Senior Labour figures say call for new Mandelson investigation is a ‘political stunt’

A series of senior Labour figures have dismissed calls for a new investigation into what Keir Starmer told MPs about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as political point scoring, before a possible Commons vote on the issue.

The Conservatives have called for the cross-party privileges committee, the remit of which includes examining whether MPs broke rules, to look at whether the prime minister misled parliament when he said normal procedures were followed with Mandelson’s appointment.

The privileges committee previously examined Boris Johnson’s behaviour around lockdown-breaking Downing Street parties during Covid, finding he deliberately misled parliament in saying no rules had been breached.

The foreign affairs committee has already begun an inquiry into Mandelson’s appointment. Downing Street says the evidence it has heard so far, including from senior civil servants, has shown Starmer told the truth.

Before an expected attempt by the Conservatives on Monday to push for a Commons vote on a new inquiry, the former Cabinet ministers Alan Johnson and David Blunkett released a joint statement calling the move a “nakedly political stunt with no substance”, calling any comparison to Johnson “absurd”.

“When parliament referred that matter to the privileges committee, a police investigation had directly disproved his categoric statements that he knew nothing about the breach of lockdown rules including parties in Downing Street, and therefore he had a case to answer for knowingly misleading the House of Commons,” they said.

Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who chairs the foreign affairs committee, said she could not see the need for a second inquiry while the one she is leading is still taking place.

“It may be that at some stage in the future some of the questions haven’t been answered and it is decided that they are of sufficient importance that the privileges committee should be involved,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Thornbery said she did not see the need for it before that stage had been reached “apart from potentially people trying to score points in advance of the local elections”.

Her committee heard last week from Olly Robbins, the former head civil servant at the Foreign Office who was for failing to tell No 10 that Mandelson had initially failed security vetting, and Cat Little, the lead official at the Cabinet Office.