Henry Dyer on Robbins revelation about the Cabinet Office saying security vetting not needed
Henry Dyer is a Guardian investigative correspondent.
Olly Robbins has given remarkable evidence so far. He has spoken about the pressure the Foreign Office faced from Downing Street – weeks before he took the top job – about ensuring Peter Mandelson made it to Washington as ambassador. That included, Robbins claims, a discussion between the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office as to whether or not Mandelson even needed to go through the vetting process.
Robbins said his predecessor had to be “very firm in person” about the necessity of Mandelson to face vetting in the days leading up to Christmas, in the face of arguments from the Cabinet Office that there was no need for Mandelson to face vetting, given he was a member of the House of Lords and a member of the privy council.
Given nearly all staff – including junior civil servants – in the Foreign Office require DV clearance, it would have been astonishing for the man in the top British diplomatic posting to not have received the same security clearance.
Robbins refuses to say if Mandelson's security vetting threw up concerns not 'already in public domain'
Thornberry asked if the vetting process threw up anything “that wasn’t already in the public realm”.
Robbins said he would not answer that because the whole process relies on confidentiality. People comply because they know that they say will not be disclosed.
Thornberry said she was not asking what the new information might have been.
Robbins said, if he said new information came out, people would ask what it was.
Thornberry said she would not do that.
Robbins replied:
I trust you. I’m not sure that the whole of the rest of the world will hold off from wanting to know.
Robbins says Mandelson's vetting decision 'borderline'
Robbins confirmed that the decision about Mandelson’s developed vetting was “borderline”. (See 8.57am.)
I was told that UKSV [UK Security Vetting] were leaning towards recommending against, but accepted it was a borderline case.
He said that, although reporting suggests this is process you pass or fail, that is now how the system works.
Robbins says he does not know if Morgan McSweeney was behind No 10 trying to rush Mandelson appointment
Thornberry asked Robbins if Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, was the person putting pressure on the Foreign Office to push through the Mandelson appointment. She said:
We do know that Morgan McSweeney was a protege of Peter Mandelson, and we know that he was very keen on Peter Mandelson getting the job, and we know that he resigned, saying that it was all his fault and that he had advised the prime minister to appoint Peter Mandelson and took it on the chin.
Robbins said, when he said he didn’t know who the individuals were, he meant it.
Cabinet Office suggested Mandelson did not even need security vetting, Robbins tells MPs
In his letter to the committee, Robbins says the Cabinet Office suggested that Mandelson would not have to go through security vetting. He says:
After the announcement, I believe the Cabinet Office (CO) raised whether Developed Veƫng (DV) was actually necessary. I understand the FCDO insisted that DV was a requirement before Mandelson took up his post in Washington.
Thornberry asks about Robbins’ phone.
Robbins says he has had to hand in his official phone. But the messages were downloaded, he says.
Thornberry asks if there was a record of all the calls for No 10.
Robbins says if civil servants minuted every call they took, they would never get anything done.
Robbins says Foreign Office was under 'constant pressure' from No 10 to push through Mandelson appointment
Robbins says the Foreign Office insisted developed vetting would have to go ahead.
Thornberry is asking where the pressure for the appointment to go through very quicky was coming from. (See 9.14am.)
Robbins says that in January 2025 his office, and the foreign secretary [David Lammy’s] office were “under constant pressure”.
“There was an atmosphere of constant chasing,” he says.
Asked who this was coming from, Robbins says it was “private office to private office”.
Thornberry asks for the names of those putting pressure on the Foreign Office to expedite the appointment and the vetting process.
Robbins says he does not want to give names.
I didn’t come here today to put scapegoats other civil servants. I came here to make sure the committee understood the circumstances.
Updated
Robbins says, when he started as permament secretary, it was not even clear that Peter Mandelson would have to go through the developed vetting process.
