Keir Starmer saw off an opposition bid to refer him to a standards committee over Peter Mandelson’s appointment after Downing Street deployed its full weight to force Labour MPs to shore up the prime minister.
However, the Labour leader bore the brunt of anger from some of his own backbenchers who accused him of creating a situation where they would be perceieved as being complicit in “a cover-up.”
The vote – tabled by the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch – was on whether the privileges committee should consider if the prime minister misled the Commons in relation to the disgraced peer taking the role of US ambassador.
While it united opposition parties including the Liberal Democrats, SNP, Reform and others, there will have been relief in the government that Labour figures such as Angela Rayner opted to keep their powder dry. The government won the vote by 335 votes to 223, a majority of 112.
Badenoch had opened the debate by accusing the Prime Minister of forcing his MPs to come out to assist him “to avoid scrutiny”.
“They are being whipped today to exonerate him before the facts have even been tested,” she added.
Badenoch said the motion rested on “facts” such as that the prime minister had appointed Mandelson before security vetting was complete in contravention of advice given to him in November, and that while his own national security advisor, Jonathan Powell, had described the appointment as “weirdly rushed”.
“We also know that this latest information about the problems with the security vetting did not come from the humble address [the mechanism used by her party to force the release of documents]. It came from a leak to the Guardian vetting,” Badenoch added, citing the Guardian’s revelation that the Foreign Office had overruled a decision to deny Mandelson security vetting clearance.
The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, likened Starmer’s response to the motion was the same to that of Boris Johnson, when the then Conservative MP faced a similar vote that paved the way for a probe into whether he misled parliament over alleged breaches of lockdown rules.
“The Prime Minister called this motion a stunt, that is not why I put my name to it. But it’s funny though, because ‘stunt’ is exactly the same word Boris Johnson used about the motion the Prime Minister and I tabled four years ago, referring Boris Johnson to the privileges committee,” said Davey.
Closing the debate for the government Darren Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister, said: “In recent weeks some have accused the prime minister of dishonesty saying there was no way that Foreign Office officials would have given Peter Mandelson clearance against the vetting agency’s recommendation let alone without checking with the prime minister himself.
However, he insisted that those accusations had been “disproved” by the testimony to a Commons committee by Sir Olly Robbins, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary who was sacked by Starmer after the Guardian disclosed the civil servant had overturned a recommendation from UK Security Vetting (UKSV) to deny clearance for Mandelson,
However, there was also lacerating criticism of the prime minister from figures including Sorcha Eastwood, the Alliance MP for Lagan Valley, who challenged Labour allegations that those supporting the motion were engaged in a stunt. After two recent car bombs near her constituency she had “bigger things to do.”