As is often the case, the simplest explanation turns out to be the most convincing. Keir Starmer wanted Peter Mandelson to be our man in Washington come hell or high water. He and those around him in 10 Downing Street would brook no delay, recognise no roadblocks, accept no excuses.
Oliver ‘Olly’ Robbins, elevated to top Foreign Office mandarin as the Mandelson appointment process drew to a close, read the runes and cleared away the final hurdle.
No point getting in the way of the Starmer steamroller at this late stage, he concluded, especially since he was the new kid on the block. And what’s wrong with pleasing the boss in your first few weeks on the job?
Step away from the morass of conflicting testimony, the confusing detail, the obfuscation, the lies. The truth is clear: Starmer was determined to have his way and Robbins obliged, resorting to a classic British establishment fudge on the vetting which clouded the issue and left no corroborative paper trail.
Well done, Sir Humphrey.
Team Starmer went to extraordinary lengths to shoehorn their man into being US ambassador.
Testifying before the Commons select committee on foreign affairs yesterday, Robbins spoke of ‘constant pressure’ from Downing Street to approve Mandelson’s appointment, even a ‘dismissive approach’ to the security vetting process he was still undergoing when Robbins took up his new post.
It must never have crossed his mind he would be fired for doing his master’s bidding. Perhaps he should have been more aware of the extent to which Starmer is prepared to go to sacrifice others, even close allies, to save his own skin.
On Monday, Keir Starmer told the Commons he found it ‘incredible’ that he’d not been alerted to the problems swirling around Mandelson’s security clearance
On Monday, Starmer told the Commons he found it ‘incredible’ that he’d not been alerted to the problems swirling around Mandelson’s security clearance.
It is far more incredible that Starmer took such a cavalier approach to vetting Mandelson, twice forced to resign from government for dodgy dealings and with a lust for power and money that led him to crave the company and wealth of various nefarious characters, from the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to thuggish Russian oligarchs and communist China’s red princes.
If anybody needed the strictest security vetting it was Mandelson. Yet Starmer ignored the advice of the then Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, in November 2024 to vet him before appointing him.
If he’d followed that wise counsel, instead of choosing to do it the other way round, Starmer wouldn’t be in the pickle he is now.
Despite receiving a due diligence report from his own Cabinet Office highlighting the security concerns surrounding Mandelson in early December 2024, he proceeded that same month to give Mandelson the job, win the King’s approval, make the appointment public, gain US agreement to it and even grant him access to the Foreign Office and certain classified briefings.
All that remained was that damned security vetting – and Downing Street was getting impatient. ‘Just f*****g do it,’ Morgan McSweeney, then Starmer’s chief of staff is said to have hissed down the phone to Robbins’ predecessor at the Foreign Office.
At one stage, Robbins revealed yesterday, the Cabinet Office was even questioning if Mandelson needed to undergo vetting, so keen was Starmer to get him in post. That really is incredible.
Testifying before the Commons select committee on foreign affairs yesterday, Oliver ‘Olly’ Robbins spoke of ‘constant pressure’ from Downing Street to approve Mandelson’s appointment
For those of you still resisting the idea that Starmer is unfit to be Prime Minister, the time to surrender is now. This is a man who has insisted during the whole sorry Mandelson saga that proper due process was followed throughout.
But, it turns out, he was prepared to ride roughshod over the process to get his way.
A man who now says he’d never have appointed Mandelson if he’d known he’d flunked his security vetting and whose top team wondered why Mandelson needed to be vetted in the first place.
A man who came to power promising to do away with the ‘conveyor belt of cronyism’ he claimed existed under the Tories.
But who, we now learn, not content with making one political ally an ambassador, also pressed the Foreign Office to find an ambassadorial post for another, his then director of communications (and Mandelson ally) Matthew Doyle – who, like Mandelson, took a reputational hit thanks to his own association with a convicted paedophile.
A man who pledged a new era of integrity in public office – yet wanted the Doyle appointment made behind the back of his then foreign secretary, David Lammy.
A man who once boasted that in previous posts he’d always carried the can for mistakes and would never take it out on his subordinates. Yet who, in power, has thrown a raft of senior colleagues under the bus.
Starmer saw himself as something of a Trump whisperer. Relations with Trump were good, Mandelson was settling nicely into Washington. But nothing is for ever with the mercurial Trump and Mandelson’s posting ended in scandal and disgrace
As the Mandelson business has unravelled, some wonder if it’s the PM’s incompetence or lack of probity that’s been exposed. In truth, it is both.
At a time of a conflict in the Gulf, war in Ukraine and a gathering global energy shock, which will herald a new cost of living crisis, Starmer has played fast and loose with our national security.
For that is what is at the heart of the Mandelson scandal – national security.
Given the depth and extent of the US-UK security and intelligence relationship, our Washington ambassador is privy to more secret, classified and confidential information than all but the most senior cabinet ministers. Yet, instead of insisting on rigorous security vetting, Starmer regarded it as an obstacle getting in his way.
Why? For the usual self-serving reasons, of course. As 2024 came to a close, after less than six months in power, the Starmer project was already coming off the rails on the home front, thanks largely to Rachel Reeves’s disastrous first Budget.
But, to even his own surprise, he saw himself a success in foreign affairs, indeed something of a Trump whisperer who, alone among European leaders, knew how to handle the incoming President. He regarded Mandelson’s appointment as essential to cultivating that role.
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And for a while it worked. Relations with Trump were good, Mandelson was settling nicely into Washington. But nothing is for ever with the mercurial Trump and Mandelson’s posting ended in scandal and disgrace.
Starmer is now trying to burnish his global reputation by spearheading a naval task force for convoys going through the closed Strait of Hormuz, a project for which we don’t have a navy that’s remotely up to the job – and wouldn’t be deployed until the Strait is re-opened anyway, by which time it probably won’t be needed.
But it plays to Starmer’s inflated sense of his abilities and importance.
That hissing sound you can now hear in Westminster is the air escaping fast from Starmer’s premiership. Even Cabinet ministers are clocking that it’s over. During his media round yesterday Ed Miliband gave every impression that he knew the game was up – that Starmer is past defending.
Other ministers feel the same. They know, in the wake of the Mandelson business, that the May 7 elections will be an even greater wipe-out than anticipated.
But what to do next still eludes the Labour Party, which is useless at removing bad leaders, especially when they’re also Prime Minister. Even more so when the alternatives look just as bad – or even worse.
Starmer is a dead man walking. But rather than put him (and us) out of his misery, Labour is just as likely to condemn the nation to a zombie government for the foreseeable future.
What we hoped back in July 2024 would be the dawn of a brave new world has turned out to be just another tacky horror story.
