Douglas Alexander, the Scottish secretary, was on the government voice on the airwaves this morning.Along with Pat McFadden and Darren Jones, he is one of the ultra ‘safe pair of hands’ ministers trusted to do a media round when the government is in a really tricky position.His argument was that the appointment of Mandelson as ambassador to the US was a mistake, that Keir Starmer has already admitted this and apologised for it, but that he did not lie because he was not told about Mandelson in effect failing the security vetting.Starmer should have been told, Alexander said.He told Sky News:double quotation markI think most people watching this programme would think if there was material information, that the UK vetting agencies had come up with concerns and made a recommendation in relation to what’s a highly intrusive vetting process, that rightly and reasonably, that would be flagged to the ministers concerned.

Asked if he expected Starmer to lead Labour into the next election, Alexander said:double quotation markI expect so, yes … I think he will.There are no certainties but of course I think he will lead and I think he should because, frankly, on the biggest call in this parliament he’s exercised the right judgment, which is to keep us out of someone else’s war.Alexander also had an unusual way of saying that Starmer does make mistakes.double quotation markAs a Scottish Presbyterian I don’t believe in papal infallibility, nor do I believe in prime ministerial infallibility.Downing Street has signalled that Keir Starmer accepts he inadvertently misled MPs by not telling them that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting interview for ambassador to the US.

Keir Starmer has been accused of misleading MPs because he told them repeatedly that due process was followed in this process,At the lobby briefing this morning, the PM’s spokesperson told journalists that parliament should have been given the information that has come to light about the security vetting leading to a recommendation that Mandelson should not be approved,But the spokesperson said that Starmer did not knowingly mislead parliament,Under the ministerial code, it is only knowingly misleading parliament that is regarded as a resignation offence; ministers who unintentionally mislead parliament are just expected to correct the record at the earliest opportunity,Asked whether Starmer misled parliament, the PM’s spokesperson said:double quotation markThe prime minister would never knowingly mislead parliament or the public.

He’s clear, though, that this information should have been provided to parliament,It should have been provided to him, it should have been provided to other government ministers,But he clearly did not have this information – that is the crucial fact – he clearly did not have this information when he previously spoke to parliament,Asked if Starmer would be correcting the record, the spokesperson said Starmer would be “updating parliament with the full facts of this case”,Downing Street released more on this in a briefing published on Friday.

Keir Starmer was advised that, if he wanted to appoint a politician like Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, the candidate should go through security vetting before the appointment being announced.Simon Case, the then cabinet secretary, said that to Starmer in a memo written in November 2024.As Sky News points out, the document was one of many released in the first batch of papers published in March as a result of the humble address saying documents about Mandelson’s appointment should be published.The Commons foreign affairs committee has confirmed that Olly Robbins will give evidence to it at 9am tomorrow about the way he was sacked over Peter Mandelson’s security vetting.Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

A new poll has suggested there will a near tie between pro-independence and pro-UK parties in the Holyrood election on 7 May, with the Scottish National party and Scottish Greens one seat short of a pro-independence majority,The new poll by More in Common, using the multilevel regression and poststratification system (MRP) which attempts to predict who wins each seat, forecasts the SNP will win comfortably with 56 of Holyrood’s 129 seats but fall short of an overall majority,That would leave SNP leader John Swinney without the mandate for a second independence referendum he believes a majority would produce,The Scottish Greens claim that mandate would arise if both they and the SNP had a combined majority – a stance Swinney has rejected,But, according to this new MRP, the Scottish Greens will win eight seats – much less than the 12 or more seats the Greens themselves expect to win, leaving pro-independence parties on 64 seats – one short of an overall majority.

In a bitter twist for anti-independence parties, the poll says Reform UK will be the largest of the unionist groupings, on 22 seats.Labour, who would win 17 seats, and the Liberal Democrats, on 14, have ruled out any deal with Reform.More in Common were very careful to say that over half Holyrood’s 73 constituency seats are three- or four-way marginals, so subject to high degrees of uncertainty.Even so, it said the Scottish Greens would win two SNP constituency seats in Edinburgh and Glasgow for the first time while the Lib Dems would treble their 2021 result with 14 seats, taking control over the Highlands.Reform’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord used these results to issue a vain and redundant challenge to Labour, the Lib Dems and Tories to help install a Reform-led government.

