Starmer warns ‘very significant volume of material’ needs reviewing before Mandelson documents released – UK politics live

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PM says 'significant volume of material' needs reviewing before Mandelson documents can be released

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Prime minister Keir Starmer has said a “very significant volume of material” related to his appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US will need to be reviewed before any documents can be released.

Starmer believes the documents will prove Mandelson lied about the extent of his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during the vetting process before he was given the top diplomatic job in Washington last year.

The prime minister had previously said he wanted to release the documents sooner and raise it at PMQs but was advised by police that doing so could risk prejudicing a future investigation or legal process.

Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a cross-party group of MPs and peers with access to highly sensitive information, will play a role in sifting through the emails, messages and documents, which could number in the tens of thousands, before they are released into the public domain.

Starmer wrote a letter to Lord Beamish, the chairman of the ISC, saying: “It is important that documents are made available to parliament as soon as possible, noting that there is likely to be a very significant volume of material that will need to be reviewed to establish whether it is in scope.”

It has done little to quell the anger among Labour MPs over his handling of the scandal, with some publicly suggesting the prime minister should consider his position, while also calling for him to sack his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in the decision to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador.

Meanwhile, Scotland Yard said enquiries were ongoing after police searched two properties connected to Mandelson as part of an investigation into claims that he passed market-sensitive information to Epstein.

Former prime minister Gordon Brown has said he “greatly regrets” making Mandelson a peer and appointing him to a ministerial role in 2008. Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the news that Mandelson was passing information to Epstein while he was business secretary was “a betrayal of everything we stand for as a country”.