• The sacked senior civil servant Oliver Robbins has said he was subject to “constant pressure” when he started working at the Foreign Office to get Peter Mandelson in post as soon as possible. Robbins was speaking to the Commons foreign affairs committee in a hearing which has revived claims that, despite Keir Starmer claiming that the Mandelson appointment was in part a vetting failure, in reality Starmer’s team were hell-bent on getting Mandelson to Washington despite the multiple concerns about the appointment. Robbins also revealed that at one point No 10 wanted him to find a diplomatic post for Matthew Doyle, who was Starmer’s communications director at the time. Privately, some Labour MPs have been expressing alarm about the latest revelations.

• The account of Mandelson’s vetting process given by Robbins has raised new questions about whether Robbins was misled about the findings of the agency responsible for vetting.

• Electricity generators will face higher windfall taxes unless they sign up to long-term fixed-price contracts under UK government plans to protect bill payers from future gas market price shocks, as the Iran war pushes up energy prices, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has told MPs.

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Jones said the claims made about the PM lying had been shown to be “not true in any way”.

He said that a leak inquiry is underway into the source of the Guardian’s story published on Thursday last week.

And he said a further release of information required by the humble address demanding the publication of paperwork relating to Mandelson’s appointment would be coming “shortly”.

Jones said in the debate today it was claimed the Cabinet Office suggested Mandelson did not need security vetting.

(This did come up in the debate, but the claim was originally in the evidence given by Olly Robbins this morning. See 9.26am.)

Jones said it was the other way round. He said it was the Foreign Office that asked the Cabinet Office if Mandelson needed to vetting given that he was already a peer and privy counsellor. He said the vetting then took place.

As Tom Clark points out in a Prospect article quoted earlier (see 2.22pm), there is a striking contrast between the way Keir Starmer treated Louise Haigh (who was sacked over a fraud conviction that dated from before she even became an MP) and Peter Mandelson (who was appointed ambassador to the US despite being sacked twice already from cabinet jobs).

Haigh has given an interview to LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr. She said the latest Mandelson revelations showed “a very small clique at the heart of the Labour party and the heart of this government have been pushing decisions in their own self interest, not in the parties and certainly not in the countries”.

She said:

There has been a very small clique, primarily of men with a fetish for the worst elements of New Labour, that have pushed interests in their own interest. And the revelations that we continue to see around Peter Mandelson and now around Matthew Doyle are evidence of that.

Haigh seemed to be referring in particular to Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s former chief of staff.

Emily Thornberry, the chair of the foreign affairs committee, has told LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr that she thought it was clear from Olly Robbins’ evidence today that Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, was the person pushing for Peter Mandelson to get the ambassador post. She said:

This is Morgan taking too much power to himself. And the criticism of Kier is that he let him.

Asked if the committee would be summoning McSweeney to give evidence, Thornberry replied:

I am going to invite some other witnesses. It would probably be best if they heard that first from me rather than from you.

But on one point Thornberry was supportive of Starmer. She said Robbins was in a difficult position and she had “a great deal of sympathy for him”. But she went on:

I still, though, don’t think it was wrong for him to lose his job. I’m afraid I don’t.

Matthew Doyle, the former No 10 communications chief who got a peerage after he left Downing Street, has said that he “never sought” a post as an ambassdor and that he was “never aware of anyone speaking to the FCDO about such a role for me”.

He was responding to the revelations at today’s committee hearing with Olly Robbins.

I will post the full quotes when I get them.

UPDATE: See 3.53pm for the full quote.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, followed Trickett. He said it was “utterly depressing” that MPs were having to have a debate like this again after the Boris Johnson years.

He said parliament should be focusing on problems like the cost of living. But instead it was having to deal with Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint “the close friend of a notorious paedophile sex trafficker to one of the most important and sensitive jobs in this government”.

He said Mandelson was appointed because Starmer wanted to please Donald Trump. But that approach had failed, he said.

He went on:

This is a mess of the government’s own making, a mess born out of a futile attempt to appease Donald Trump …

The last Conservative government failed our country by getting stuck in a cycle of chaos and scandal and refusing to move.

The question for the Labour party is whether they will repeat that mistake, or finally deliver the change our country needs.

Badenoch ended her speech saying Starmer should resign.

It is clear to the public that he is failing at the job. It is clear to civil servants that he is throwing them under the bus, and it is clear to members across this house that he is not fit to lead.

This cannot go on. This house deserves better. The country deserves better.

The prime minister is not fit for office. The first duty of any prime minister is to keep this country safe. This prime minister has put the country’s national security at risk. He must take responsibility. It is time for him to go.

Badenoch says the problems with the Mandelson appointment are evidence of a wider problem with Keir Starmer.

We need a prime minister who has a grip on national security.