Last week Offord provoked a bitter row with Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar after alleging Sarwar had privately approached him late last year to suggest private talks about a deal to lock out the SNP – a claim Sarwar has described as a “desperate lie”.Sarwar has been adamant he would not talk to Reform.Offord said:double quotation markIt is abundantly clear now that Anas Sarwar will not be first minister.The only way that would happen is if all unionist parties backed him in a coalition and we at Reform categorically rule out supporting a Labour party that no longer supports workers and doesn’t share our ambition to make Scotland the most prosperous part of the United Kingdom.So, we ask Mr Sarwar, will you back a Reform government or will you let this country suffer another 5 years of the SNP?At his press conference Nigel Farage was asked about reports saying that Keir Starmer knew about the security concerns about Peter Mandelson that led to him failing his security vetting interview.

That was a reference to the Telegraph splash, which says:double quotation markSenior Whitehall sources told The Telegraph that the UKSV [UK Security Vetting] findings largely restated security risks that had already been drawn to Sir Keir’s attention.One senior source with knowledge of the process said: “The reality is that Starmer had already been warned about the major risks and he had waved them away.”In response, Farage said that there was “no way” Starmer would not have known about the concerns.Farage pointed out that in September last year the Independent published a story by David Maddox saying: “Serious concerns have been raised that newly sacked US ambassador Peter Mandelson did not clear security vetting for the role – but the prime minister pushed through his appointment anyway.” In his story Maddox said:double quotation markSources have told The Independent that MI6 failed to clear the Labour peer largely because of concerns over his business links to China.

However, there were also worries that his past links to the disgraced financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein “would compromise him”.The Independent now accepts that the concerns that it was UKSV that failed Mandelson, not MI6.Asked about the story, Downing Street told Maddox that vetting had been carried out in the normal way.In his press conference reply, Farage went on:double quotation markIt’s impossible for the prime minister to say the warning lights weren’t flashing.And if you were prime minister and there were news reports last September that your ambassadorial choice had failed vetting, you would have thought perhaps he might have had some curiosity to try to find out whether this had really happened or not.

I just find the whole thing totally incredible.Incredible.There is no way the prime minister couldn’t have known.Are you telling me that everyone around him knew and he didn’t know what? It’s possible he’s just a puppet and never consulted on anything, but frankly, it isn’t believable.And I do believe strongly that he misled the House of Commons, that he lied to the country especially.

He was so definitive in that Hastings speech that all the necessary channels had been gone that vetting had been assured.Asked if Reform UK would vote for a no confidence motion in Starmer, Farage said that they would – but that there was no chance of Labour MPs supporting such a motion.He added:double quotation markThe Labour backbenchers are not yet of a mood to get rid of their prime minister, although after 7 May they just might be.David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary who was foreign secretary when Peter Mandelson was made ambassador to the US, has said that he was never told that Mandelson failed the security vetting interview.Mandelson’s was only technically approved because Olly Robbins, the head of Foreign Office, exercised his discretion to ignore the recommendation from the people doing the vetting.

Lammy gave his account of this in an interview with Pippa Crerar.Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, has said he finds this hard to believe.He told GB News:double quotation markThe problem ultimately is caused by the prime minister choosing an ambassador with a known integrity problem.Everybody understood that about Peter Mandelson, if you look at his past record.I’m not criticising his abilities, but as the talisman for New Labour, he had a very dodgy series of relationships.

We won’t go into that,So there should have been, the prime minister should have thought through before announcing the appointment how he was going to manage that aspect of choosing Mandelson,But let me just move on now to the whole process of the DV [direct vetting],I cannot believe that a permanent under secretary, when he got the results of the DV, didn’t ring up his minister, who he talks to every day, and say to him, ‘Look, Mr Lammy, minister, we have a problem, and we have to work out now how we’re going to manage that problem’,Did Olly Robbins really take it on himself to not tell anybody and decide, as the permanent under secretary of the Foreign Office, that the risk was manageable? I mean, whichever way you look at it, it’s a mess.

It was a bad choice in the first place,It was an appalling choice in the first place,Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference,He is talking about plans by his party to deport people already granted asylum in the UK,There is a live feed here.

In a news story about the announcement, the Press Association says:double quotation markReform UK has pledged to deport “hundreds of thousands” of small boat migrants who have successfully claimed asylum if the party wins the next general election.It plans to review all successful asylum claims over the past five years, with anyone who is found to have entered illegally or overstayed their visa and subsequently claimed asylum to “have their status revoked and be deported”, Reform’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said.The Times reported that Nigel Farage’s party estimated 400,000 people will be “in scope” of the review and “the majority” will be deported.In a statement on X, Yusuf said: “Reform will reverse the invasion of Britain.“Anyone who broke into the country illegally, or came in on a visa and overstayed to claim asylum (which is almost all of them) will have their status revoked and be deported.

