Cabinet Office officials delayed telling Starmer about Mandelson vetting recommendation for almost three weeks – UK politics live

Permanent secretary Cat Little tells MPs that she sought legal advice before sharing the vetting information with the prime minister

Little says in March she had a meeting when she asked to see the Foreign Office’s documentation about the decision to grant Mandelson vetting. She said she was asking because this was documentation covered by the humble address. She said was told that “that information would not be forthcoming”.

In the middle of March, I have a meeting with Sir Olly and a senior member of his team, and this is after the point that I’ve been told that this summary document exists.

I specifically ask to see this document and any decision-making audit trail around those judgments at the time. It was made clear to me that that information would not be forthcoming.

I took the very unusual judgment that I should directly request the information from UK Security Vetting.

And I did that because I go back to my responsibilities, to discharge the humble address, which is a responsibility that is unique to me and I take very seriously.

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Olly Robbins refused to give Mandelson vetting summary to Cabinet Office, says Cat Little

In evidence to MPs, Cabinet Office top civil servant disputes that her department suggested vetting might not be needed

Olly Robbins refused to hand Peter Mandelson’s vetting summary to the Cabinet Office, the civil servant who leads the department has said.

The summary – which would have revealed that Robbins, the now-sacked Foreign Office head, had granted Mandelson clearance against the advice of security officials – was instead provided to Cat Little by UK Security Vetting, she said.

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Labour MP calls for Starmer’s resignation to end ‘psychodrama’ – UK politics live

Jonathan Brash says ‘own goals’ are distracting from Labour’s achievements

UK inflation accelerated to 3.3% in March after the Iran war triggered the biggest jump in fuel prices for more than three years, Richard Partington reports.

Today the Liberal Democrats staged a photocall to publicise their line about this being “Trumpflation”. Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader and Treasury spokesperson, said:

People across our country have been struggling for years with a devastating cost-of-living crisis and Donald Trump’s idiotic war in Iran has added to it. The cost of fuel is soaring, mortgage rates are rising and fixed energy deals are already going up by hundreds of pounds.

But what is utterly inexcusable is that there are politicians in this country - Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch - who are happy to cheerlead Donald Trump as he hikes people’s bills. All the while this Labour government promised to fix the country but instead we’ve got political Groundhog Day: yet more sleaze and scandal.

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Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, to be questioned by MPs

Exclusive: McSweeney summoned by foreign affairs select committee in rare step, as Mandelson vetting row continues

Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s former chief of staff, has been summoned before the foreign affairs select committee as the Peter Mandelson vetting row continues to undermine Keir Starmer’s premiership.

As MPs attempt to unravel the facts, McSweeney is to appear next Tuesday to respond to allegations that Downing Street put huge pressure on the civil service to approve his appointment as the UK’s ambassador to Washington.

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Olly Robbins’ account of Mandelson vetting piles pressure on Keir Starmer

Sacked civil servant tells select committee of ‘pressure’ to give clearance and ‘dismissive’ attitude to vetting

The civil servant sacked by Keir Starmer has given a devastating account of his government, saying Downing Street put huge pressure on the civil service to approve the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Washington ambassador despite the concerns of vetting officials.

Olly Robbins, the former top official at the Foreign Office, said No 10 took a “dismissive” attitude to vetting, and Mandelson was given access to the Foreign Office building and to “higher-classification briefings” before he was granted security clearance.

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Cabinet Office suggested Mandelson did not need security vetting, says Robbins as he describes ‘pressure’ from No 10 – UK politics live

Olly Robbins was forced out as Foreign Office permanent secretary over the Peter Mandelson security vetting revelations in the Guardian

The hearing has started.

Emily Thornberry, the chair, started by saying that Robbins did not tell the whole truth about this process when he gave evidence to it in November.

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Mobile phones to be banned in schools in England under new plans

Government amendment to children’s wellbeing and schools bill to replace existing guidance with statutory ban

A ban on mobile phones in schools in England is to be introduced by the government to ensure that “critical safeguarding legislation” is passed.

The government will table an amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill in the House of Lords after the bill was held up by peers on opposition benches.

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How safe is Starmer’s premiership after his Mandelson vetting statement to MPs?

Despite his explanation and the need for political stability, the PM is still unpopular – and Olly Robbins has yet to give his side of the story

Labour MPs frustrated with the lack of a clear mission from Keir Starmer’s No 10 have often urged the prime minister to be more forceful in his arguments, to prosecute his values, to find an enemy to define himself against.

The prime minister has found one: Olly Robbins. Starmer prosecuted his case against the former Foreign Office chief on Monday with the vigour of his former life at the bar.

