Sir Keir Starmer has been skewered this morning by two polite assassins. Even before the box office appearance by Sir Oliver Robbins, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband took a blowtorch to the Prime Minister’s judgment by making it clear he would never have touched Peter Mandelson with a barge pole.
“I steered well clear of Peter Mandelson when I became Labour leader in 2010,” Miliband told Sky News on Tuesday, deadpan. Asked what he thought when Mandelson’s appointment was announced, he said: “That it could blow up, that it could go wrong.”
And boy, has it blown up.
When just an hour later Robbins, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary who was sacked by Starmer last week, took his place in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he didn’t waste any time in dropping some more bombshells, albeit in a controlled, mandarin way.
The Cabinet Office, Robbins said, suggested dispensing with any vetting of Mandelson at all while the Foreign Office insisted it should go ahead. No 10 applied “constant pressure” on the Foreign Office to fast track Mandelson’s appointment and showed no interest in his vetting. There was an atmosphere of “constant chasing,” he said, confirming The i Paper’s reporting in February that No 10 had put pressure on the Foreign Office to get the appointment done and dusted.
The evidence went to the heart of Starmer’s original sin of allowing himself to be persuaded by the New Labour Blairites in No 10 at the time to override his instincts and appoint Mandelson to the plum posting of UK ambassador to Washington.
But strap in! Robbins, the dimpled assassin, wasn’t done. The bullets rained down. He alleged there was active discussion in No 10 about not putting Mandelson through security vetting at all.
Starmer has consistently claimed that he followed all due process in appointing Mandelson to his post – and was let down by others, most notably Robbins. But the former civil servant suggested senior people in Downing Street were determined to push the appointment through, regardless of any potential concerns.
Starmer will wish he’d never crossed Robbins. Later still, Robbins launched another projectile. He revealed that No 10 tried to get Starmer’s spin doctor Matthew Doyle a posting as a “head of mission” for the Foreign Office abroad. Foreign Office diplomats work all their professional lives for these postings.
Lord Doyle later left Government and has since been stripped of the Labour whip over campaigning for a councillor who had been charged with child sex offences. What emerged from Robbins’s testimony is that there was an atmosphere of jobs for the boys in No 10.
Robbins also wrote a letter to the committee in which he said that after Mandelson was sacked as ambassador, he asked to see the full vetting documents.
He wrote that there were discussions between the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office about whether this access would be granted. In the end it was decided that he wouldn’t be allowed to view the documents. This demonstrates that people inside the Cabinet Office were aware that Robbins was asking questions about the vetting process.
One of the biggest criticisms levelled at the Prime Minister has been that he and his team were not curious enough about this whole saga. And there we ended: full circle back to the original sin.
All these points will be pored over by Parliament in an emergency debate this afternoon. Robbins has only started something. Starmer’s critics will want to finish it. And him. No 10 wanted Mandelson in post come hell or come highwater. And they’ve ended up with both.
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