Yet last week, the former Labour defence secretary and former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson warned that the prime minister had a corrosive complacency when it comes to defence. This is the same man who wrote the prime minister’s Strategic Defence Review. He is ringing the alarm bell, warning us of the grave consequences of the government refusing to take the tough choices needed to increase defence spending.

This matters because if we cannot trust our prime minister to tell the truth about this ambassadorial appointment, the whole truth, a key appointment in Britain’s national security architecture, it calls into question the assurances he gives us on everything else – his promises to control taxes, which he has broken, his promises not to raise borrowing which he has broken, promises to back business, protect our veterans, defend our farmers and prioritise growth, all of which he has broken.

And he has broken them because, at his core, he is a man with no idea what he believes.

Badenoch opened her speech by claiming Mandelson was a security risk.

The prime minister personally decided to appoint a serious, known national security risk to our most sensitive diplomatic post. Peter Mandelson was not just a man who had already been sacked twice from government for lying, not just a man who had a public relationship with a convicted paedophile, but a man with links to the Kremlin and China links so close that they were raised as red flags with the prime minister before his appointment.

Yesterday the prime minister did not deny that he knew about these links before he appointed Mandelson. He could not deny this because, by his own admission, he had seen the documents that proved the links. I cannot overstate how serious a matter this is. The prime minister sent a known security risk to Washington, to a position where he would see our most important allies, top secret intelligence.

In the Commons Kemi Badenoch is now speaking at the start of the emergency debate on Peter Mandelson. This has been allowed under the SO24 (standing order 24) procedure.

They debating a neutral motion (“that this house has considered the government’s accountability to the house in connection to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States of America”) and so there won’t be a vote – or, if there is, it will be meaningless.

But the Tories will get up to three hours to again condemn Keir Starmer over this issue.

Here is some reaction from journalists and commentators to the Olly Robbins’s evidence.

From Kevin Maguire, the former Daily Mirror political editor

He’s fucked Kev. It’s done.”

Message from Labour MP watching Olly Robbins.

The “He” is, of course, Keir Starmer.

From Kevin Schofield from HuffPost UK

Labour MPs selling shares in Starmer after Robbins’ appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee.

One describes his evidence as “utterly devastating - and truthful”.

“The Burnham train has left the station and everybody will be clambering to get on it,” the MP adds.

Senior party figure says Starmer should set out a timetable for his departure after the May 7 elections.

“Labour can’t make the mistakes the Democrats made. Biden left it too late to go and helped usher in Trump. Keir is helping usher in Farage.”

From my colleague Jessica Elgot

This is the key point. The prime minister says he would have blocked Mandelson had he known about the UKSV concerns. But we know an atmosphere was created at the time which suggested the opposite.

From the Telegraph’s Tony Diver

The principle of the issue aside, you do have to question the political wisdom of Keir Starmer to publicly start a briefing war with one of the only people in the world who knows he tried to appoint Lord Doyle as an ambassador. Was this not an inevitable outcome?

From Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham

The top line of Robbins’ testimony is damning and on the worse end of expectations for the prime minister. He accused Downing Street of having a “dismissive approach” to vetting and creating an “atmosphere of pressure” by pressing ahead with the appointment and announcement before vetting had been completed. That is strong language that Starmer will have to answer.

From Sky’s Sam Coates

The thing I find so surprising about all of this is this is a war Number 10 started and over the next few days prosecuted with vigour. Did they not know the Doyle fact could emerge? Did they not know the cabinet office didn’t suggest vetting at all?

This is (in part) the consequence of not having a stable, functional, long term team around the PM providing institutional memory and helping with medium term judgement

Throwing people under the bus is the short term and the long term cause of what we are seeing

From the Times’ Steven Swinford

There are parallels between Keir Starmer turning on Olly Robbins and Boris Johnson turning on Dominic Cummings

In both cases Starmer and Johnson believed they could assert their authority and use their position to take on and ultimately bury their former employees

In both cases Cummings and Robbins have used devastating appearances before select committees to drop a welter of extraordinary and damaging revelations about their former bosses

From Robert Colvile, the Sunday Times columnist

The irony is that the Robbins letter shows there is a credible case Starmer/No 10 could have made in its own defence (that the Guardian report wasn’t accurate), which it blew up by firing/starting a briefing war with Robbins...

From the Sun’s Jack Elsom

We have today witnessed one of the most brutal demolition jobs in modern political history.

It may have been couched in Whitehall jargon. It may have been done with unflappable politeness and charm.

But over the course of two hours, Sir Olly Robbins successfully steamrollered Sir Keir Starmer’s version of events surrounding the appointment of Peter Mandelson.

Keir Starmer has restated his claim that Olly Robbins was wrong not to tell him about the UK Security Vetting concerns about Peter Mandelson. Downing Street has sent out a readout from today’s cabinet, and it is all about the Mandelson appointment – mostly just restating what Starmer told MPs yesterday.

