Allies of Sir Olly Robbins have hit back at Sir Keir Starmer, claiming that the sacked mandarin had a “duty” under current rules not to tell Downing Street that Peter Mandelson had failed vetting. Vincent MacMaster (the pseudonym of a former Cabinet Office civil servant) has the details in the Spectator.
Section 3 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 assigns the power to manage the civil service to “the Minister for the Civil Service” who is, both by convention and presently, the Prime Minister. Conversely, the Act assigns the power to manage the diplomatic service to the Secretary of State (that is, the Foreign Secretary), and expressly says that this includes the power to make appointments to the diplomatic service. The Foreign Secretary, not the Prime Minister, is thus the relevant appointing authority for the diplomatic service. The Prime Minister clearly has political influence, and in practice may be consulted on or even politically try and direct major appointments, but he has no formal legal role in the selection of ambassadors.
The Act also says that the management powers over both the home civil service and the diplomatic service do not cover national security vetting. Vetting sits outside the ordinary management power. A diplomatic appointment and a vetting decision are legally distinct things. Official vetting guidance likewise treats national security vetting as a separate process from the appointment itself.
Final decisions on difficult vetting questions and any waiver process ordinarily rest at permanent secretary level. That strongly implies the probability that Sir Olly Robbins, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, authorised Mandelson’s clearance. A letter sent jointly by Robbins and Yvette Cooper to the Foreign Affairs select committee on September 16th last year seems to imply this by stating that ‘the [vetting] process is also independent of ministers who are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome’.
On the legal front, therefore, it seems correct to say that the Prime Minister should have been informed only of the outcome of the appointment and vetting process conducted within the Foreign Office, not treated as a formal decision-maker himself. The official vetting process also appears to mandate that ministers not be told anything about vetting other than the final decision.
This is potentially the true scandal of this entire affair: the process as outlined by Sir Olly in his letter to the Foreign Affairs committee requires that he alone bear the responsibility for overturning the findings of the security vetting procedure. He is notionally forbidden from informing ministers of anything other than the final outcome which, taken literally, would prohibit him from revealing that he overruled the security services’ determination.
It is very clear in retrospect that Robbins should not have reached the judgement he did. But it is worth readers and politicians alike reflecting on how appropriate it is that an unelected career bureaucracy is expected to make such monumental decisions with no democratic oversight. Sir Olly made a mistake, but it was a mistake he was effectively boxed into making by a system very clearly designed to keep ministers out of the decision-making chain.
Worth reading in full.
If that is the system then it is, as ‘MacMaster’ implies, bonkers. But it doesn’t get Starmer off the hook. Because Mandelson’s appointment was ordered by Downing Street and was, as National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell said, “weirdly rushed“, with Mandelson already in post and given top security clearance weeks before vetting was complete. Officials were “put in an invidious position” by Downing Street, says civil service union boss Mike Clancy, only being asked to vet Mandelson after his appointment had already been publicly announced by the Prime Minister. Indeed, Robbins himself was only appointed on January 8th 2025, several weeks after Mandelson’s appointment was announced on December 20th 2024, making blaming him doubly inappropriate.
Ultimately, as a political appointment ordered and expedited by Downing Street, it’s on Starmer.
.
Via The Daily Sceptic
See Related Article Below
Starmer’s go-to excuse: ‘I was in the dark’. Don’t believe it. He’s deeply in the loop
From Jimmy Savile to Peter Mandelson, Starmer has followed a trajectory of career-enhancing ignorance. He knows far more than he lets on. It’s the reason, after all, why he was knighted
JONATHAN COOK
Sir Keir Starmer must be the most ignorant man ever to have entered high office.
Here are a few highlights:
* As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer was apparently never consulted on his office’s decision, in late 2009, not to prosecute prolific, and highly connected, paedophile Jimmy Savile, despite Savile being one of the most famous figures in Britain. Starmer claims he didn’t even know that his own Crown Prosecution Service had opened a file on Savile, a friend to the then Prince, now King, Charles. It will never be possible to confirm or dispute Starmer’s account because all the CPS files related to the case were destroyed – under Starmer’s watch.
* Again as DPP, Starmer was supposedly not informed that the CPS was insisting through 2010 and 2011 that Sweden press on with sexual assault allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, despite a lack of evidence. Assange had deeply embarrassed the UK and US by exposing their war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Starmer’s officials again secretly destroyed the email trail between the CPS and Sweden that would likely have illuminated his role in the affair.
* As Labour leader, Starmer apparently had no knowledge of the fraudulent activities being carried out by Labour Together, the shadowy think tank that brought him to power, including its covert campaign to smear journalists who tried to expose its criminal acts.
* As prime minister, Starmer claims to have had no idea of the depth of the ties between Peter Mandelson and serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, even though Mandelson was the most influential figure in the Labour party backing his bid to become leader. In return, Starmer would promote Mandelson in late 2025 as ambassador to the US.
* Starmer said this week that he was kept in the dark that Mandelson had, in fact, failed vetting by the British security services for the post of ambassador. That requires that we believe his own Foreign Office, which overruled the security services’ decision, did so without consulting with him.
