Speeches by Brandreth.

“I have quite a lot of paperwork in front of me, so would you mind reading out bullet 2?”

“So all the information that I read out was shared with the Prime Minister prior to his appointment and was considered not sufficient to cause concern about the appointment.”

“I just want to touch on the due diligence and add a couple of quick questions regarding the earlier conversation. Since we are talking about what came up during the due diligence, publicly available information at the time was that Mandelson and Epstein had kept a notoriously close relationship and that in June 2009 Ma…”

“Those are not things you would usually put on your CV, I would imagine.”

“During the conversation that you had with him, were you aware that he had been sacked as Trade and Industry Secretary in 1998 for failing to declare an interest-free loan that he had received from someone whose businesses were being investigated by the Department at the time; that he had been sacked in 2001 after attem…”

“In the two recent examples that you gave, was the vetting clearance process completed before or after the appointments were announced?”

“The huge potential of both the north-west of England and north Wales is being held back by poor rail infra-structure. The last Conservative Government committed themselves to spending at least £1 billion to upgrade and electrify the railway lines from Crewe and Warrington through Chester and into north Wales, but this …”

“When would you need to have an agreement on this by?”

“You have said that you cannot repay the loan in September. Could you set out what the current expectation is with the FCDO in terms of when and what the repayments should be? If you were to begin making those loan repayments in September, what would be the impact for the British Council?”

“My hon. Friend makes an important point. It has no navy and only nine coastguard vessels; it is not able to protect those waters. Even if illegal fishing were controlled, the Mauritian Fisheries Minister has already spoken of wanting to issue fishing licences around the Chagos Islands. The agreement provides no guarant…”

“The treaty that the Bill will implement is shocking for so many reasons: the security implications, the staggering costs, and the voices that it has ignored—the voices of British Chagossians. Their views and concerns are many and varied. I had the privilege of meeting members of the community when they came to Parliame…”

“Following the tragic murder of her daughter Brianna, Esther Ghey has dedicated herself to making our schools safer. I have just come from an event that she is hosting in Parliament, at which she is calling for a statutory ban on smartphones in classrooms. Will the Minister for Children and Families, the hon. Member for…”

“Are there things that you think the cell could do to be more effective or to work more collaboratively with legitimate local security partners, and things like that, to improve its effectiveness?”

“Thank you. To you, Grace, and picking up on what James Kynge was saying, how do you see China’s use of state-backed media and social media to influence and shape global narratives?”

“I want to ask about the counter-Daesh communications cell, which the UK leads on, to undermine propaganda in parts of Africa, and also I believe in the middle east and Afghanistan. How effective do you think it has been in building that resilience against terror and extremist narratives?”

“Are there things that you think the cell could do to be more effective or to work more collaboratively with legitimate local security partners, and things like that, to improve its effectiveness?”

“I want to ask about the counter-Daesh communications cell, which the UK leads on, to undermine propaganda in parts of Africa, and also I believe in the middle east and Afghanistan. How effective do you think it has been in building that resilience against terror and extremist narratives?”

“Thank you. To you, Grace, and picking up on what James Kynge was saying, how do you see China’s use of state-backed media and social media to influence and shape global narratives?”

“At the start of this Parliament, I could not have imagined that we would be asked to consider a Bill that is so uniquely detrimental to our national security, the British taxpayer, the British Chagossian people and the environment. Not only are we ceding sovereignty of a critical overseas territory, but we are paying a…”

“Will there be a sovereignty clause?”