It concludes:

The prime minister concluded by saying that Sir Olly Robbins made an error of judgment, but that he is a man of integrity and professionalism. He said it is wrong that the current cabinet secretary and permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office have been attacked despite doing exactly the right thing in sharing the information with the prime minister once they had gone through the correct process to do so. He said that there are thousands of hard-working civil servants across the country who are full of integrity, doing excellent work every day with a profound sense of public duty.

It is not entirely clear who Starmer was referring to when he talked about people attacking the cabinet secretary, Antonia Romeo, and the permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, Cat Little. During his evidence, Robbins did implicitly criticise these two officials, because he said that once they told the PM and others in No 10 about the Mandelson file, the news soon leaked. (See 11.18am.)

But Robbins made this point after well today’s cabinet meeting would have started.

Christopher Hope from GB News points out that the Lib Dem MP Edward Morello, who is a member of the foreign affairs committee and who was one of the MPs questioning Olly Robbins this morning, also asked Keir Starmer yesterday if he had proposed other political diplomatic appointments. This suggests Morello may have known about the Matthew Doyle proposal. Starmer sidestepped the question, saying there were many appointments and he would need to check.

Stephen Flynn, the SNP leader at Westminster, has said that Keir Starmer should resign today in the light of the Olly Robbins revelations.

During the hearing Flynn posted this on social media.

I wrote to Keir Starmer warning him not to appoint Matthew Doyle to the Lords due to his connection with a convicted paedophile.

He ignored those warnings.

And it now turns out he had even higher hopes for Doyle.

Just extraordinary.

And, after the hearing was over, Flynn released this statement.

The evidence from Olly Robbins this morning was devastating and definitive – Keir Starmer’s short and sorry time as prime minister is finished. He should now do the only decent thing and resign before the day is out.

In the Commons Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has just confirmed that she is extending the windfall tax for energy companies. She said this would generate more money for the Treasury, helping to pay for “government to support businesses and families”, and encourage electricity producers to move on to new contracts, which should lead to lower prices for consumers.

Jillian Ambrose wrote a preview of this announcement here.

Today Reeves told MPs:

I am announcing that I will extend the electricity generator levy past its scheduled conclusion in 2028. And ahead of that, I am increasing the rate of the electricity generators levy from 45% to 55%.

This ensures that a larger proportion of any exceptional revenues from high gas prices are passed back to government, providing a vital revenue stream so that money is available for government to support businesses and families with the impacts of the conflict in the Middle East.

But, crucially, it will encourage older, low carbon electricity generators, which supply about a third of our power, to move from market pricing to fixed price contracts for difference.

Under new proposals set out by [energy secretary Ed Miliband] today, that will further weaken the link between high gas prices and the price paid for our electricity, and limiting the spikes in energy prices from driving up inflation and costs for households and for businesses.

Reeves also said she publishing new rules for “tiebacks”, which allow North Sea oil and gas producers to extend drilling into areas adjacent to existing fields that can be accessed via rigs already in place. She said these rules could lead to “tens of millions more barrels of oil and gas being available for UK supply”.

And she said she was removing barriers to investment in renewables too.

During Foreign Office questions in the Commons, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, said she would not have approved of Matthew Doyle being made an ambassador.

Asked by the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller about the revelation that came out when Olly Robbins was giving evidence to MPs this morning, Cooper said:

I was the home secretary at the time that I understand this has taken place, so I was not involved and don’t know the circumstances.

I am, of course, extremely concerned at any suggestion that the permanent secretary or permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office would be told not to inform the foreign secretary.

I can also confirm that the case that he raised, it would not have been an appropriate appointment.

Olly Robbins did not come across as angry or bitter. Instead he came across as hurt and disappointed – but also conscientious, principled, and honest. He seemed to impress members of the foreign affairs committee, and that made his evidence all the more compelling.

Mostly, he did not say anything that directly contradicts what Keir Starmer told MPs yesterday. They both agree Starmer, and No 10 generally, were not told about the reservations UKSV (UK Security Vetting) had about Peter Mandelson. Robbins would not discuss the details of his conversation with PM where the PM told him he was being sacked, but he was passionate, and quite compelling, about the case for protecting the confidentiality of the DV (developed vetting) system. But there is still one hole in this part of the story. While No 10 is saying the UKSV file on Mandelson shows that “the recommendation from the vetting officer had been that DV should not be granted to Peter Mandelson”, Robbins claims he was not told that, at least in those terms. (See 9.56am, 10am, 10.10am and 10.47am.) On this point, the committee did not sound as if it was confident that it had got to the bottom of the story.

Robbins also claimed that knowing that refusing Mandelson’s vetting would cause a colossal problem for No 10 was not a factor in the decision to approve it. (See 11.23am.) Mmm. You can choose to believe that if you want.

But the most important part of Robbins’ evidence was what he said about the pressure he, and the rest of the Foreign Office, were under to push through the appointment. This was not a total surprise; but Robbins’ language was powerful. (See 9.14am, 9.22am and 10.22am.) And Robbins revealed that the Cabinet Office argued that Mandelson did not even need to be vetted. This is new, and highly embarrassing.

