It will come as no surprise that Keir Starmer appears to have heard a very different evidence session from Sir Olly Robbins to the one everyone else thought the ex Foreign Office mandarin gave yesterday. The Prime Minister arrived in the Commons for questions today convinced that Robbins had in fact largely backed him up, give or take a few quibbles over whether there was a ‘dismissive’ attitude in Downing Street towards Peter Mandelson’s vetting.
First, though, he had to deal with a question about whether Downing Street had wanted Matthew Doyle to get an ambassadorial post. His lawyerly answer confirmed this at length: ‘Matthew Doyle worked for many years in public service, for me as prime minister and other ministers. When people leave roles in any organisation, there are often conversations about other roles they may wish to apply for, but nothing came of this.’ In short: yes.
Kemi Badenoch was on really strong form today – though she did of course have plenty of material. She chose not to taunt the Prime Minister, other than to point out that even his own cabinet ministers were not defending him. She also did not point out, presumably because she didn’t need to, just how quiet the chamber was for much of their exchanges. Labour MPs couldn’t really cheer along with the Prime Minister – and not just because they didn’t feel like it. Presumably they were as confused as everyone else when they heard Starmer say, as he did, that what Robbins had said in his evidence ‘puts to bed all the allegations levelled at me by those opposite in relation to dishonesty’.
That ‘puts to bed’ line came in his first answer to Badenoch, who had asked whether he stood by the claim he had made on 10 September 2025 that ‘full due process’ was followed in the appointment of Peter Mandelson. Starmer replied:
Yes I do. Let me make clear at the outset that the appointment itself was a mistake, it was my mistake. I have apologised to the victims for it and I do so again. What I set out to the house on Monday is that Foreign Office officials granted security clearance to Mandelson against the recommendation of UK Security Vetting. Yesterday Sir Olly Robbins was asked if he shared that decision with me, No. 10, or any ministers. He gave a clear answer. No. That puts to bed all the allegations levelled at me by those opposite in relation to dishonesty.
Last week they were all saying that it must have been shared with me, Sir Olly was very clear yesterday it was not. I believe not sharing it was a serious error of judgement. That information should have been shared with me and other ministers, and if it had Mandelson would not have been committed to point.
Badenoch replied that this did not in fact ‘put to bed anything’. She said Starmer had received advice from the then cabinet secretary Sir Simon Case that he should get security clearance before announcing Mandelson’s appointment. And that, she said, showed that due process had not been followed. Starmer insisted that normal process had been followed, and that Robbins had said that yesterday. Badenoch then pointed out that she was talking about the advice he was given before the appointment, rather than what happened after. She told the chamber that Mandelson’s job was a ‘done deal’ and quoted Robbins’s claim that there was a ‘dismissive’ attitude towards the vetting. ‘This clearly wasn’t proper process: why was due process not followed?’ she asked.
Starmer then, somewhat laughably, claimed that ‘Sir Olly Robbins could not have been clearer in his evidence yesterday. He said this: “I didn’t feel under pressure personally in terms of my judgement.” His words!’ They were indeed his words, but they were not the sum total of Robbins’s evidence.
The pair continued to circle around each other, with Starmer answering a slightly different question to the one Badenoch had posed each time. But it was a measure of the seriousness of the situation that Starmer finds himself in that he didn’t try to deflect attention – or at least, not until his final answer, where he started to upbraid her for having ‘rushed to judgement’ on the matter, just like she did on the Iran war. If Starmer is really going to start congratulating himself on how he has handled the Mandelson affair, then British politics is about to get even weirder than anyone could have expected.
Listen to Isabel’s analysis on today’s Coffee House Shots podcast:
