Keir Starmer and Olly Robbins - The Consequences

“Ministers hate surprises. They need to be told bad news, told about serious problems, and told when important decisions are brewing, as soon as you are aware of them. They may not be very pleased but they will be a lot less pleased if they first hear of the problem from someone else, or even worse from the press, and then find out that you knew all along.”

Around ten thousand civil servants have read the above advice in my book ‘How to be a Civil Servant‘ - but Olly Robbins missed it. This newsletter examines what happened as a result of this mistake.

(This newsletter will in due course be added to the permanent record in the form of my Can Permanent Secretaries be Sacked? web page. Please therefore comment below if you want to add anything or if you think I have got anything wrong.)

The Appointment

There was already a highly competent ambassador already in place in the form of Karen Pierce. She was admired within the Foreign Office and within the incoming Trump administration, although the incoming President’s views were probably not known.

But it appeared likely that Lord (Peter) Mandelson would appeal rather more to Donald Trump as they had inhabited similar social circles. It was also likely helpful that Mandelson had relevant experience as Business Secretary, Trade Secretary and EU Trade Commissioner in addition to his spell as Northern Ireland Secretary.

The appointment was announced on 20 December 2024 and (as far as I can recall) did not attract much criticism. Mandelson’s somewhat sleazy past was thought likely to be an advantage at the Trump court, and it was very close to Christmas. The then Foreign Office (FCDO) Permanent Secretary, Philip Barton was not consulted about the appointment (and was probably not impressed) and was told that the new ambassador needed, if possible, to be in post by 20 Jan 2025 for Trump’s inauguration. In practice he did not take up his duties until 10 February.

Simon Carne recently summarised the next steps in this way:

Before appointing Mandelson to the post of Ambassador, the Prime Minister’s team went through a process of due diligence. The facts they gathered about Mandelson would doubtless have been numerous for someone with such a notorious career behind him. Amongst them were:

• Mandelson had twice been sacked or resigned in disgrace from Tony Blair’s Cabinet (although a subsequent investigation of the second matter held that he had done nothing wrong) before returning to the Cabinet under Gordon Brown.

• Mandelson had been a director of Sistema, a Russian company with links to Putin, and he continued as a director even after the invasion of Ukraine.

• Mandelson had been friends with convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. The extent of the friendship seems not to have been fully uncovered by Starmer’s people, perhaps because it was delegated to two of Mandelson’s friends to make the relevant enquiries.

Nothing uncovered by the due diligence process was seen as an obstacle to Mandelson becoming an ambassador to Trump’s USA. So Mandelson’s appointment was announced, even though he had yet to go through vetting [which is] required for all such appointments.

The Vetting

The FCDO is different from most other government departments, as Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary Cat Little explained. The Foreign Office is a “make-recommendation department”, making it an exception in government – along with some other departments that Little did not name. An agency called UK Security Vetting (UKSV) undertakes a risk assessment and provides two conclusions: the level of concern around a candidate and its overall recommendation on whether to grant developed vetting. However, the recommendation is non-binding and the FCDO is the “ultimate decision maker” in the process

The FCDO’s Permanent Secretary is however like most other Perm Secs (and private sector chief execs) in that he does not usually get involved in detail but relies on colleagues to brief him accurately. Simon Carne again ...

It may seem astonishing that Sir Olly was prepared to override a UKSV assessment of “high concern”, but Robbins [was in fact not] told of the “high concern” assessment. He wasn’t shown UKSV’s report. He was given only an oral summary by a colleague called Ian Collard, who was, at the time, Director of Estates, Security and Network in the Foreign Office. Robbins was told by Collard that UKSV’s conclusion was “borderline”. Robbins further recalls Collard saying that UKSV were “leaning toward recommending that clearance be denied”, a recollection which Collard supports, although he does not recall his precise words.

At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Sir Keir Starmer told Parliament that it was “an error of judgement” warranting instant dismissal that Robbins did not tell Starmer that “UKSV recommended with red flags that clearance should be denied and there was high concern”. But if that was Starmer’s view, he seems to have sacked the wrong man. As explained above, Robbins was in the dark about the red flags, just as much as Starmer. If anyone deserved the sack, surely it was Collard?

Well, no, actually. That is because we now know that Collard wasn’t told either. In a letter sent by the current (acting) head of the Foreign Office to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 27 April 2026, it is stated very clearly that Collard did not see UKSV’s report: “He was briefed orally by his team.” He did not see the report until after Mandelson had been sacked, many months later.