Kemi Badenoch is claiming that Robbins’ evidence shows that due process was not followed. (See 12pm.) In fact, it shows the opposite; it is because due process was being followed that Morgan McSweeney was constantly on the phone telling the Foreign Office to speed it all up. Badenoch is pushing this line because she is still trying to land the argument that Starmer lied to MPs, despite having to back down from the extreme version of this claim she was pushing last week.

Ed Davey’s response to the Robbins’ hearing (see 12.05pm) is more astute because he has focused on the one revelation from the hearing that will most shock Labour MPs: that No 10 was trying to find a diplomatic job for Matthew Doyle. The broadcasters have not been making this a key feature of their coverage yet because Doyle, despite being a peer (and independent one, now he has lost the Labour whip), is not really a public figure. But he is very well known to Labour MPs (he has a long history in the party, being a Labour adviser when Tony Blair was PM) and backbenchers will be astounded that Starmer was lining him up for a plum Foreign Office job. The fact that this is now public is bad for Starmer’s reputation with the people who will decide his fate.

In his response to the hearing, Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has focused on the revelation about No 10 wanting for find an ambassador’s job for Matthew Doyle. (See 10.29am and 11.03am.)

This is incredibly damning for Keir Starmer.

Not content with appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his links to Epstein, he tried to appoint another man with a known friendship with a sex offender.

This is not just a lapse in judgment, it’s a pattern of behaviour.

Every day this scandal gets worse, and it becomes clearer that the only way to draw a line under it is for Starmer to go.

Kemi Badenoch claims that Olly Robbins evidence shows that “due process” was not followed in the appointment of Peter Mandelson, and that therefore Keir Starmer misled MPs when he claimed it had been.

She has posted this on social media.

The evidence from Olly Robbins is devastating to Keir Starmer.

It is clear that No10 not only made the appointment before vetting was completed, but that Mandelson was already acting as the Ambassador before the vetting – even seeing highly classified documents.

With this, and the ‘constant pressure’ No10 applied to the appointment and their ‘dismissive attitude’ to vetting Mandelson, it is now absolutely clear that ‘full due process’ was not followed.

Keir Starmer has misled the House.

Yesterday Keir Starmer described a conversation he had had when he sacked Robbins, saying that he did not agree with the Foreign Office permanent secretary about his argument about not being able to disclose information about Mandleson’s vetting process.

Asked what he had told the prime minister, Robbins said that was a legitimate question, but he said he could not speak about that.

Referring to possible legal proceedings about his sacking, Robbins said that he was in “unknown territory” and for the sake of his family he had to keep quiet for the time being.

(Permanent secretaries who get sacked in circumstances like this normally end up negotiating some sort of payoff. What gets said in public can influence this.)

Asked about his reaction to being sacked, Robbins said:

The very short answer is I don’t fully understand the reasons that I’m in the position I am in, but that is for a separate process for me to try to get to the bottom of.

As a human being, I’m desperately, desperately sad about it.

I love that job, I love that institution, I was proud to serve this government and any government that might follow it.

I hope I was doing it to the best of my ability. I was certainly doing it as hard as I possibly could.

I had wonderful colleagues who I miss deeply and the issues we were dealing with, and my colleagues are still dealing with, are of profound importance to the success of this government and the success of the country.

It’s been the proudest part of my career to lead that institution because of their work, not because of mine.

I just feel intensely proud of the people I’ve led and I wish them every success and wish I could still be with them.

Robbins said that security vetting should not become a “pass/fail piety test”. He explained:

If we turn DV [developed vetting] into a pass/fail piety test, what we end up doing is robbing the British state of a lot of very, very capable people with complicated lives and potential vulnerabilities.

And I really, really don’t want that for the sake of this country.

If anything, this government needs to be served by an ever increasing range of people with broad experience and interesting lives, not suddenly find that the only people we can employ in sensitive roles are ones who raise no issues whatsoever.

Asked what would have happened if the Foreign Office had refused to give Mandelson developed vetting clearance, Robbins said that this would have caused “a real problem” for the government and the country.

He went on:

I was very conscious that if we went through the rigour of our process and decided against granting clearance that would have caused a real problem for the government and a problem for the country,

I was conscious of that without letting it influence my judgment, let alone transferring any of that atmosphere on to the people charged with actually making that assessment.

Robbins also said that vetting was one of the hardest bits of his job.

I hate doing it, honestly. It’s some of the most emotional things I got involved with in my time in the job.

I take those responsibilities extremely seriously. I have been prepared to follow through on tough advice.

Robbins said the leak to the Guardian of details of Mandelson’s vetting was “a grievous breach of national security”. He suggested he thought the leak happened once information about the UKSV process in this case was passed on to the Cabinet Office and No 10 as part of the process of scrutinising which documents will have to be published to comply with the Commons humble address.

