had concluded.<\/p>\n
However, Labour MP Liam Byrne, who chairs the committee said it would “begin gathering information immediately” so it would be ready to launch an inquiry if it decided to once police action had concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sir Chris went on to explain the government would comply with the terms of the humble address “in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-443539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}