This is one long trajectory of career-enhancing ignorance and incompetence. Does any of it sound even vaguely plausible?
There are lots of clues as to what might really be going on.
Such as a spate of secret flights to Washington by Starmer in 2011, when he was DPP, to meet top US law officials that, against protocol, went unrecorded. What was discussed will never be known because all CPS files related to the flights were, once again, destroyed. However, the meetings are likely to have included discussions, later acted on, to seek Assange’s extradition to the US for political crimes so he could be disappeared into one of its super-max jails.
Or Starmer’s decision in 2017, as a shadow cabinet minister, to secretly join the shadowy, CIA-linked Trilateral Commission without telling the Labour party’s then leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Notably, Lord Mandelson has also enjoyed the rare “privilege” of being invited to join the Commission.
Or Starmer’s failure to declare to Labour members that his campaign to become Labour leader had been underwritten by prominent pro-Israel lobbyist Sir Trevor Chinn.
Secrecy and destruction of records have been a consistent pattern under Starmer. Chinn was also the key funder of the Labour Together think-tank, which failed to declare its funding – and main donors – in violation of Electoral Commission rules, most likely to prevent Labour members knowing that its activities were being bankrolled, and the party captured, by billionaires like Chinn.
Starmer is far more in the loop than he lets on. After all, that is precisely why he is Sir Keir Starmer. For nearly two decades, his job has been to do exactly what the British establishment has demanded of him.
This article (Starmer’s go-to excuse: ‘I was in the dark’. Don’t believe it. He’s deeply in the loop) was created and published by Jonathan Cook and is republished here under “Fair Use”
*
TALI FRASER
Sir Keir Starmer has sacked the Foreign Office’s top civil servant, is personally messaging his Labour MPs and clearly trying to come up with some sort of defence after the major news broke that Peter Mandelson, his pick for US ambassador, was appointed despite failing his security vetting.
The problem for Starmer is that none of these measures does anything to address the remaining issue of whether the Prime Minister has repeatedly misled the Commons – the press and public, too – over the latest Mandelson scandal. One that gets to the root of why on earth he was ever appointed in the first place.
“Security vetting, carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise, that gave him clearance for the role.” Those were Starmer’s own words at a press conference. They were, on the basis of yesterday’s reporting showing his failed vetting was overruled, plainly untrue. At best the reasoning could be incompetence, ineptitude, ignorance. At its worst, lies.
In the House of Commons chamber, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch questioned Starmer. At PMQs on 4 February, he asked: “Did the official security vetting he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with Epstein?”. Starmer’s answer began “yes it did”. Surely then Starmer must have seen the vetting which then means he would have known Mandelson failed.
Downing Street has released a statement insisting that neither the Prime Minister nor any government minister was aware that Mandelson had failed his developed vetting until earlier this week. If true (implausible), it raises alarming questions about the degree to which Number 10 was ignorant of its own government’s most consequential personnel decisions. If false then we are in far more serious territory.
And it is leaning to false. How could Starmer tell Badenoch in the Commons that yes, he knew what the vetting mentioned, if he had never received or seen the vetting.
A letter from the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper last year even wrote of National Security Vetting that while the process may be independent of ministers, they “are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome”. The final outcome, which was that Mandelson failed his vetting.
Opposition leaders have moved quickly. Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of three potential resignation issues: “If he has misled Parliament, as it looks like he has, he should resign. If he has broken the ministerial code, as it looks like he has, he should resign. If he withheld documents by a cover-up from Parliament, he should resign.”
Even if, despite all of this, he is somehow found to not have directly misled the Commons, part of the Ministerial Code requires ministers to provide accurate information to Parliament and “correct any inadvertent errors at the earliest opportunity”. From the recent reporting, the Prime Minister was definitely aware from Tuesday that Mandelson’s vetting had failed and yet not on that day, nor the next day before PMQs, nor the day after that did he think to declare it to Parliament. A failure in itself.
Beyond the immediate headlines, all of this damages the one thing left of the Starmer brand ‘Mr Process’. This is a Prime Minister who built his political identity around the idea of upholding the rule of law and integrity, holding others to account. Week after week, he persisted with Boris Johnson on the argument that ministers who mislead Parliament must face consequences – and resign. Now he faces those same accusations, just as Labour is approaching what one might charitably describe as electoral armageddon at the local elections. ‘The process was followed,’ when it clearly wasn’t, is an excuse most will find inconceivable.
There are now three distinct problems compounding each other. There is the original scandal of the appointment itself – a man with documented links to Jeffrey Epstein appointed as Britain’s top ambassador. There is the months-long insistence by the government that due process was followed when it appears it was not. And there is now the question of what ministers and their advisers knew, and when they knew it.
Mandelson resigned last September. In theory the story should have died with him. Instead, it has mutated into something far more dangerous: a direct challenge to the Prime Minister’s honesty, at exactly the moment he can least afford it. The US ambassador, Downing Street chief of staff, Downing Street head of communications and now permanent under secretary in the Foreign Office have all gone. There’s only really one person left to go.
The Conservatives know better than most that a leader who has lost the trust of colleagues and country rarely recovers it. Labour MPs might want to study that lesson carefully.
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