He explained:

[This] probably flows from the rest of the evidence I’ve been giving you this morning. I think the system does not work if candidates for it don’t understand that this is an entirely different category of protection and losing that – I know it’s a cliche, but that trust, once gone, cannot be got back.

Thousands of people go through this process. Thousands and thousands of documents and sensitive issues and operations depend upon it. And I am struck and saddened that within I think days – probably only a small number of days – the Cabinet Office for their own reasons, deciding to open that up to share what they thought they’d found and their perceptions of it internally with No 10.

I’m not making accusations at anybody. It’s not my business to do so. I hope they’re being very rigorously investigated and the prosecutions will result, because this is a grievous breach of national security.

Asked to clarify this, Robbins said that he was not an investigator. But he said he was able to “put two and two together”. He said soon after Keir Starmer was told about the UKSV’s conclusions about Mandelson (on Tuesday last week, at the meeting described in this minute) the story was in the Guardian.

Robbins told the committee that he did not accept Keir Starmer’s argument that he should have been given more details of Mandelson’s security vetting.

He said:

I hope it’s clear from everything I have said so far that I believe that’s a misunderstanding and a dangerous misunderstanding of the necessity of confidentiality of the process.

I’ve been interested, of course, over the last couple of days to read Lord Hague on this today and David Lammy even on Saturday, the former foreign secretary, deputy prime minister, where both have said in different language that they have never had vetting issues discussed with them in all their time as a minister and nor would they expect to.

I’m afraid that’s exactly the culture I have been brought up in. It’s supported by guidance. You are not supposed to share the findings and reports of UKSV other than in the exceptional circumstances where doing so allows for the specific mitigation of risk.

And here is more from what Robbins told the committee about the proposal for Matthew Doyle to get a diplomatic job. (See 10.29am.) Robbins said he was told not to discuss this with the foreign secretary, David Lammy.

Robbins said there were “several discussions initiated by No 10 with me about potentially finding a head of mission opportunity for Matthew Doyle who was then the prime minister’s director of communications”.

He went on:

I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then foreign secretary, which was uncomfortable.

Robbins said he “felt quite uncomfortable” about the proposals and kept “giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the office and was hard for me personally to defend”.

He said:

I found it very hard to think how I would explain to the office what the credentials of Matthew were to be in an important head of mission role when I was in danger of making very senior, very experienced diplomats leave the office.

Here is more from what Robbins told the committee about how the Cabinet Office though Mandelson could take up his post without going through security vetting. He said:

It was not, I’m afraid I don’t think at the point of his appointment and for days thereafter, it was actually a given that he would be vetted.

If you look at the documents submitted under the humble address there is no stipulation from number 10 that he should be vetted.

The welcome that was sent to him immediately afterwards doesn’t say welcome to the Foreign Office subject to vetting; the announcement put out on 20 December says that he will be out early in the new year, it does not say subject to vetting.

Robbins said the contract issued to Lord Mandelson after he was vetted said he must maintain his clearance “but nothing about his appointment actually, as far as I’ve seen in writing, stipulates it”.

Robbins went on:

There was then a debate between Cabinet Office, FCDO, about how to make sure that he is sent out to post with the appropriate clearance and that took several days and a position taken from the Cabinet Office was that there was no need to vet Mandelson.

He was a member of the House of Lords, he was a privy counsellor, the risks attending his appointment were well-known and had been made clear to the prime minister before appointment.

In the end, the FCDO insisted and put its foot down. I understand my predecessor had to be very firm in person but that was a live debate at the point of announcement and I think it’s important to make that clear to the committee.

Robbins told the committee it was important to clear up “one of the most important misunderstandings” about UKSV (UK Security Vetting).

UKSV do not deny clearance in the Foreign Office.

They make findings and they make a recommendation.

I was told that that recommendation was that they “leant against” and it was a borderline case. That’s the conversation I relayed to the committee. They do not deny clearance.

The Foreign Office grants or denies clearance on the basis of a hugely experienced and capable personnel security team that responds to the fact that the Foreign Office is under more threat than the whole of the rest of government put together.

Robbins said that the security directorate at the Foreign Office took the final decison about vetting. He said they normally took that decision themselves, but sometimes they passed it up the system.

Occasionally that gets escalated up the line. And in this case, as I’ve made clear, it came to me for a sense check at the end.

Robbins said UKSV and the Foreign Office’s security directorate talk all the time. He went on:

The conversation I recall it on 29 January was that they had debated some of the assessments that UK has being made about specific risks and indeed … some of those had shifted up and down a bit.

And then the Foreign Office had reached his assessment and briefed me on it.

So I can understand why we are all today focussed on the starkness of the form, albeit a form I have never seen.

But the conversation has briefed to me was a dialogue between the two in which – clearly I’m not trying to pretend otherwise – there was unease in UKSV and the Foreign Office had to work out whether it could manage and mitigate that unease.

