The top civil servant who was seemingly set up to take the fall for the Mandelson-Epstein scandal struck back on Tuesday, stating Downing Street had a “dismissive attitude” over the Labour veteran even needing security clearance, and then tried to rush the process once it began.
The rolling scandal in British politics over how and why precisely Peter “Prince of Darkness” Mandelson, the erstwhile peer and power behind the throne of the Keir Starmer Labour Party, became British Ambassador to the United States, took a fresh turn on Tuesday morning as Sir Oliver ‘Olly’ Robbins was questioned by the Foreign Affairs Committee. One of the few British civil servants senior enough to have a public profile, having repeatedly hit the headlines since the Brexit era in which he was so involved, Robbins was sacked from the government last Thursday in a move widely reckoned to be Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s last-ditch attempt to save his political skin by giving the press a “sacrificial lamb“.
Yet by sacking Robbins, who evidently knows where the bodies are buried and, as a freshly unemployed man, no longer feels totally bound to silence, Starmer appears to have set the stage for even more details about the Mandelson affair to come to light. Under questioning this morning, Robbins utterly contradicted the official government line on how Mandelson — Starmer’s political appointee — was able to become Ambassador, stating that far from the Foreign Office acting unilaterally and out of sight of the Prime Minister, Downing Street was constantly pressuring to get him confirmed and in post in time for the Presidential inauguration.
Robbins said there was a “very, very strong expectation… coming from No 10 that [Mandelson] needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible”, there was “constant pressure” from Downing Street to “get on with it quickly” and “very frequent” calls from the centre of government to demand “has this been delivered yet”.
The Daily Telegraph noted, after the evidence session had concluded, that government insiders moved to contradict these claims, reframing the frequent contact as “asking reasonably for updates on an appointment process… I would draw a distinction between the idea of pressure and being kept informed about the process and progress of the appointment.”
The dismissed civil servant explained that the process of making Mandelson, one of the key figures of the 1990s New Labour era of Prime Minister Tony Blair and reckoned to be an extremely powerful power broker in the party despite his numerous disgraces, was approached in a topsy-turvy manner. He was publicly announced as taking the post, and the process to have him agreed with Washington, before the security vetting process had even got underway.
The attitude from Downing Street was “dismissive” that Mandelson even needed vetting at all, he stated, with the “position” taken by the powerful Cabinet Office being that because Mandelson was such a high-profile figure, “the risks attending his appointment were well known” anyway. Robbins claimed this was a battle between the parts of government closest to the Prime Minister, Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign Office, which insisted on going ahead with the vetting process, and which did turn up risks once the process had been completed. The Foreign Office won this tussle by “putting its foot down”, the committee heard today.
There are still several unanswered questions, including why — although, for national security reasons, it seems unlikely this will ever be answered — Peter Mandelson’s security vetting process threw up concerns that the Prime Minister has claimed to be ignorant of. Beyond Mandelson’s relationship with disgraced financier paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which continued after his jail sentence for child sexual abuse, and his having been dismissed from the government twice before over the decades for probity scandals, there have also been claims that Mandelson’s professional dealings with Russia and China may have been of concern.
Robbins refused to be drawn on this, explaining it would undermine the UK’s security vetting system.
In addition to these new dimensions to known issues, Robbins also revealed for the first time that Mandelson wasn’t the only paedophile-linked disgraced peer that Starmer tried to appoint to a top diplomatic job. The Prime Minister attempted to get a plum role for his previous head of communications, Matthew Doyle, he said, and apparently attempted to do so under a vow of secrecy to prevent the then Foreign Minister knowing what was happening.
That this attempt to make political appointments to diplomatic roles — which is not at all usual in the United Kingdom — for questionable political allies happened not once but twice was pointed to as a very particular failure by the Prime Minister, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Edward ‘Ed’ Davey. He said this morning in response to this fresh revelation: “This is not just a lapse in judgement, it’s a pattern of behaviour. Every day this scandal gets worse, and it becomes clearer that the only way to draw a line under it is for Starmer to go.”
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