‘If Mandelson can pass, anyone can’: Epstein scandal prompts scrutiny of UK security vetting

LONDON — Keir Starmer’s ill-fated decision to pick Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. — despite known links to Jeffrey Epstein — has thrown his government into turmoil. And it’s prompting intense scrutiny of a system designed to stop precisely that outcome.

As the U.K. prime minister faces continued blowback for appointing Mandelson to the diplomatic post, POLITICO spoke to seven national security experts, current and former officials and MPs familiar with the security vetting system that governs sensitive roles.

They say the Mandelson case — in which the veteran politician was given the job despite his ties to late convicted sex offender Epstein — highlights a slew of long-running problems with a set-up meant to ensure candidates for key posts are free from the kind of risks that have now blown up in Starmer’s face.

In reality, they say, the process suffers from political pressure, a lack of robust due diligence, a reliance on trust, and stretched resources. Some were granted anonymity to speak candidly about this sensitive issue. 

A security official who has undergone the same process as Mandelson — known as Developed Vetting (DV) — said: “If the process was done properly — and he still passed — then everyone who has been through DV needs re-vetting. Because, if Mandelson can pass, anyone can.”

For his part, Mandelson — who did not respond to a request for comment for this piece — has said he “deeply regrets” his continued association with Epstein and the “lies” that the “monster” told him. He has said none of the Epstein emails released by the U.S. Department of Justice “indicate wrongdoing or misdemeanor on my part.” He has apologized “unequivocally” for his association with Epstein and “to the women and girls that suffered.”

A question of timing

A full DV check is supposed to be a grueling affair, gatekeeping the most senior and sensitive Whitehall jobs.

Candidates must actively declare any potential security risks they are aware of. They are routinely subjected to a deeply-personal interview on every aspect of their life, including those which could potentially make them a blackmail target. 

Self-declaration forms are filled in, candidates are interviewed, and referees are quizzed to cross-examine the information provided. DV covers everything from a candidate’s foreign travel to their pornography habits. It presses them on any drug taking or affairs, and can probe their entire financial history. Criminal records must be declared and are scrutinized.

“The process requires a vast amount of information, including a full travel history, where you’ve been and with whom, and any foreign associates,” the security official quoted at the beginning of this piece said. “It’s intrusive by design. Any normal person would feel uncomfortable, let alone someone with a history.”

DV is carried out by United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV), a body in the Cabinet Office. The questions it asks and the information it collects are confidential and shared only with UKSV and the Foreign Office’s own security team. The prime minister does not have access to its findings.

But Mandelson’s appointment has raised questions over both the sequencing and scope of this vetting.

The pick for the U.S. ambassador job was announced to much fanfare in December 2024 — before DV had taken place. 

Ahead of the announcement, No.10 Downing Street instead asked the Cabinet Office’s internal Proprietary and Ethics Team (PET) to run a more limited “due diligence” check on the ambassadorial choice, alongside five other candidates then under consideration by the government. 

The vast majority of the information the Cabinet Office relied on for the exercise was in the public domain. A summary was then handed to Downing Street, who proceeded with the appointment, after No.10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney emailed three further questions to Mandelson on his relationship with Epstein. Only then did developed vetting begin.

Matthew Savill had a long career working in Whitehall and vetting before joining the RUSI security think tank — and is among those raising alarm bells about the sequencing of this process in Mandelson’s case. 

“There is a huge question over how Mandelson was appointed and publicly announced before vetting,” he said. “There is no way that that doesn’t slightly tip the balance towards acceptance. If you’re going to hold up the appointment or deny them the clearance, it becomes an issue.” 

At the time Mandelson was announced for the job, the fact of his association with Epstein was public knowledge — although the full extent of his longer-term ties to the disgraced financier had yet to be made public in the U.S. Department of Justice’s release of the Epstein Files. “None of us knew the depths and the darkness of that relationship,” Starmer said earlier this month in a speech apologizing to Epstein’s victims for appointing Mandelson.

Emily Thornberry, chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, grilled Foreign Office boss Olly Robbins about the process last November, weeks after Mandelson had been fired as ambassador over the publication of correspondence between him and Epstein. 

Robbins acknowledged that Mandelson — a veteran Labour politician who had held multiple government posts under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — had “jumped the queue” for vetting, with a process done “faster than some people’s clearances will have been.”

But he said: “That was not because the process was different; it was because we advanced him up the queue.” Robbins — who was Mandelson’s line manager — told the committee that he had a conversation with Mandelson about his “conflicts of interests” during the process, and the contents of that “needs to be between us.”

Thornberry remains unconvinced that enough time was granted to allow full developed vetting to take place — and fears political timescales were at play.

“It all had to be sorted out and tickety-boo by the swearing in with the president [Trump] at the beginning of January,” she tells POLITICO. “So there was very little time — and there was Christmas in between. Normally, as I understand it, DV takes months.

“What we did get out of our inquiry was that he wasn’t given a panel interview the way that a non-political appointee would do, and so therefore any questions asked of him seem to have been done pretty informally by [Starmer’s then-Chief of Staff] Morgan McSweeney — which is pretty low-level accountability.” The Cabinet Office declined to comment on the record for this piece.

Tools for the job

Others are questioning whether the DV process is robust enough to account for a candidate who may give misleading answers. 

Starmer has accused Mandelson of lying to him “repeatedly” about the extent of his ties to Epstein — and that, say those familiar with the vetting process, shows one of its fundamental weaknesses: a reliance on trust over hard information.