In response to a question from Emily Thornberry, Robbins told the committee that he thought Peter Mandelson appointment should have been blocked following the due diligence scrutiny carried out by the Cabinet Office. This is the ‘soft vetting’ that happened before the security vetting.

Robbins said:

Due diligence was done before the appointment. And I think that has been now released in the humble address papers.

What I am, what I feel sad about, is that the prime minister’s nominee went ahead despite that due diligence.

Robbins confirmed that he did not tell No 10 about the recommendation from UKSA about Mandelson.

He said:

And months and months later, when in the immediate aftermath of Mandelson’s sacking, we were obviously thinking internally about how to respond to legitimate questions this committee and others had about that process.

My recollection is, in a way, I wasn’t surprised by the direction from No 10 was we must make clear that these decisions were taken entirely independently of ministers and that they were not consulted other than to be told the outcome.

Emily Thornberry asked Robbins if he could confirm that No 10 suggested that Matthew Doyle should be given an ambassadorial job somewhere.

Doyle, who is now a peer, was Starmer’s head of communications at the time. He was also close to Peter Mandelson, and he was one of the No 10 people asked by Keir Starmer to question Mandelson about his links with Jeffrey Epstein ahead of Starmer’s decision to appoint him.

Doyle has had the Labour whip suspended in the Lords over his own links with a friend convicted of a child sex offence.

Robbins said he did not know where that suggestion came from.

He went on:

It was serious enough for the No 10 private office to bring up the head of the diplomatic service and ask for a forward look of available head of mission jobs. And that’s the point at which I thought that I needed to lay down some markers.

He also said that Mandelson was asked if there might be a job available for Doyle in the US embassy team.

Robbins was asked about a repor from Sam Coates at Sky News that Morgan McSweeney, the then chief of staff to the PM, called Philip Barton, Robbins’ predecessor as head of the Foreign Office, asking him to speed up the Mandelson vetting approval. McSweeney reportedly told Barton: “Just fucking approve it.”

Robbins said that when he took over there was a “strong sense that there was an atmosphere of pressure and a certain dismissiveness about this process”.

But he said he does not recall Barton using those words. Barton is not the sort of person who would report language like that, he said.

Robbins was asked to clarify what he was saying about the recommendation from UKSV.

Asked if he was saying he was told that security vetting should be denied, Robbins said that he was telling the committee what he was told at that meeting. He was told that the decision was “borderline”, and that they were leaning against granting approval.

Q: So you did not see a form with the red box ticked?

Robbins said he had never seen a form like that until the template was published by No 10.

He stressed that UKSV’s findings were “recommendations and not decisions” to the Foreign Office.

What my team will have done, I’m sure, is break that down, go through the specific issues that have led UKSV to their concern and then make an assessment as to whether they can be managed. And that’s what came to me.

Robbins was asked more about the meeting he had with his head of security about Mandelson. They said they could manage the risks associated with Mandelson’s appointment. Was it there decision, or was it ultimately his decision?

Robbins said this was a recommendation to him, but he said he would not read too much into that. He went on:

They are entirely professional people. They care deeply about national security. They run one of the toughest security functions in government given the attack we’re under. I trusted their judgment and I backed it.

UPDATE: I’ve amended this post because orginally it said Robbins’ meeting was with UKSV, but in fact it was with the head of security from the Foreign Office’s security directorate. See 10.47am for more on this.

Paul Lewis is the Guardian’s head of investigations.

Olly Robbins’ testimony raises the extraordinary possibility that the permanent secretary was misled about Mandelson’s UK Security Vetting (UKSV) outcome.

Robbins told the committee he did not see the UKSV document personally.

Instead, he said he was given a briefing about Mandelson’s vetting file by security officials in his department. He said Mandelson’s case was described to him as “borderline” and that UKSV was “leaning toward” clearance being “denied”.

But said he was also told that the Foreign Office “might wish to grant” Mandelson clearance, and risks could be managed with “mitigations”.

That account is at odds with the Guardian’s understanding. The Cabinet Office last week released a template of the UKSV file on Mandelson. (See 9.56am.) It lists three rankings for possible “overall concern”: low, medium and high. In the next box, there is a space for a vetting officer to list the outcome of the assessment with their “overall decision or recommendation”.

Again, there are three options: clearance approved, clearance approved “with risk management” or clearance denied. According to multiple sources, the UKSV process in Mandelson’s case concluded there was a “high” overall concern and concluded “clearance denied”. In the committee hearing, Robbins said those were terms he did not recognise.

Another committee member, John Wittingdale, specifically raised the Cabinet Office template document, and said the committee’s understanding was also that Mandelson got ticks in the two red boxes. Robbins said he did not recall the briefing being given to him being “that definitive”.

John Whittingdale, a former Conservative cabinet minister and committee member, went next.

