The Vetting Myth

Understanding the realities of Mandelson's pre-appointment checks

As I write this, the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is supposedly wading through thousands of documents relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to Washington DC. There appears to be a widespread expectation that this process, particularly a review of the files relating to Mandelson’s “security vetting” will expose some hitherto unknown insights from MI5 and MI6 that may, either: prove that they knew all along that Mandelson was a wrongun but appointed him anyway; or, somehow rescue Starmer with an improbably soft conclusion from that process that gave Mandelson a clean bill of health (clearly erroneously) but which allows the government now to say “we acted on the information available to us at the time”.

All of this story appears to misunderstand the nature of the vetting process. For civil service jobs (including ones as grand as British Ambassador to Washington) there is a process called ‘Developed Vetting’ (DV) which is basically the same as having Top Secret security clearance (there’s also something called STRAP induction, which isn’t as painful as it sounds, but that’s not nearly as important so we’ll ignore it). If you don’t have ‘DV’ status, you can’t access most sensitive government communications. Lots of people are ‘DV’ed’, as the jargon has it, including most employees of the FCDO, and all in the intelligence and security world. But, importantly, no politician gets vetted. Mandelson has held many roles in government, but this will almost certainly have been the first time he was vetted.

But this isn’t the end of the story: the DV process is, bluntly, limited, flawed, untransparent, incompetent, inadequate and crying out for reform. Talk to anyone who has been DVed (I suspect I have plenty of readers in this category) and I’ve yet to meet anyone who has a good word to say about the process. Here’s how it goes: the first thing to note is that “security vetting” isn’t carried out by the security services. It’s carried out by something called UK Security Vetting, which is technically part of the Cabinet Office but basically operates like a private sector business within government. It charges individual government departments for carrying out vetting and is slow, bureaucratic and ill-equipped. The candidate for vetting starts out with being sent a series of forms to fill in. The most absurd of these is one which requires you to list every time you have been overseas, the details, destination, people you met and so on. Yes, every time. The weekend away with your partner, the post-university backpacking trip, the friend’s wedding in Italy, you name it. Then there’s a financial form and a credit check: list everything about your finances. This is like a mortgage application on steroids, with endless details about “did I buy that washing machine on finance or pay outright?” Again, a level of detail which might reasonably be said to have nothing to do with whether you are exposed to foreign intelligence agencies or an international pedophile ring.

The paperwork phase of the DV process is only the warm-up: the big drama is the interviews - of you and one or two contacts that you nominate as referees. These interviews are normally carried out by retired police officers or people with that sort of background, and at risk of stereotyping, they tend to have a solid air of social conservatism and narrow horizons. The interviews go on for hours and focus on prurient obsessions about your sex life and leisure time. You might be asked “have you ever tried illegal drugs?” “What, ever, including weed or pills?” “All illegal narcotics, yes, at any point in your life.” So you drag your memory of what you might have done as an undergraduate, and wonder whether it’s going to ruin your future career.

The sex bits are worse: “how many sexual partners have you had?” “How would you describe your sexuality?” “Are you gay?” “Are you sure you’re not gay?” “Have you ever thought about being gay?” (“Of course, it would be fine if you are gay, we just need to know…”) All of this to a complete stranger who gives off the air of being mildly disgusted by your life, even if your life turns out to be pretty vanilla. And then, the funny bits: “Have you travelled behind the Iron Curtain?” I’ve been asked that decades after 1989 and the integration of countries like Poland into the heart of the Western Alliance.

All of these questions are also asked of your referee - in a separate interview. Most people who have been referees end up saying “I have no idea” to most of the questions. How many of your close friends know exactly how many sexual partners you’ve had, whether you have pondered about the possibility of being gay, or whether twenty five years ago you took a drag on a joint being passed around the room? Importantly, as the candidate chooses the referee, people in the know make a point of picking someone less likely to know these things about them. Don’t choose the mate who came with you on that slightly dodgy trip to Morocco after you left university. Choose the person you’ve known and liked for decades but who you don’t actually share intimate details of your life with.

Once the interviews are over, that’s it. The vetting officers write their reports, make a decision and (if you pass) you’re all set for the next few years. If they don’t like your answers, perhaps your bohemian lifestyle offends their sensibilities or they worry that you might not keep up the payments on your car, they can refuse you. You will never know why you failed vetting, there is no right of appeal or right to see the report. But not passing will mean in many cases that you can’t take up a job. These decisions can and do ruin careers, and lives.

For those that are doing this for the first time, there’s an understandable belief that after the interview phase, then the MI5/MI6 machine kicks into gear, cross-checks your answers against a series of special databases and sources and then makes a judgement on your truthfulness, reliability and potential exposure to blackmail or worse. Nope, that isn’t how it works. UKSV has very limited access to anything at all, and MI5 and MI6 are genuinely not in the business of investigating individual law-abiding UK citizens. The intelligence agencies don’t have the resources, they don’t see it as their job and they don’t want it to become their job. So this brings us to the most important insight about UK vetting and one which will probably ensure that I never pass vetting again. You can lie to your vetting officer. You can tell them “Oh I never touch drugs, I have very strong views about this” whilst spending every Saturday night snorting away your salary and, as long as your referee is squared away, the vetters will never know. You can be married whilst having multiple affairs and claim a quiet and faithful home life and, again, they have no way of finding out if there isn’t some obvious bit of external evidence. The entire process is based on whether you trigger the prejudices of the vetting officers, not whether you are or are not a flawed, exposed and risky personality.

Princes of Darkness

This will have been the process as it applied to Peter Mandelson. Fill in some forms, nominate a referee, do some interviews. MI5 and MI6 not involved. Now, it’s important to establish a few additional points: the Cabinet Office carried out a separate process on Mandelson internally before the formal security vetting occurred. There was also, apparently some sort of risk assessment even before that. It’s not impossible that the intelligence agencies were involved in some ways in those processes (although I find it unlikely). Also, you have to take into account the fact that Mandelson is a famous person, whose private life was already going to be known and knowable to some extent to his vetting officers. But this doesn’t mean that there would have been a special process in place for Mandelson. And in addition, the vetting officer knows full well that s/he is not realistically going to be able to deny the highest profile official appointment of the Starmer government. These are anonymous and - perhaps wrongly - low status people that can deny a young civil servant their future career but would never be able to hold up a direct appointment of the Prime Minister to the highest diplomatic post.

I have long believed that our vetting processes don’t work. The Americans use a polygraph: many people have cheated these, but I reckon most people are more likely to tell the truth hooked up to a lie detector than in an overly long interview with a retired copper who knows nothing about you. Vetting is important: we entrust people with state secrets, with national assets and with making difficult decisions on which the fate of millions might hang. But if we want to take it seriously, it should be done differently. And perhaps, in an age of kompromat and hybrid warfare, we should vet our politicians as well? Arguably, the tragic disasters of the Johnson and Truss governments would never have happened if they had been exposed to some sort of checks.

For more on this topic have a look at my friend Jason Pack’s piece:

Epstein, the Disorderer of 2026; and McSweeney has got to Go (and he did)!