Boris Johnson did not pressure House of Lords chiefs to approve Russian media mogul Evgeny Lebedev for a peerage, the chair of the appointments committee has insisted.
And Lord Bew, who chairs the House of Lords Appointments Committee (HOLAC), said while security services provided information on Lord Lebedev, they did not "warn" them off appointing him to the upper chamber.
The Crossbench peer told a Commons committee the appointment of Lord Lebedev, the son of a former KGB agent and a friend of Boris Johnson, was "a special case...there's no doubt it was a unique case."
He said all of the four MPs on his committee had frontbencher security experience, adding: "You don't think they didn't take this seriously, do you?"
Questions have been raised over whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked anyone in the security services to revise, reconsider or withdraw their assessment of the media mogul ahead of his appointment in November 2020.
Lord Bew told the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (Pacac) that, while Lord Lebedev was a "unique" case that involved security checks, the committee had approved his peerage without interference.
"There was no pressure on this candidate - that I think is probably worth saying," said the historian.
He said the committee had asked for more information from the security services to understand the information they shared, but denied there was any "warning" issued to Mr Johnson about the appointment.
"We did what we often do: we said 'You told us "x", you really need to tell us more'," said Lord Bew.
"They didn't say, 'What we said in the first instance was wrong'. They said, 'Here is a bit more, here is a bit more still'. That's how it goes, it is an elaborative process, a process of clarification, we need to know as much as we can."
Asked if the House of Lords Appointment Commission had blocked, paused or questioned Lord Lebedev's application for a seat in the Lords, Lord Bewsaid the panel had requested extra information.
Lord Bew insisted the panel had not blocked the appointment but accepted the request for more detail could be considered a "pause".
"Block, I think, fits under the heading of warning: No," he said.
But he said there could be delays "for all kinds of reasons".
"You can say that we, as I have already indicated, eventually received advice and we required further elucidation and this went on for some weeks, you can definitely say that," he said.
"Does that constitute a pause? I suppose."
Asked if that clarification was a "dilution" of the initial advice, Lord Bew said: "It's more a matter of being told something which made us say 'we need to know more'. This happens regularly.
"In this case this was not as rapid as it sometimes is in other cases - in some cases it is cleared up very quickly."
