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Sir Keir Starmer and his senior ministers and advisers are preparing to hand over WhatsApp messages, texts and email exchanges with Lord Peter Mandelson relating to his appointment as UK ambassador to Washington, in a data dump expected to deepen the prime minister’s woes.
The cross-party intelligence and security committee has written to Starmer saying it expects relevant information to be handed over to parliament “very shortly”, creating a “Mandelson files” cache of potentially embarrassing documents.
Starmer believes that some of the exchanges relating to Mandelson’s vetting for the US job will support his claim that the former ambassador “lied” about his relationship with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But other messages sent between Mandelson and Starmer’s team could be much more problematic. Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s under-fire chief of staff, supported Mandelson for the job and was in close communication with him during his time in Washington last year.
Starmer had hoped to release documents relating to the vetting process last week but was frustrated by a request from the Metropolitan Police not to disclose anything that could prejudice its criminal investigation into Mandelson over alleged misconduct in public office.
Government officials still hope those documents can be released soon and are in talks with the police.
Starmer is being forced to hand over a much wider trove of messages than he had wanted to, including “electronic communications and minutes of all meetings between Lord Mandelson and ministers, government officials and special advisers during his time as ambassador”, according to the ISC.
Those that are deemed by the government to be too sensitive to be released because they impact on national security or international relations will be handed over to the ISC for scrutiny.
Some of Mandelson’s previously private exchanges could particularly strain UK relations with Donald Trump if they cast the US president in a bad light.
The ISC, a panel of cross-party MPs and peers, told Starmer it would act “entirely independently of government” and said: “We reserve the right to determine how to deal with the material shown to us.”
Starmer had wanted the head of the civil service, Sir Chris Wormald, to decide which sensitive documents were released but he was forced by mutinous Labour MPs to hand that job to the ISC. It is unclear how long the ISC scrutiny process of sensitive documents will take.
The committee told Starmer: “The ISC therefore expects the government will, very shortly, be laying before the House, all such papers, except for the very limited number where it is assessed that some material within them cannot be published without prejudicing UK national security or international relations.”
The ISC said in its letter that the government would need to provide a “clear and logical rationale” for every “word, phrase or sentence” that it wanted to remove on grounds of national security or diplomacy. It also said it wanted to see “details of any payments made to Lord Mandelson on his departure as ambassador and from the civil service”.
Starmer apologised on Thursday for appointing Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US despite knowing about his friendship with Epstein.
“None of us knew the depth and darkness of that relationship,” Starmer said. But a growing number of Labour MPs, angry at his handling of the scandal, said the prime minister’s time in Number 10 was coming to an end.
As well as Starmer and McSweeney, the dump of documents has the potential to be highly embarrassing for others in government previously close to Mandelson, including health secretary and possible successor to Starmer, Wes Streeting.
The prime minister’s former communications director, James Lyons, said the Mandelson revelations were “at least the biggest scandal since the expenses scandal” in 2009, when The Daily Telegraph published leaked data showing how MPs had claimed public money for dubious expenses.
“I don’t think anyone can understate the gravity of the situation,” he told the BBC. “I think we could just be in the foothills here.”