Robbins says No 10 wanted Mandelson in US 'as quickly as humanly possible' before security vetting started
Robbins starts by saying that when he started as permanent secretary, the Mandelson appointment was well under way. He says:
I wasn’t walking into a vacuum. I arrived to a situation in which a due diligence report had been undertaken into Mandelson by the Cabinet Office, assessing the reputational risks and his fitness for office.
The prime minister had then presumably taken advice on his fitness for office.
The name had been submitted to the king as ministers’ recommendation.
The prime minister had made an announcement that Mandelson was his nominee without caveats.
The British government had sought agreement, the formal diplomatic process for a host government accepting a nominee from the US government, and that had been obtained before I arrived in post.
He’d been given access to the building. You’ve been given access to low classification [information]. And, from time to time for case specific issues, he was being given access to higher classification briefing.
So I’m afraid I walked into a situation in which, there was already a very, very strong expectation [that the appointment would go through].
Robbins also said that “coming from No 10” there was an expectation that “he needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible”.
Updated
The hearing has started.
Emily Thornberry, the chair, started by saying that Robbins did not tell the whole truth about this process when he gave evidence to it in November.
She says she hopes he will be more forthcoming today.
The full text of the letter is here.
The foreign affairs committee has released a letter it has received from Olly Robbins. According to Sky News, in it he says he will not be able to talk about some matters related to his sacking because he is taking legal advice.
That seems to be confirmation that he is pursuing an unfair dismissal case.
Robbins gives evidence to foreign affairs committee
The foreign affairs committee hearing is about to start.
There is a live feed at the top of this blog, you may need to refresh the page for it to appear.
Updated
According to the report by Steven Swinford and Oliver Wright in the Times, Olly Robbins will tell the foreign affairs committee that he never actually read the full developed vetting report on Peter Mandelson. They say:
The Times has been told that Robbins will use an appearance before the foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday to reveal that he did not see the formal recommendation by UK Security Vetting (UKSV), the body that vets public appointments, stating that Mandelson should not be given clearance.
He was given a verbal briefing by the Foreign Office’s security team and told that UKSV considered Mandelson’s case to be “borderline”, although if the decision was UKSV’s, it was likely to oppose giving him clearance. Robbins assessed the “outstanding risks” and concluded that they could be mitigated.
Robbins is expected to highlight the “prevailing atmosphere” at the time of the appointment, including the fact that Starmer chose to press ahead with announcing Mandelson as ambassador to the United States before security vetting had been conducted.
Ed Miliband says he always thought appointment of Mandelson as ambassador to US would 'blow up'
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has said that he always thought that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US would “blow up”.
In an interview with Sky News this morning, Miliband claimed that David Lammy, the deputy PM who was foreign secretary at the time of the appointment, also had doubts about the appointment.
But Miliband said he did not express his concens to Keir Starmer, in part because it was well known that Miliband and Mandelson did not get on.
They clashed when they were both cabinet ministers when Gordon Brown was PM, and when Miliband subsequently became Labour leader, he marginalised Mandelson – who in turn became a critic of Miliband’s leadership strategy.
Miliband told Sky News:
You’re saying [Mandelson] should never have been appointed [as US ambassador] and I agree with you …
I steered well clear of Peter Mandelson when I became Labour leader in 2010.
Asked what he thought when the Mandelson appointment was announced, Miliband said:
That it could blow up, that it could go wrong.
I had a conversation with David Lammy about it before the appointment, and I said I was worried about it … I think he was worried about it too.
But Miliband did not discuss this with Starmer, he said.
Maybe I wasn’t the person that people would necessarily ask, I think people knew my view on Peter Mandelson.
But Miliband also said he did not think Starmer should resign over this.
You’re asking me should Keir Starmer resign over the appointment of Lord Mandelson? And I’m saying to you, no, I don’t think he should.
Because I think if every time a prime minister made a mistake they resigned, we would shuttle through prime ministers like nobody’s business.
Prime ministers make mistakes.
I think on big judgments for this country, the biggest judgment of all, whether to join the war against Iran, Keir Starmer made a big and fundamental correct judgment.