So, when Sir Olly Robbins made the ultimate decision to grant Mandelson “developed vetting” status, he did so on the basis of an oral briefing from Ian Collard, who was, himself, relying on an oral briefing from his team. Neither of them knew that the vetting officer(s) had concluded “high concern”. And neither of them knew that the officer(s) had recommended against granting clearance. They knew only that, in Sir Olly’s words, UKSV was “leaning towards ... denial”. ... Clearly, in the mind of the report writer, “high concern” was not to be equated with “clear fail”. It was possible to be “high concern” and yet “very borderline”.

To those unfamiliar with risk management, the two notions may seem incompatible. But it seems that, in the language used by UKSV, “high concern” simply denotes something along the lines of “needs careful mitigation”.

My use of square brackets, above, conceals the fact that Simon thinks that the fact that Olly Robbins wasn’t told of the ‘high concern’ is astonishing. I react slightly differently in that I am not surprised that Sir Olly was, like most Perm Secs, happy to rely on briefing. I also suspect that nothing that FCDO officials read about Mandelson would have surprised them. They really, really did not like him.

In short, I agree with Lewis Goodall:

[Robbins’] case is essentially this. By the time Robbins took up his post as the Foreign Office’s most senior official in January 2025, Peter Mandelson’s appointment had already been announced by Downing Street. The diplomatic wheels were already in motion. The King had issued his credentials, the Trump administration had accepted them. Mandelson was already in receipt of government papers and intelligence briefings. The vetting process started after the fact. Throughout, Robbins says, the Prime Minister’s private office was putting him under “constant pressure” to expedite the vetting and took a “dismissive approach”: “There was a very strong expectation . . . coming from Number 10 that he needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible.”

Was there Undue Pressure?

The media love to write about ministers and officials coming ‘under pressure’ when someone is lobbying in favour of a particular decision. But so what?

One of the principal roles of minsters and mandarins is to understand the competing arguments and decide on a way forward. Pressure is only improper if there is a suggestion of bribery or unpleasant personal consequences if the decision does or doesn’t go the right way. But there is no suggestion of that in this case.

A vetting failure, however, would have precipitated a crisis.

As Philip Barton said:

No one in the working in the FCDO on this could have been in any doubt about the urgency and importance that No. 10 attached to Mandelson being in DC in very short order. ... It would have been a crisis if we had got to the point where he had no vetting clearance ... a publicly announced political appointment of the next ambassador to Washington not being able to go. That would have been a big problem.

A vetting failure would also have raised ‘interesting’ questions about how Mandelson could have been allowed to become a Cabinet Minister and European Commissioner. The short answer is that those appointees are never formally vetted but you can be pretty sure that the security services would have had something to say if they had real concerns which could not have been mitigated. (I am not an expert but I doubt that Mandelson’s recent formal vetting added much to what was already on his file.)

The Secrecy

No. 10 believe Robbins missed four chances to speak out about the failed vetting: when it first crossed his desk, then when Mandelson was sacked in September over his friendship with Epstein, then again when the government was forced by Parliament to release related correspondence, and finally when ministers pledged a review of security vetting.

As foreshadowed in the introduction to this article, I think that it would have been sensible for Olly Robbins or one of his team to tell No.10 and the Cabinet Office about the UKSV’s concern at some point before the news broke. The details of security vetting by the UKSV are of course confidential, but the result is not — otherwise what would be the point of the vetting in the first place?

So why did Robbins delay? I can think of a couple of reasons.

First, there was never a trigger point. The Prime Minister had not lied. Mandelson had not ‘failed’ the vetting process. And no-one suspected that the UKSV recommendation (if you can call it that ) would ever become public. But it might well have done if the information was shared outside the FCDO. So best keep quiet?

Second, FCDO ministers and staff face less public scrutiny than those in other departments. FCDO policies change very slowly and are subject to much less day to day scrutiny than those of other Whitehall departments. Embassy staff have to rub along together so performance management is difficult. Then, when FCDO does come under pressure (such as during the Afghanistan evacuation) it performs relatively poorly both practically and in front of the media. Olly Robbins probably never imagined how ministers would react to being ‘kept in the dark’.

I therefore agree with most other commentators that it would have been better if Olly Robbins had warned No.10 about the vetting failure - but it wasn’t a sacking offence.

Keir Starmer

Sadly, therefore, it looks as though the Prime Minister panicked, probably driven by media pressure - which No.10 should be able to withstand.

Olly Robbins was not give any opportunity to explain what had happened, nor to contribute to a public explanation, which would have helped clear the Prime Minster.

The PM’s decision was clearly unfair, not least in employment law terms.

Antonia Romeo & Cat Little

But the PM was not actually Olly’s line manager. He could of course say that he expected Robbins to be sacked, and appears to have done so. But was there no push back from the Cabinet Secretary and the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary?