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Judgment day as Starmer faces Commons showdown over Mandelson scandal

Prime minister to deliver high-stakes statement to MPs over vetting controversy that has put his position in peril

Keir Starmer will deliver a high-stakes statement to MPs on Monday as he struggles to overcome fears inside his government that the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal could yet cost him his leadership.

In what is set to be a dramatic showdown, the prime minister will set out how Mandelson was able to take up his role as UK ambassador without the Foreign Office revealing it had overruled the decision to fail his vetting.

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Starmer is facing his judgment day over Mandelson missteps

Ahead of a showdown with MPs, prime minister looks like a man who is not really in control in his own government

Keir Starmer has spent much of the last 24 hours working on a plan for what senior government figures are already describing as his “judgment day”: his showdown with MPs on Monday over the latest Peter Mandelson revelations.

That the prime minister was apparently not told of Mandelson’s vetting failure has provoked incredulity across Westminster and accusations he sacked a senior civil servant to save his premiership.

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Starmer would have blocked Mandelson appointment if he had known about failed vetting, ministers say – as it happened

The prime minister’s leadership is still in the spotlight after Peter Mandelson was appointed US ambassador after he failed security vetting

Our Scotland correspondent Libby Brooks has written this piece on how Scottish voters are being attracted to Reform UK, and how it reflects attitudes to immigration.

It’s Monday evening in Aberdeen, and George Preston is wearing his union flag suit to the Reform UK rally. He joined the party in 2024 as it gained ground in the north-east of Scotland with its first councillor defections from the Scottish Conservatives.

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Starmer would have blocked Mandelson role over vetting failure, says Lammy

Deputy prime minister says it is ‘inexplicable’ top civil servant kept Downing Street in dark

Keir Starmer would have blocked Peter Mandelson from serving as the UK’s ambassador to Washington had he known he failed security vetting, David Lammy has said, as he attempted to shore up the prime minister amid damaging fallout from the row.

In his first public comments on the vetting affair, Lammy said it was “inexplicable” that Oliver Robbins, the former top civil servant who was forced out of the Foreign Office this week, had opted to leave Downing Street in the dark over the outcome.

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Green MP: Labour caricatures working-class people over greyhound racing

Hannah Spencer says minister ‘continuously offends people by saying working-class people don’t care about dogs’

Labour is “offensively caricaturing” working-class people by saying they do not want a greyhound racing ban in England, the Green party MP Hannah Spencer has said.

The sport has traditionally been associated with working-class culture and has historically been popular in so-called red wall areas, which Labour insiders suggest is part of the reason why there are no plans for England to follow bans announced last month in Scotland and Wales.

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Labour claims Reform UK won’t protect women, as poll suggests Farage’s party heading for ‘seismic’ wins in May – UK politics live

Poll projects major political earthquake across Britain with Labour losing Wales and England’s Red Wall

In the light of what George Robertson, who led the strategic defence review for Labour, said about defence spending in his speech last night, there’s a good chance Kemi Badenoch will choose to raise this at PMQs later.

She may well raise the Times’s splash, which says Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is proposing to raise defence spending by less than £10bn over the next four years.

The State of It political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times has been told that Reeves is unwilling to break her fiscal rules or increase taxes to boost defence spending.

John Healey, the defence secretary, is pressing for a bigger increase as there are concerns that £10bn will not be enough, given the increasing likelihood that British forces will be deployed to Ukraine and the Middle East.

Lord Robertson produced his first SDR as Tony Blair’s defence secretary in 1998, and the historian David Edgerton noted then that Britain was committing itself “to acting primarily with the USA in a wide-ranging programme of global policing”. The structure of the armed forces is designed not for autonomous defence but because “the composition … is what allows Britain to be the USA’s principal partner”. Only 15% to 20% of spending, Prof Edgerton reckoned, related to purely national defence. In that sense, the model Lord Robertson now defends was never primarily about defending the UK at all. It was about plugging into a US system and piggybacking on its arms industry base.

The Treasury is right to question prioritising defence now. Cutting welfare would hit demand and weaken growth. As Khem Rogaly of the Common Wealth thinktank argues, defence spending provides a weak economic stimulus compared with public investment – and is even worse as a job creator. Moreover, the UK is not using higher defence spending to build its own independent military, but to reshape its armed forces around a US-style venture capital and tech ecosystem. With Mr Trump in office, there is no better time to ask: whose security are we funding – Britain’s or America’s?

