Well, what would you do? You’re a top civil servant with more than 25 years of government service. You’ve worked for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. You went through Brexit hell as a lead negotiator. You were sacked by Boris Johnson and were then brought back by Keir Starmer.
You land a plum job as permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office and do your boss a favour by appointing his man as ambassador to the US. You’ve already got a knighthood; that peerage is only a matter of time away. Then it all blows up in your face and the prime minister sacks you and trashes your reputation in parliament.
Call it the revenge of the nerd. On Monday we had the case for the prosecution during Keir Starmer’s statement to the Commons. On Tuesday, we got Olly Robbins giving his defence before the foreign affairs select committee. And, in its way, it was quietly damning. Mostly of the government, occasionally – if inadvertently – of himself.
Throughout, Robbins presented himself as a fundamentally decent man. Someone who lived and breathed public service. The sort of man Starmer believes himself to be yet somehow isn’t. An ingenu for whom process is everything. A man governed by ritual. You would guess his sock drawer is pristine and numbered. Someone crushed by his recent sacking. Heartbroken at losing a job he loved.
At one point, he insisted that the two books he knew by heart were the civil service manual and the Book of Common Prayer. Blessed are the geeks. For they shall inherit the Earth. Just a shame that Olly never got to the bit in the prayer book about anything to do with Peter Mandelson always ending in a vale of tears. A shadow of darkness. And unlike previous misdemeanours, this time there shall be no resurrection for him. Possibly not even for Olly or Keir.
Robbins’ testimony was all the more powerful for its quiet sense of reserve. That he was not on a seek and destroy mission. He was more subtle than that. Some secrets would stay with him till the grave. The committee chair, Emily Thornberry, thanked him for giving up his time. “I’ve got all the time in the world now,” he said sadly. But he was going to offer up enough to allow people to fill in the gaps for themselves.
It was like this, said Olly. By the time he was appointed to the Foreign Office, No 10 had already declared that Mandelson was to be the next ambassador to the US. It had been ratified with the Americans in Washington. The king had signed it off. God knows what Charles had had to say about it. There was intense pressure from No 10 for the Foreign Office to do the right thing. Just shut up and sign the approval forms along the dotted line. If necessary, don’t even bother with the vetting process. Dismissive. Mandelson was even allowed to view confidential documents long before his vetting was complete.
MP Richard Foord got flustered. “Just say it,” said Thornberry. But Foord was too delicate a flower. So Emily said it for him. “Morgan McSweeney told you to ‘just fucking approve it.’ This is what Downing Street wanted.” Though who knows if it was what Starmer wanted. You got the feeling that Keir was a semi-detached prime minister. Curiously unbothered about who did what or why or when. Happy to let his team run the country for him. Keir was just happy that people called him prime minister. Not least because it reminded him he was prime minister. He had a tendency to forget.
Olly was keen, though, for the committee to understand that he had never given in to the pressure. Yes, it had been intense, but his decision to approve Mandy for Developed Vetting had been done entirely by the book. Robbins was as Robbins does, and Robbins would never act against the civil service code of impartiality. Mind you, he couldn’t comment on the details of Mandy’s vetting because that would undermine the integrity of the process. People with interesting lives shouldn’t necessarily be excluded. There’s interesting and then there’s Peter Mandelson.
Now it all became as clear as mud. Olly was certain that the sort of things that might ordinarily have precluded Mandy from being posted to Washington – you know, things like having twice being sacked for breaking the ministerial code, remaining friends with a convicted child sex offender and leaking market-sensitive information to a bank – should all have come under the heading of the government’s “due diligence”. And since Mandy had passed the due diligence, he had assumed Downing Street was totally cool with his past misdemeanours.
That just left the problem with Mandelson failing the vetting. Though Olly was at pains to point out that he hadn’t really failed the vetting. Just that the vetting agency had said there were a number of problems and that they were leaning to recommend a refusal to improve. Yet again, Robbins couldn’t tell us what those issues were – assuming they were nothing to do with due diligence – because if he did, he would have to kill everyone. Though they were insignificant enough for him to do what the government had always wanted. Not that he had caved in to pressure.
At this point, we disappeared through the looking glass. Because No 10 had insisted there were two red lights ticked on Mandelson’s vetting form, which should have been an automatic no-no for any appointment. Only, Olly had never seen any vetting form. Certainly not Mandelson’s. Not even his own. He had never heard of the red, amber and green boxes. It was all a mystery to him. Though if he had his time again, he would still approve Mandy. Go figure.
This was the madness of King Keir. The prime minister who had no idea of what anyone in his office was doing. The man with no opinions of his own. The man with no interests. Though it did turn out that someone inside No 10 had decided it would be a great idea to nominate Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s former head of comms, for a job in the diplomatic service. Preferably alongside Mandelson in Washington. I guess that it made sense to have two men with close links to child sex offenders in the same place. Killing two birds with one stone. Robbins had managed to head this one off at the pass.
Finally, after two-and-a-half hours of interrogation, we were done. Robbins was free to go back to his life. What was left of it after Starmer had finished with him. As for Keir, there were still way more questions than answers. And Olly was going to keep what Starmer had said to him at his dismissal to himself and his legal team. There will be a reckoning. The blob fights back.
