It was all very polite, very reasonable, and very deadly. Olly Robbins walked into his interrogation by the foreign affairs committee with the kind of studied anonymity which defines the higher echelons of the civil service. He was unassuming, modest, polite and seemingly harmless. And then, predictably, he went on to commit political murder.
Robbins is emblematic of many of the failures of the civil service. Some of the things he said – particularly concerning the mercurial, almost ghostly decision-making process in the Foreign Office – raised questions about political authority, professional responsibility and democratic accountability.
But the main takeaway from his evidence session was ultimately quite simple. The processology of the Peter Mandelson story is a mirage. It is a mist which conceals the basic reality. That reality is as follows: No.10 decided it wanted their man for the US ambassador role. Once it made that decision, it pressured the civil service to make it happen. It is therefore unsurprising that this was the eventual outcome.
Starmer now claims to be furious about this. But it was precisely in order to avoid his fury that the civil service behaved the way that it did. He perpetuated the culture which he now seems so outraged by.
Robbins told MPs on the committee that he was under pressure to hurry up and confirm Mandelson’s appointment from the moment he walked into the Foreign Office job in January 2025. There was “already a very, very strong expectation… coming from No.10 that he needed to be in post and in America as soon as humanly possible”.
There’d been a due diligence report by the Cabinet Office. The king had signed off on it. The UK government had sought agreement from Washington. The prime minister had announced it. Mandelson already had access to the Foreign Office building and some high classification briefings.
It didn’t need to be this way. The Cabinet secretary had advised Starmer to complete security vetting before the appointment was made. That advice was not followed. In fact, Robbins said, there was a “generally dismissive attitude to his vetting clearance”. The Cabinet Office tried to avoid any vetting at all.
The vetting service in the Foreign Office then came up with its assessment, which was that Mandelson was a borderline case but they would veer towards no. They also provided mitigation strategies for how to deal with that risk. These risks were not about Jeffrey Epstein but probably about Chinese clients in his public relations work.
On the basis of that oral briefing, Robbins decided to OK the appointment, clearly feeling that he had the discretion to do so and that the mitigation strategies were sufficient. The hall-of-mirrors decision-making structure of the Foreign Office meant that he could do so without having been informed of the substance of the vetting concerns and without informing the prime minister.
This is absurd and makes democratic accountability almost impossible. There obviously needs to be political involvement in this process. But to get lost in the process is to miss the heart of the story. Robbins was clearly operating according to the pressure being placed on him by No.10. What would have happened, one MP asked him, if he had said no? “I think it would have been very difficult indeed,” he said. This was, of course, an understatement. It would have triggered a crisis, with No.10 sources lashing out to journalists about civil servants sabotaging their agenda.
Robbins appears evasive because he cannot admit the one thing which shields him from blame: that his decision-making in this case was highly influenced by the pressure No.10 put on him.
There is a gap between how the civil service should act and how governments want it to act. Of course, civil servants must implement the government’s agenda, but they should also be challenging, finessing and improving it. They should be subjecting it to tests based on ethics, practicability, legality and national security considerations.
Generally speaking, this is not what ministers want. They tend to view civil service advice as obstructionism. This is what the previous Tory government complained of when it railed against “the blob” or attacked “Remainer bureaucrats”. It is then what Starmer himself complained of when he railed against a civil service that was “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” mere weeks before the Mandelson appointment.
Civil servants hear these things. They are alive to the political pressure. And Robbins would have been alive to the demand that he hurry up and sort the Mandelson appointment.
It is preposterous and honestly rather shameful for Starmer to act so upset over the Mandelson affair. He is basically attacking Robbins for doing precisely what he wanted him to do. If he had desired a proper process which really vetted Mandelson he wouldn’t have appointed him in advance of it happening and he most certainly would not have had the Cabinet Office agitating for it not to happen at all.
There is a real sense of Shakespearean tragedy to the prime minister.
He is a former Director of Public Prosections himself (a position equivalent to a permanent secretary). He should understand how best to work with the civil service. Instead, he has detonated the relationship between Whitehall and Downing Street. But by castigating Robbins so publicly, he will have made the civil service even more risk-averse, worsening decision-making choke-points and lessening future effectiveness.
Starmer was opposition leader during Boris Johnson’s time in office. He seemed genuinely outraged that someone of Johnson’s personal defects should be prime minister, that British politics was dominated by tiresome who-said-what gibberish at a moment of national decline. But by behaving this way, he has been forced into precisely the same position as his predecessor and for no discernable gain.
Starmer was a man with a reputation for integrity and decency. Allies and opponents agreed that he was fundamentally honourable and motivated by public service. But his recent behaviour makes a mockery of that reputation. Instead of taking responsibility for his actions, he blames others. Instead of admitting his error, he blames a culture he himself helped create.
This scandal will not destroy him, but it is undermining the core qualities on which his administration is based. It is ridding it of the things which you might rightfully admire about his government, leaving behind an empty shell. When the next ill-wind blows, it will all crumble quickly.
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