He asked about the document released by No 10 on Friday showing how UKSV sums up its recommendations after security vetting interviews.

The No 10 briefing implied that UKSV ticked the red boxes.

Whittingdale said that a red box tick did not sound like a borderline judgment.

Robbins said, before he had seen the No 10 document, he had never seen a form like that.

He went on:

I certainly do not recall the way in which the UKSC findings were presented to me as being that definitive. As I say, it was briefed to me that they were leaning against. I think it’s the phrase I remember.

Robbins said UKSV had also considered if the risks could be managed.

After they took a view on that, they came to him with a decision, he said. He said there were only two people in that meeting – him and the UKSV director of security.

Henry Dyer is a Guardian investigative correspondent.

Olly Robbins has given remarkable evidence so far. He has spoken about the pressure the Foreign Office faced from Downing Street – weeks before he took the top job – about ensuring Peter Mandelson made it to Washington as ambassador. That included, Robbins claims, a discussion between the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office as to whether or not Mandelson even needed to go through the vetting process.

Robbins said his predecessor had to be “very firm in person” about the necessity of Mandelson to face vetting in the days leading up to Christmas, in the face of arguments from the Cabinet Office that there was no need for Mandelson to face vetting, given he was a member of the House of Lords and a member of the privy council.

Given nearly all staff – including junior civil servants – in the Foreign Office require DV clearance, it would have been astonishing for the man in the top British diplomatic posting to not have received the same security clearance.

Thornberry asked if the vetting process threw up anything “that wasn’t already in the public realm”.

Robbins said he would not answer that because the whole process relies on confidentiality. People comply because they know that they say will not be disclosed.

Thornberry said she was not asking what the new information might have been.

Robbins said, if he said new information came out, people would ask what it was.

Thornberry said she would not do that.

Robbins replied:

I trust you. I’m not sure that the whole of the rest of the world will hold off from wanting to know.

Robbins confirmed that the decision about Mandelson’s developed vetting was “borderline”. (See 8.57am.)

I was told that UKSV [UK Security Vetting] were leaning towards recommending against, but accepted it was a borderline case.

He said that, although reporting suggests this is process you pass or fail, that is not how the system works.

Thornberry asked Robbins if Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, was the person putting pressure on the Foreign Office to push through the Mandelson appointment. She said:

We do know that Morgan McSweeney was a protege of Peter Mandelson, and we know that he was very keen on Peter Mandelson getting the job, and we know that he resigned, saying that it was all his fault and that he had advised the prime minister to appoint Peter Mandelson and took it on the chin.

Robbins said, when he said he didn’t know who the individuals were, he meant it.

In his letter to the committee, Robbins says the Cabinet Office suggested that Mandelson would not have to go through security vetting. He says:

After the announcement, I believe the Cabinet Office (CO) raised whether Developed Vetting (DV) was actually necessary. I understand the FCDO insisted that DV was a requirement before Mandelson took up his post in Washington.

Robbins says the Foreign Office insisted developed vetting would have to go ahead.

Thornberry is asking where the pressure for the appointment to go through very quicky was coming from. (See 9.14am.)

Robbins says that in January 2025 his office, and the foreign secretary [David Lammy’s] office were “under constant pressure”.

“There was an atmosphere of constant chasing,” he says.

Asked who this was coming from, Robbins says it was “private office to private office”.

Thornberry asks for the names of those putting pressure on the Foreign Office to expedite the appointment and the vetting process.

Robbins says he does not want to give names.

I didn’t come here today to scapegoat other civil servants. I came here to make sure the committee understood the circumstances.

Robbins starts by saying that when he started as permanent secretary, the Mandelson appointment was well under way. He says:

I wasn’t walking into a vacuum. I arrived to a situation in which a due diligence report had been undertaken into Mandelson by the Cabinet Office, assessing the reputational risks and his fitness for office.

The prime minister had then presumably taken advice on his fitness for office.

The name had been submitted to the king as ministers’ recommendation.

The prime minister had made an announcement that Mandelson was his nominee without caveats.

The British government had sought agreement, the formal diplomatic process for a host government accepting a nominee from the US government, and that had been obtained before I arrived in post.

He’d been given access to the building. You’ve been given access to low classification [information]. And, from time to time for case specific issues, he was being given access to higher classification briefing.

So I’m afraid I walked into a situation in which, there was already a very, very strong expectation [that the appointment would go through].

Robbins also said that “coming from No 10” there was an expectation that “he needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible”.

Here is the letter from Olly Robbins.

The foreign affairs committee hearing is about to start.

There is a live feed at the top of this blog, you may need to refresh the page for it to appear.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has said that he always thought that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US would “blow up”.

In an interview with Sky News this morning, Miliband claimed that David Lammy, the deputy PM who was foreign secretary at the time of the appointment, also had doubts about the appointment.

But Miliband said he did not express his concens to Keir Starmer, in part because it was well known that Miliband and Mandelson did not get on.

