The original sin

The Civil Service Code, Sir Oliver “Olly” Robbins told Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, is one of two documents he has committed to memory “along with the Book of Common Prayer”. Both works urge readers to bend themselves to the will of a higher power known for expressing its wishes obliquely. Only one of them suggests that the authority in question is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Robbins was giving evidence on Tuesday because he’d fallen victim to a more worldly power. This time last week he was running the Foreign Office, and a year ago he gave the prime minister what he wanted by clearing Peter Mandelson to become US ambassador. We now learn that this wasn’t what the prime minister wanted at all, and on Thursday evening, Robbins was cast into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. He is not, it’s fair to say, taking this very well.

It wasn’t that he was furious or raging. There was neither earthquake, wind nor fire in his evidence. But if not even poetic licence allows me to describe the beefy Robbins’s voice as “small”, he was calm.  

It was two hours of drama that contained everything, including a surprising moment of tenderness from Robbins, his civil service career abruptly over when he was sacked from a job he loved and denounced in the Commons by the prime minister days later. “I’m desperately, desperately sad,” he said. “I loved that job and I loved the institution.”

The previous day, Keir Starmer had given us the case for the prosecution: Mandelson had failed vetting, and Robbins had for some reason kept this to himself. On Tuesday, we got the defence. Committee chair Emily Thornberry took the defendant through his evidence: Mandelson had not failed vetting, because the decision was one for Robbins alone, and he had passed him.

Before Robbins, there had been a formal assessment by investigators, which we now know Mandelson did fail. Why had Robbins not told anyone this? Because he hadn’t been told this himself. Robbins had simply been told that the vetters were “leaning against” passing Mandelson. But the Foreign Office security chaps had taken the view that whatever dirt the vetting plods had dug up, they could manage it, and so he’d signed it off. 

Just as Robbins was laying all this out for us, in another part of the forest Starmer was explaining to Cabinet that Robbins had made an “error of judgement” in not sharing the vetting concerns. 

Robbins’ reply was that Starmer’s office had made it very clear that it wasn’t interested. “I wasn’t working into a vacuum,” he said. Number 10 had taken “a generally dismissive attitude to vetting”, arguing that Mandelson was a member of the House of Lords and the Privy Council, so could be trusted. Sadly, we now know rather more about how seriously Mandelson took those obligations. 

It wasn’t unusual, Robbins explained, for people working at the Foreign Office to have had “interesting lives.” Thornberry, having the time of her life, chipped in: “There’s interesting and there’s Mandelson.” 

It was important to get the ambassador clearance, Robbins said, because the US government was “hot” on that subject. Who would have guessed that Donald Trump’s White House would turn out to have cared more about security than Keir Starmer’s Downing Street?

“My office was under constant pressure,” Robbins went on, to get Mandelson approved. There had been daily phone calls asking when the clearance was going to be delivered. It was a picture of a frankly surprising level of dynamism inside Starmer’s Number 10. If only his office had taken this level of interest in, say, national defence. 

But then it turns out that there are some subjects that Downing Street cares about. In an astonishing drive-by, Robbins revealed that he’d been asked to find a diplomatic job for Matthew Doyle, one of Starmer’s many former directors of communications (Doyle says he’s unaware of this). A cynic would note that Robbins dropped this line as he begins negotiations with the government about the terms of his dismissal and the size of his pay-offs. Does he have other such nuggets to share? All things come from you, prime minister, and of your own do we give you. 

Anyway, Robbins insisted to the committee that his eventual decision to clear Mandelson wasn’t in any way influenced by the fact that it was precisely the outcome Downing Street wanted. Well. If we say we are without sin, we deceive ourselves. 

It was all delivered with great cheeriness, and the occasional smile to the press bench. “It’s nice of the committee to keep thanking me for my time,” the mandarin remarked at one point. “My diary is quite open.” On which note I can only say that if he fancies a pint, he knows where to find me.

A stickler for propriety, Robbins refused to go near the issues that had cropped up in Mandelson’s vetting, except to say they had nothing to do with the thing that caused the ambassador’s downfall, his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On that, his view had been that the prime minister was aware of the dangers. “I assume he would have looked at the risks about Mandelson.” 

But was Starmer involved at all? Although the talk was of the prime minister, he has the air of a man who is just now discovering what has been going on in his name. 

It’s inescapable that the original sin was the appointment of Mandelson

Richard Foord, a Lib Dem, quoted a report that the erstwhile chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, had been the one driving the process. He’d even made an aggressive phone call at one stage, demanding the vetting be moved along. Foord was too squeamish to repeat the precise words McSweeney is supposed to have used, but Thornberry, a heartier soul, was on hand to help. “’Fucking!’” she declared, quoting the report with evident pleasure. “‘Just fucking approve it!’” This is not, I believe, a line from the Book of Common Prayer.

On which note, it’s inescapable that the original sin was the appointment of Mandelson. Everything followed from that. As Robbins himself said, the Foreign Office was full of people intelligent enough to know that when the prime minister announces something, he wants it to happen. Starmer claims he had assumed the vetting team would alert him to skeletons in the noble lord’s closet, but Mandelson had quite enough of those on display, and we are asked to believe that no one in Downing Street had noticed them. The greatest trick Mandelson ever pulled was convincing Number 10 that Wikipedia didn’t exist.