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Government sets aside extra £1bn for victims of UK’s infected blood scandal

Additional funds include extra £35,000 each for former pupils experimented on at school without their knowledge

Compensation payments will rise for people affected by the infected blood scandal, including an extra £35,000 each for former pupils who were experimented on at school without their knowledge, the paymaster general has announced. The government has allocated £1bn for the payments.

The final report of the inquiry into what has been described as the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history was published in May 2024. The compensation scheme that followed has also been blighted by controversy.

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Starmer’s ‘corrosive complacency’ on defence has put UK in peril, says ex-Nato chief

George Robertson says Iran war should be wake-up call to address military underfunding in scathing remarks

The British government has shown a “corrosive complacency towards defence” and put the UK “in peril”, according to a government adviser, in fierce criticisms of Keir Starmer’s military policy.

The former Nato secretary general and author of the government’s strategic defence review, George Robertson, believes Starmer was “not willing to make the necessary investment”, the Financial Times has reported.

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Chagos Islands treaty is now ‘impossible to agree at political level’, UK minister says

Stephen Doughty says US withdrawal of support means bill cannot complete passage through parliament

A treaty over ceding sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius has become “impossible to agree at political level” and the corresponding bill will not complete its passage through parliament, a Foreign Office minister has said.

Stephen Doughty told the Commons that the agreement with Mauritius was initially negotiated in close coordination with the US, but Donald Trump’s position “appears to have changed”.

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Starmer implies he didn’t tell Trump he was ‘fed up’ about his impact on rising UK energy bills – as it happened

Prime minister says conversation with US president on Thursday night focused on need for ‘practical plan’ to open strait of Hormuz

Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, has joined those saying the government should allow drilling for oil and gas in the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields in the North Sea.

Both applications were approved by the last Conservative government, but then overturned by a court ruling. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has to make a decision about the revised applications operating in a quasi-judicial capacity, which means he has to follow due process and can’t take the decision purely on political ground.

The current debate [on energy policy] is deadlocked between two incomplete responses. The government argues the answer is to accelerate Clean Power 2030, focusing on decarbonising the electricity system as quickly as possible. The opposition argues that the answer is to expand domestic oil and gas production. Both positions contain elements of truth, but neither addresses the core strategic problem: outside the power sector the UK economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels, and electricity is still too expensive to support mass electrification.

The UK is caught in a self-reinforcing high-cost, low-electrification trap. High electricity costs suppress demand, slowing the uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial electrification. Weak demand growth, in turn, means that the fixed costs of the system – from networks to long-term contracts – are spread across a smaller base, keeping prices high. The result is a system that is too expensive to electrify and therefore remains dependent on fossil fuels and exposed to global shocks …

The first of these vital measures will ban anyone from possessing or publishing harmful pornography that shows incest between family members, and sex between step or foster relations where one person is pretending to be under 18.

A further amendment will criminalise the publication and possession of pornography where an adult is roleplaying as a child.

This government is uncompromising in our mission to protect women and girls online, and we have taken action to stop tech firms from publishing this abusive content.

In February, we told platforms that they must remove reported non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours.

I greatly welcome the government’s plans to fully address harmful pornographic content such as incest, step-incest and the mimicking of child sexual abuse. This content that is freely and widely available online is deeply harmful, normalising child sexual abuse and abusive relationships within families …

Today the government has answered our calls for change, and I am delighted that once again the UK is leading the way on regulating this high harm industry.

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Defence secretary reveals UK navy foiled secret Russian submarine operation in North Sea – UK politics live

John Healey says navy forced Russia to abandon activity in month-long operation

In interviews this morning Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, declined to confirm reports that a Russian warship has been escorting two sanctioned Russian ships through the English channel.

Sanctioned Russian ships carry oil being sold to fund the war in Ukraine, and the UK government recently announced that the armed forces have been authorised to board these ships in British waters to stop them.

What I can tell you is that we have given permission now for action to be taken against the Russian shadow fleet. Operational decisions then have to be taken in the right way by the military.

There are indications of the way in which not just the Russian shadow fleet is operating, but also the way in which we are seeing increased Russian threats, not just to the UK, but across Europe as well.

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Antonia Romeo given powerful mandate to deliver No 10’s priorities

PM’s most senior civil servant now has task of rewriting civil service code and ‘making it recognised for improved productivity’

Antonia Romeo, Keir Starmer’s most senior civil servant, has been given a powerful new mandate to deliver his priorities, while Darren Jones, the No 10 chief secretary, has shifted to a role more focused on wider Whitehall reforms.

Romeo, who was promoted last month, took over the job of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service after an unsuccessful year in charge by her predecessor, Chris Wormald, who was not considered effective enough by No 10.

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