Did they panic, too? Or were they sidelined? Not a good look either way, especially as they both knew about the failed vetting nearly three weeks before anyone told the PM. So why did he not sack them, too?

Cat Little says that she needed legal advice - but that doesn’t take three weeks. Or, if the law really was that complicated, it suggests that Olly Robbins also had a good reason not to start telling anyone about the UKSV recommendation.

The Consequences: Ministerial - Civil Service Relations

Jill Rutter is concerned that there may be severe damage:

[Newly appointed Antonia] Romeo said that she would “build and foster a stellar top leadership team of permanent secretaries”. Instead she finds her goals already undermined by a fierce stand-off between two men, Keir Starmer and Olly Robbins, both convinced they are completely in the right over their view of a process that was unable to cope with an ambassadorial appointment like no other. This is not just a personal row, however destructive for both prime minister and the sacked former Foreign Office chief: it is yet another episode in the continuing breakdown of ministerial relations with the civil service.

The row over Peter Mandelson’s vetting as ambassador to the US is more damaging than the sacking of Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar by Kwasi Kwarteng before he even got the chance to work with him as chancellor, or of the multiple victims of Dominic Cummings’ “hard rain”. Starmer’s decision to dispense with the services of Chris Wormald, his own appointment as cabinet secretary, and after less than 14 months, barely registers on the scale.

Robbins himself came back into government after a spell in the private sector to be confronted in his first week with an incredibly difficult decision — one which he took rapidly and for which he has taken accountability. He has since made a lot of enemies inside the FCDO by driving through the cuts the government wants as part of its efficiency programmes. Starmer himself previously heaped praise on him. Ministers say they want civil servants to take more risks and more accountability. If so, they need to accept the consequences. They also need to show that they are people worth working with. If Starmer is unable to cut someone like Robbins any slack over what seems to be a different understanding of ministers’ role in vetting,

Former Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler described the relationship between Downing Street and Whitehall as “very ruptured”. And also:

“The prime minister, and particularly No.10 and the political wing of No.10, have created a very bad relationship with the civil servants in No.10, with the Cabinet Office and with departments like the FCDO, and that, I would go so far as to say, makes the government dysfunctional.”

Jill Rutter again ...

Others worry that civil servants will look at what has happened and conclude that they need to dip ministerial hands in the blood of every decision; the processes of government will accordingly become even more laborious and risk averse. Bringing in people like Robbins was supposed to dynamise a civil service that Starmer had accused of wallowing in “a tepid bath of managed decline”. His peremptory dismissal is drowning it in an ice-cold shower.

I very seldom dare to disagree with Robin Butler or Jill Rutter but I am not quite so pessimistic. If Perm Secs and Directors General have previously got on well with their ministers then I doubt that this will change. Those ministers and mandarins will both look at what has happened, shudder and thank the Lord that they weren’t involved.

The deeper problem is that senior officials were already very reluctant to challenge their ministers for all sorts of reasons, including their pernicious five year contracts. This episode will not encourage them to speak truth to power, but they had half given up anyway.

Ethan Croft raised a rather different concern in the New Statesman:

We had Robbins taking what was in effect a highly sensitive political decision when presented with a borderline vetting assessment. The conclusion might be that Robbins should never have been in a position to make that decision without ministerial oversight. This saga has renewed a desire among some labour radicals for widespread reform of the system, which Starmer once contemplated but backed off from. “The distinction between political and non-political is now a nonsense”, says one insider.

I hope that ‘the insider’ does not get their way. Vetting decisions need to be kept away from politics. It would be quite wrong to give ministers the power to refuse vetting clearance, for such a power could easily be misused. And most minsters wouldn’t want to have to take such decisions in marginal cases, for they would be sure to upset someone!

Conclusion

I adopt the conclusion of the IfG’s Alex Thomas & Hannah Keenan:-

On finding out that the Foreign Office had – in Keir Starmer’s understanding – not informed him about Peter Mandelson’s ‘failed’ vetting, the prime minister took the worst approach available to him. He sacked Sir Olly Robbins in haste, and will repent at such leisure as is granted to him by Labour MPs.

Further Reading

Andrew Greenway’s introduction to Select Committees and AOs’ performance before them is here.

The IfG’ introduction to security vetting is here.

Stephen Webb is not impressed by the vetting system:-

Do your Own Damn Vetting

Nor is the LSE’s Joe Martin, though I think he goes too far when claiming that Mandelson was a vetting failure. As so often in government, it was a communications failure rather than anything else:-

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/what-the-mandelson-vetting-crisis-tells-us-about-the-civil-service/

Martin Stanley