“This is an addition to all those currently in Britain illegally,”The announcement comes after 602 people crossed the Channel on small boats on Saturday, making it this year’s second busiest day for crossings and bringing the total number of arrivals in 2026 to more than 6,000,Reform has already pledged to identify and deport all illegal migrants in the UK, as well as leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR) which is often used by people to claim asylum,The party has said it would aim to deport 188,000 illegal migrants a year by operating five removal flights a day,In his interview on the Today programme this morning Douglas Alexander, the Scottish secretary, accused Kemi Badenoch of peddling a conspiracy theory about Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson’s security vetting.

Ignoring the fact that Badenoch has toned down what she is saying about Starmer from the end of last week (see 10.33am), Alexander said:double quotation markThe central charge that has been run by the opposition since Kemi Badenoch appeared on this programme on Friday – and I quote her directly, she said “there is deliberate dishonesty, I know he is lying” – is that the prime minister has been deliberately dishonest.That is simply not true.Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence disproving that charge, not least friends and allies of Olly Robbins himself, who maintained that he didn’t tell the prime minister and claim he couldn’t tell the prime minister the recommendation of the vetting agency about Peter Mandelson.So, of course, rightly and reasonably, there will be important questions asked from all sides of the House of Commons today and the prime minister will account for the decisions he’s taken where he should at the despatch box.

But the central charge made by the opposition, that somehow he knowingly misled parliament or the public is simply untrue.And to believe that requires a conspiracy not only involving Olly Robbins and his friends, but senior officials like the cabinet secretary, and indeed the permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office and every minister involved in this appointment.Tom Fletcher, the UN under secretary general for humanitarian affairs and a former Downing Street foreign policy adviser, was on the Today programme this morning talking about the humanitarian impact of the Iran war.Asked about Olly Robbins being sacked as head of the Foreign Office for not telling Keir Starmer about the recommendation for Peter Mandelson to be refused security vetting, Fletcher defended his former civil service colleague and said they had been in touch in recent days.He said:double quotation markThis is a guy who has public service and integrity stitched into his DNA in a way I haven’t seen in any other single individual.

And I’ve worked with so many people inside government.So he has had an utterly rough few days.He’s a pretty strong character.But I think he’s heartbroken.Asked if he agreed with comments from people like Gus O’Donnell (see 9.

59am) and Simon McDonald, another former head of the Foreign Office (in an interview on Saturday) that Robbins had been badly treated, Fletcher indicated that he thought O’Donnell and McDonald were raising serious points.On Friday Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, told the Today programme that she knew Keir Starmer had been lying about Peter Mandelson’s security vetting.She said:double quotation markIt’s completely preposterous for us to believe that when the prime minister said on the floor of the house [of Commons] the full due process was followed that officials who knew that was not the case would not have told him.He knew.It is preposterous for us to believe that on 5 February, [after] him giving press conference saying that Mandelson was cleared by the security services, nobody told him that actually that this was not the case.

It’s completely preposterious, the prime minister, the former chief prosecutor, did not ask basic questions, did not ask to look at the security vetting himself.It’s also completely preposterous that civil servants would have cleared a political appointee who had failed security vetting.Mandelson was not a mandarin he was a Labour party grandee appointed to be our most senior diplomat and ambassador …It doesn’t matter what story the prime minister is telling, at some point there is deliberate dishonesty – whether it’s the cover-up story or the original story – one of these is deliberate dishonesty, they can’t all be true, and that’s why I know he is lying.But now Badenoch has revised her charge against the prime minister.She is not saying that she knows he is “lying” (a word that requires someone to not just say something untrue, but to knowingly state a falsehood).

In an open letter to the PM, she says he has been “at best recklessly negligent and at worse dishonest”.Badenoch still wants him to resign, though.She made this clear in interviews this morning, telling LBC: “I do think, certainly, in terms of his authority, he has reached the end of the road.He should resign.”It was a mistake to announce Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US before he was security vetted for the role, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish secretary, said in interviews this morning.

Peter Walker has the story.Downing Street is claiming that under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 Olly Robbins, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, could have told Keir Starmer that Peter Mandelson in effect failed his security vetting.(See 9.21am.) In its briefing document today, it says:double quotation markPrerogative powers emanate from the crown but are exercisable by ministers and, when (and only when) delegated or otherwise authorised by ministers or as decided by statute, are exercisable by civil servants