One former government special advisor who has been through DV said that the interview they faced was “like going to the GP and they ask how many units [of alcohol per week] you have. Nobody fully tells the truth, and I guess they can only go by what you provide them with, unless they can get good data.”

In contrast with some U.S. counterparts, British officials remain wary of leaning on polygraph tests to weigh the veracity of answers given in interviews. Instead, the DV process relies on the strength of the intelligence that feeds into it — and the honesty of the person subject to the checks.

“There is no lie detector — which the U.K. has been pretty skeptical about in comparison to the U.S. which uses them a lot. If you lie and there’s something that only you know about, which your references don’t, then you might get through vetting,” Savill said.

There is only a limited role in the process for Britain’s Intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6. 

Savill said there are two places where spooks might feed into vetting: a “box check,” in which UKSV runs a candidate and their family’s details against security service records, “to see if they turn up in some capacity;” and during the due diligence check by the Proprietary and Ethics Team (PET) in the Cabinet Office. “This is a point at which you might consult the agencies in the background,” Savill said. Political party whips can also feed into this process. 

But, he warned, “questions around political figures that have national security implications are radioactive in the intelligence community.” Britain’s Wilson Doctrine — the convention that MPs’ and Lords’ communications should not be intercepted by the intelligence services — continues to place “pretty significant constraints on how intelligence and politics interact.”

PET did not consult the security services during its due diligence process for Mandelson. The Cabinet Office declined to comment on security matters relating to Mandelson’s appointment or any engagement with the intelligence community.

There is also some consternation among security experts that Mandelson’s known Russian connections were not viewed as a sufficient risk to stop his clearance. The former Labour politician had a long-standing relationship with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. “I know people who haven’t even gotten their parliamentary clearance because they’ve travelled to Russia once for work, or they’ve had a parent who’s been born in that region but has no links there whatsoever,” the former special advisor quoted above said. “That’s the level of paranoia there is, and about Russia in particular.”

Carve-outs for areas of acute sensitivity are possible under the vetting process.

Mandelson’s clearance would likely have seen him inducted into STRAP, a high-level, U.K. security clearance allowing access to top-level intelligence material. Obtaining this clearance involves looking at the foreign exposure of an individual — and can result in a subject being denied access to certain pieces of intelligence if deemed a risk.

Savill noted that given that the U.S.-U.K. relationship is “so key,” its ambassador is expected to have access to a vast swathe of intelligence and “it would be really difficult to do his job without this.”

‘Failed to get a grip’

UKSV itself continues to feel political heat over its performance — and major questions about the resourcing of DV checks persist. 

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee reported in 2023 that ministers had repeatedly complained to UKSV over delays in granting clearances. “The Cabinet Office has failed to get a grip of vetting services since it took over responsibility in 2020,” the watchdog said. “It has not assessed the impact across government that delays to vetting can have when staff are unable to progress work because they do not have the appropriate level of security clearance.”

Savill argues that “national security vetting has largely been a car crash for the past decade.” He cites a combination of short-staffing, botched IT upgrades and a lack of capacity for what can be expensive and intrusive work into people’s backgrounds. “It raises the question if DV is fit for the modern era for people who are attempting to evade scrutiny,” Savill added.  

At the same time, Savill said there can be quite “a high bar to get over when denying a DV” clearance to a candidate, which leads to emphasis on what’s known as “aftercare” — regular checks on a person’s circumstances to keep an eye on issues identified during vetting.

“There has been criticism that DV lets a lot of people through the gate and then it puts a lot of emphasis on checking up on them afterwards,” he said. “The problem is the presumption is towards giving a DV — it is a bit like a trial, the presumption is towards innocence.”

Shake-up starts

Earlier this month, the British government folded to political pressure and agreed to release vast swathes of internal documentation relating to Mandelson’s appointment — but the work to overhaul vetting is only just beginning.

Starmer’s administration has promised to publish Mandelson’s due diligence report, a conflict of interest form he had to fill out, and information provided to UKSV by the Foreign Office. But it is unlikely that the information contained in Mandelson’s DV process will ever see the light of day.

Further documents deemed to be “prejudicial to U.K. national security or international relations” will be referred to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), while an ongoing police investigation into misconduct in public office allegations against Mandelson — who appears to have forwarded on government policy advice to Epstein while serving in Gordon Brown’s government — leaves some elements in limbo. Officers have not yet interviewed Mandelson and he has denied wrongdoing.

In a bid to get back on the front foot after days of damaging headlines, the government has signaled that it’s open to a shake-up of vetting. Morgan McSweeney — Starmer’s chief of staff, who was forced to resign over the scandal — called for the process to be “fundamentally overhauled” in his parting statement. 

Darren Jones, the minister who leads the Cabinet Office, vowed last week that the government would tighten the process for appointments like Mandelson’s. It will, Jones said, include assurances that “where the role requires access to highly classified material, the selected candidate must have passed through the requisite national security vetting process before such appointments are announced or confirmed.”

“This cannot simply be a gesture but a safeguard for the future,” he said.

In the meantime, the questions about this particular appointment — and how seriously the vetting process was taken by the politicians calling the shots — continue to mount. “What is extraordinary is that I cannot see how a vetting team could have given him a positive outcome of that process,” a former senior British security official said of Mandelson’s appointment: 

 “Whatever Starmer and [former No.10 chief of staff Morgan] McSweeney think of him and his abilities — that’s not the issue. The issue is whether you lack integrity and/or are a security risk.”