Voters 'don't like' Starmer, but leadership challenge 'last thing we want right now', says Labour MP Sarah Champion
Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who chairs the international development committee, was on the Today programme this morning talking about the mood in the Labour party following the Peter Mandelson crisis. She said that Keir Starmer was unpopular with voters, but not because of this. She said:
I’ll be honest with you, people don’t like Keir on the door but it’s not over this Mandelson thing. They don’t like him personally.
There’s been a fantastic campaign by opposition parties to undermine him …
I think that so much attention being given to the minutiae of this just confirms the Westminster bubble in their mind and they don’t like it.
But Champion also said that a leadership challenge was “absolutely the last thing that we want right now”.
Trump says Starmer made 'really bad pick' when he chose Mandelson as US ambassador
Donald Trump seems to be conducting his relationship with Keir Starmer chiefly by online trolling at the moment. He was at it again overnight, with a post on his Truth Social network saying that, when Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, it was a “really bad pick”.
Sacked Foreign Office chief Olly Robbins to face MPs’ questions over Mandelson vetting
Good morning. At 9am Olly Robbins will give evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US. Until last week Robbins was permanent secretary at the Foreign Office and his predecessor but one in that office, Simon McDonald, was the man who terminated Boris Johnson’s career with a revelation showing that Johnson had lied about his knowledge of a sleaze allegation about a minister. Robbins is not expected to produce a bombshell on that scale, but his evidence will be moment of jeodpardy for Keir Starmer nevertheless.
Robbins was sacked because he had not told Starmer that Mandelson failed his security vetting interview after Starmer had announced he was getting the ambassador’s job. If Robbins were to prove that Starmer were told, that would be career ending for the PM. But no one is expecting that.
Instead, the hearing will illustrate the dispute between the PM and the former head of the Foreign Office over whether Robbins should have told Downing Street. Starmer says he should; Robbins is expected to say that that he was meant to keep the process confidential because all that ultimately mattered was the final decision – which is that Mandelson did get vetting approval, because Robbins used his judgment as the decision-maker to ignore the recommendation from officials and grant vetting approval.
The most interesting question is, why? And here it will get difficult for Starmer, because Robbins is likely to argue that he felt under pressure to grant vetting approval because Starmer had already said he wanted Mandelson to get the job, despite knowing full well about the multiple factors that made his appointment problematic.
We know this because Robbins suggested as much when he last gave evidence to the committee about this appointment, in November last year. Robbins told the committee:
Back before Lord Mandelson was announced as the appointee, there was a process … within the Cabinet Office to make sure that the prime minister was aware of Lord Mandelson and the issues around his appointment. There was then a process of clearing his conflicts of interest, which the employing department [the Foreign Office] oversaw, which we have talked about. In parallel with that process, we also went through the standard UK national security vetting process for DV [developed vetting].
Mandleson failed the DV interview. But Robbins was making the point that, by then, Mandelson had already been approved by the Cabinet Office’s due diligence process (a separate vetting exercise). Robbins also told the committee:
By the time we are describing [when DV was carried out], it was clear that the prime minister wanted to make this appointment himself.
In the Times, Steven Swinford and Oliver Wright highlight this in their story on today’s hearing, saying Stamer “will be accused of pressuring the Foreign Office into approving the appointment of Lord Mandelson despite being aware of his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his business links to Russia and China”.
And here is the our analysis, by Kiran Stacey, Henry Dyer and Paul Lewis, of all the issues likely to come up at the hearing.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Olly Robbins, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, gives evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet, including a political cabinet session.
9.30am: The Good Growth Foundation holds a day-long National Growth Debate, with speeches from Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the PM.
10am: Executives from TikTok, Meta, Roblox, and academics give evidence to the Commons education committee on screen time and social media.
11.30am: Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, makes a statement to MPs.
After 1.30pm: MPs begin an emergency debate tabed by the Tories on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.
2.20pm: John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, speaks at the STUC conference.
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