{"id":540520,"date":"2026-04-20T05:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T05:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/540520\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T05:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T05:23:09","slug":"five-questions-awaiting-starmer-as-he-faces-commons-over-mandelson-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/540520\/","title":{"rendered":"Five questions awaiting Starmer as he faces Commons over Mandelson scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sir Keir told reporters that the first he knew about the red flags was on Tuesday last week, despite them being initially raised to the Foreign Office by UK Security and Vetting (UKSV) officials in January last year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said the information was passed on to him by Dame Antonia Romeo, the head of the civil service, and Cat Little, the head of the Cabinet Office, who had received it two weeks prior.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The documents had been revealed after the Conservatives tabled a motion which demanded the publication of all paperwork relating to the vetting process.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The prime minister&#8217;s head of press, Tim Allan, was contacted by the political editor of the Independent in September, with the paper publishing a story about Mandelson failing vetting later that month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The prime minister has insisted that his former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and staff in Number 10 also did not know about the UKSV warnings.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">McSweeney quit his job over the Mandelson scandal in February.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, opposition MPs say it is not credible that neither Sir Keir, nor anyone on his team, could have remained in the dark for more than a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sir Keir told reporters that the first he knew about the red flags was on Tuesday last week,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540521,"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-540520","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\/540520","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=540520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}