Keir Starmer, still just about Prime Minister, is about to face the toughest grilling of his entire premiership. The reverberations of the Mandelson vetting scandal are profoundly damaging for Starmer, both with his party, the civil service writ large, and the country as a whole.
It is easy to get bogged down in the technical details of this scandal, which, with his lawyer’s training, is exactly what Starmer will try to do.
This will make for torturous and unconvincing political theatre, even if he might be able to prevent it being proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he explicitly lied to parliament.
On one side is the No10 narrative. Wicked officials approved the appointment against security advice and neglected to mention this to ministers or the Prime Minister.
It is a theory that requires one to believe the British civil service, for all its faults, suddenly decided to freelance on matters of the utmost sensitivity to national security.
But we already know that Starmer, as Leader of the Opposition, was briefed by the security services on Mandelson’s dodgy business links to Russia and China (including a very fruity meeting with President Xi himself). That is on top of the literal decades of scandals and firings Mandelson has already inflicted on the nation.
The PM’s own political team also knew about Mandelson’s deep friendship with the notorious billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
So this narrative requires one to believe that Starmer, a barrister by training, never thought to ask about the outcome of the vetting he had himself demanded.
And it requires one to believe that a Prime Minister who tells the Commons something untrue, and fails to correct the record for two months, again and again, bears no responsibility for the untruth. Nor that the Civil Service would, at any point, see this and fail to intervene.
The alternatives are either that Starmer lied, and/or that this is a totally pointless distraction from the main point. That point is that Starmer knew the risks and didn’t care because he wanted his man in place for political reasons.
In February, Starmer told the House of Commons that "full due process" had been followed in clearing Mandelson for Washington.
To portray Keir Starmer as either a knave or a fool is misleading: he is both - James Price | Getty Images
But we know this isn’t true, even on the political level, because Starmer unveiled Mandelson as the Ambassador back in December 2024, before the vetting process was completed (AND FAILED!) in January 2025.
At that point, what was the civil service to do? They had already warned Starmer and his Labour advisers, and they had been told that none of that mattered.
The appointment, in other words, was a fait accompli. The vetting was theatre. Sir Olly Robbins was one of the few people who dared sound warnings. He was ignored.
Now he has been thrown under the bus. In a beautiful piece of timing, Robbins will be testifying to Parliament tomorrow, after Starmer has spoken.
This means that Starmer will be further constricted in what he can claim to Parliament, lest Robbins have the receipts to prove him wrong. Some wonder whether Starmer is a knave or a fool. The answer is that he is both.