They clashed when they were both cabinet ministers when Gordon Brown was PM, and when Miliband subsequently became Labour leader, he marginalised Mandelson – who in turn became a critic of Miliband’s leadership strategy.

Miliband told Sky News:

You’re saying [Mandelson] should never have been appointed [as US ambassador] and I agree with you …

I steered well clear of Peter Mandelson when I became Labour leader in 2010.

Asked what he thought when the Mandelson appointment was announced, Miliband said:

That it could blow up, that it could go wrong.

I had a conversation with David Lammy about it before the appointment, and I said I was worried about it … I think he was worried about it too.

But Miliband did not discuss this with Starmer, he said.

Maybe I wasn’t the person that people would necessarily ask, I think people knew my view on Peter Mandelson.

But Miliband also said he did not think Starmer should resign over this.

You’re asking me should Keir Starmer resign over the appointment of Lord Mandelson? And I’m saying to you, no, I don’t think he should.

Because I think if every time a prime minister made a mistake they resigned, we would shuttle through prime ministers like nobody’s business.

Prime ministers make mistakes.

I think on big judgments for this country, the biggest judgment of all, whether to join the war against Iran, Keir Starmer made a big and fundamental correct judgment.

Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who chairs the international development committee, was on the Today programme this morning talking about the mood in the Labour party following the Peter Mandelson crisis. She said that Keir Starmer was unpopular with voters, but not because of this. She said:

I’ll be honest with you, people don’t like Keir on the door but it’s not over this Mandelson thing. They don’t like him personally.

There’s been a fantastic campaign by opposition parties to undermine him …

I think that so much attention being given to the minutiae of this just confirms the Westminster bubble in their mind and they don’t like it.

But Champion also said that a leadership challenge was “absolutely the last thing that we want right now”.

Donald Trump seems to be conducting his relationship with Keir Starmer chiefly by online trolling at the moment. He was at it again overnight, with a post on his Truth Social network saying that, when Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, it was a “really bad pick”.

Good morning. At 9am Olly Robbins will give evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US. Until last week Robbins was permanent secretary at the Foreign Office and his predecessor but one in that office, Simon McDonald, was the man who terminated Boris Johnson’s career with a revelation showing that Johnson had lied about his knowledge of a sleaze allegation about a minister. Robbins is not expected to produce a bombshell on that scale, but his evidence will be moment of jeodpardy for Keir Starmer nevertheless.

Robbins was sacked because he had not told Starmer that Mandelson failed his security vetting interview after Starmer had announced he was getting the ambassador’s job. If Robbins were to prove that Starmer were told, that would be career ending for the PM. But no one is expecting that.

Instead, the hearing will illustrate the dispute between the PM and the former head of the Foreign Office over whether Robbins should have told Downing Street. Starmer says he should; Robbins is expected to say that that he was meant to keep the process confidential because all that ultimately mattered was the final decision – which is that Mandelson did get vetting approval, because Robbins used his judgment as the decision-maker to ignore the recommendation from officials and grant vetting approval.

The most interesting question is, why? And here it will get difficult for Starmer, because Robbins is likely to argue that he felt under pressure to grant vetting approval because Starmer had already said he wanted Mandelson to get the job, despite knowing full well about the multiple factors that made his appointment problematic.

We know this because Robbins suggested as much when he last gave evidence to the committee about this appointment, in November last year. Robbins told the committee:

Back before Lord Mandelson was announced as the appointee, there was a process … within the Cabinet Office to make sure that the prime minister was aware of Lord Mandelson and the issues around his appointment. There was then a process of clearing his conflicts of interest, which the employing department [the Foreign Office] oversaw, which we have talked about. In parallel with that process, we also went through the standard UK national security vetting process for DV [developed vetting].

Mandleson failed the DV interview. But Robbins was making the point that, by then, Mandelson had already been approved by the Cabinet Office’s due diligence process (a separate vetting exercise). Robbins also told the committee:

By the time we are describing [when DV was carried out], it was clear that the prime minister wanted to make this appointment himself.

In the Times, Steven Swinford and Oliver Wright highlight this in their story on today’s hearing, saying Starmer “will be accused of pressuring the Foreign Office into approving the appointment of Lord Mandelson despite being aware of his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his business links to Russia and China”.

And here is the our analysis, by Kiran Stacey, Henry Dyer and Paul Lewis, of all the issues likely to come up at the hearing.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Olly Robbins, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, gives evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet, including a political cabinet session.

9.30am: The Good Growth Foundation holds a day-long National Growth Debate, with speeches from Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the PM.

10am: Executives from TikTok, Meta, Roblox, and academics give evidence to the Commons education committee on screen time and social media.

11.30am: Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, makes a statement to MPs.

After 1.30pm: MPs begin an emergency debate tabed by the Tories on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.

2.20pm: John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, speaks at the STUC conference.

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