Delete your emails about King, top civil servant tells diplomats

Diplomats and civil servants were told to delete emails and Whatsapps discussing the King’s concerns about Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK, The i Paper understands.

Documents released in the so-called Mandelson files show that Government officials ordered the deletion of the messages as they scrambled to contain the fallout from the US President’s bust-up with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

Senior Whitehall sources have told this newspaper that the emails related to “sensitive discussions” around the State Visit, including the King’s reservations over it following the row between the two presidents.

The revelation highlights the lengths Sir Keir Starmer’s aides and Government officials went to in order to ensure Charles’s concerns did not become public and to manage diplomatic relations with the White House.

In one email dated 13 March 2025, Ailsa Terry, the Prime Minister’s private secretary for foreign affairs, told senior aides that Sir Olly Robbins, who was then the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, was “clear about the need to delete all traffic on this”.

The email was sent to Peter Mandelson, then ambassador to Washington, his deputy James Roscoe, Starmer’s then chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and the Prime Minister’s ex-principal private secretary Nin Pandit.

Part of the message was redacted in the release of the second tranche of the Mandelson documents earlier this week under an exemption which allows for matters that could harm diplomatic relations to be kept secret.

It comes after The i Paper revealed on Thursday that the King had “jitters” over Trump’s trip, while another source starkly claimed: “He did not want to do it.” The State Visit eventually went ahead in September that year.

It is not illegal for civil servants to delete official emails but the Civil Service code says officials must “keep accurate official records and handle information as openly as possible within the legal framework”.

Cabinet Office policy is to keep records of important decision-making and substantive policies. It also has a policy of deleting emails between civil servants after three months – not immediately – unless they are important enough to be kept.

The Foreign Office said the instruction to delete certain emails arose from the inadvertent circulation of “sensitive material” that should not have been sent via email and that it was consistent with internal procedures to ask recipients to delete those messages.

‘Please ignore – and if you can do it discreetly, delete!’

The published files show on 13 March 2025 Mandelson emailed the group of senior No10 aides a WhatsApp message forwarded from an official, believed to be Robbins, that morning.

The WhatsApp message read: “You’ll see Karen Pierce’s email following an event last night. Please ignore – and if you can do it discreetly, delete!”

Pierce was Mandelson’s predecessor as ambassador to Washington, having just handed over to the Labour peer.

Mandelson told the officials: “I don’t know why Karen decided to email everyone last night with ***[redacted comment]”.

Terry replied that same day: “Thank you Peter. On the back of the email you mention, Olly has been clear about the need to delete all traffic on this.”

She then appeared to refer to the upcoming audience Starmer was due to have with the King on Wednesday 26 March.

The aide wrote: “Given the range of equities, we will put some updated advice to the next *** on 26 March drawing on the various views expressed by *** since the last *** discussion, and keep in close touch with you and the Washington team in the interim.”

Deleting emails ‘bad for democracy’

Deborah Mason, head of Communications at the Archives and Records Association, expressed concern over the deletion of emails, saying: “It is bad for democracy, openness and trust in Government but unfortunately it is legal.”

And Jon Davis, professor of government education at King’s College London, said: “As a historian, we want ALL government communication kept. Obviously that’s never been possible and only a fraction ends up after twenty years in the National Archives.”

But Hannah Keenan, associate director of the Institute for Government, suggested that the lines over what should be recorded were becoming blurred as more conversations transition from in person to on Whatsapp and via email.

She said: “If this was a policy decision, it would need to be recorded, and it shouldn’t be deleted. The bit that is perhaps less clear cut is that so much more of our lives are now online, and things that you would have had as a conversation in the corridor or a chat are now on WhatsApp or they are on email, and actually we don’t expect government to keep a record of absolutely every conversation that happens. It wouldn’t be plausible.

“It’s not necessarily in the public interest to record all of those things and to disclose all of that. Obviously, in this instance, it is a bit embarrassing that this particular exchange has come out this way, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad for how government works.

“It’s obviously damaging to a certain extent to trust in the civil service to have this type of email come out, but it’s very easy to feel that this might be a conspiracy to hide something, when it might just be that actually it is the sort of thing you would just have had a bit of a gossip or a chat over.”

More than 1,500 pages of documents relating to Government communications with Mandelson were published on Monday afternoon after the Tories forced a parliamentary motion, known as a humble address, to have them released.

The Foreign Office said it had published a substantial set of documents and met its obligations under the humble address, with the only exception being material held at the request of the Met Police as Mandelson is being investigated for alleged misconduct in public office.

Where necessary, information relating to national security or which could damage international relations had been redacted prior to publication, the Government added.

The deletion of emails was not reflective of a failure to follow rules around record-keeping in the civil service, which are fully understood across the Foreign Office, the Government claimed. It said this had been demonstrated by the volume of material it had been able to publish within the scope of the humble address.

Robbins declined to respond to a request for comment.