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Good morning. On Monday, Keir Starmer told MPs that officials had failed to inform him Peter Mandelson had been refused security vetting before being appointed ambassador to Washington. Yesterday, the ousted Foreign Office permanent secretary Olly Robbins gave his own account in parliament.
Not only did Robbins’s retelling differ from the prime minister’s version, it also included further damaging claims about the pressure his department had been under from the Downing Street operation to confirm the New Labour grandee in the role. Robbins, who gave two and a half hours of evidence to the foreign affairs select committee, also revealed he had been under pressure to appoint another Starmer aide to a senior diplomatic role – while keeping the foreign secretary firmly out of the loop.
For today’s newsletter I spoke to Guardian policy editor Kiran Stacey about the gaps between the two accounts, the questions that remain unanswered and where Starmer goes from here. First though, the headlines.
Five big stories
UK politics | Olly Robbins, the former top official at the Foreign Office, said No 10 took a “dismissive” attitude to vetting, and Peter Mandelson was given access to the Foreign Office building and to “higher-classification briefings” before he was granted security clearance.
Middle East crisis | Donald Trump unilaterally announced an extension of the two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday amid frantic efforts to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table.
Labour | The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told “white liberal” hecklers to “fuck right off” after being accused at an on-stage event of copying the policies of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
US politics | Tucker Carlson has said he is “tormented” by his support of Donald Trump, issuing an extraordinary mea culpa that called for “a moment to wrestle with our own consciences”.
UK news | Seven more people have been arrested after a series of arson attacks on Jewish sites in London.
In depth: ‘He said he’d been made a scapegoat’
Opening yesterday’s session, the foreign affairs committee chair Emily Thornberry was withering about how candid Olly Robbins had been to the same committee previously. “You clearly told us the truth,” she said, “but you only told us part of the truth. It’s a little bit like saying ‘I had to run to work today’, but not saying you were chased by a bear.”
Robbins was, Kiran Stacey says, clearly aggrieved at how he has been treated. “He said he’d been made a scapegoat and insisted he’d done everything by the book.”
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What did Robbins tell the committee?
Robbins’s argument boiled down to this: by the time he took up his role, Mandelson’s appointment had already been announced, approved by King Charles and accepted by the US – and the Foreign Office was under “constant pressure” from No 10 Downing Street to get him to Washington as quickly as possible.
He insisted this pressure bore no part in his decision-making. However, on our live blog coverage of the hearing yesterday, my colleague Andrew Sparrow had more than a little suspicion on this score, writing: “You can choose to believe that if you want.”
Kiran says that Robbins’s message here was “the appointment had effectively already been made – agreed, announced and tied up. If I’d refused clearance, I’d have killed the appointment after it had already been announced. I would have been reversing the prime minister’s decision.”
Crucially, Robbins maintained that the vetting outcome had been presented to him as “borderline” and manageable – despite reports that officials had in fact recommended clearance be denied – and he also claimed not to have been presented with any of the documentary evidence around the vetting process.
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A new line of attack against Starmer
One new piece of information that came out of Robbins’s session was his suggestion that the No 10 operation had been seeking a diplomatic role for Matthew Doyle, who was then the prime minister’s director of communications. This line, Kiran says, “came out of nowhere”.
“He was obviously prepared for it and just waiting for the right moment to drop it in,” Kiran says. “I don’t know whether he’d briefed the committee in advance, but it was completely out of the blue – not directly related to what he was talking about, but a pretty amazing revelation.”
Robbins then told the committee he had been told not to inform the then-foreign secretary David Lammy about this – which seems quite extraordinary. In the Commons, the current foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said she was “extremely concerned” about the suggestion a permanent secretary was being ordered to keep a minister in the dark. Doyle, who was made a Labour peer, was suspended from the House of Lords in February after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children. Doyle said later on Tuesday 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”.
Kiran tells me that given the overall tenor of Robbins’s testimony – that Starmer desperately wanted Mandelson in place, come what may – “to then add: ‘Oh, and by the way, he also wanted another mate, someone who’s been tarred by association with a paedophile, to take on a diplomatic role’. Well, that adds to a growing feeling among Labour MPs that Starmer’s political judgment is all over the place.”
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A story Robbins wanted to bury
Robbins also confirmed the Guardian’s story that senior government officials had considered whether to withhold from parliament sensitive documents about the vetting process, which was denied last week by Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary.
In fact, the former senior civil servant seemed regretful the episode had come into the public domain at all, saying the leak to the Guardian of details of Mandelson’s vetting was “a grievous breach of national security”. He implied it would only be helpful to “hostile powers”, and that anything that undermined the integrity of the security vetting process could pose a risk to people working in embassies in Moscow or Beijing.
“It’s important to stress that he confirmed our reporting that they were considering covering the whole thing up,” Kiran says. “In fact, he said he would have preferred that.”
Kiran points out that even once it became clear during the process in the Commons that forced the government to release documents pertaining to Mandelson’s appointment, Robbins’ preference was still not to publish it. “He was at loggerheads with others,” Kiran says, “and who knows how it would have played out. But if we hadn’t published our story, the public might never have known about any of this.”
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Where do we go from here?
Robbins stuck to his insistence – however much Thornberry suggested surely he must have picked up the phone to someone senior at some point after the decision was reached – that he did not tell anyone in No 10 about the vetting recommendation. That will bolster the prime minister’s claims in the House of Commons that neither he nor any of his aides knew about the debate around Mandelson’s vetting status, describing the decision to keep the information from him as “frankly staggering”.
“Starmer said due process was followed,” Kiran reminds me. “He can still say that was true – it’s just that he wasn’t told the full detail of the process.”
What does this mean for Starmer’s already frail position? An expected mauling in May’s local elections is “baked in” says, says Kiran, but there is a danger that the Mandelson story will continue to haunt what remains of Starmer’s premiership.
“It’s one of those stories that gets reignited by fresh information – another transcript, more documents, perhaps the vetting recommendation, if that’s published.”
Thornberry referenced being chased by a bear this morning. It isn’t clear that Starmer is out of the woods yet.
What else we’ve been reading
The Guardian has relaunched its Cotton Capital series as part of the next phase of its 10-year plan to address and atone for the organisation’s historical links to transatlantic enslavement. Our Legacies of Enslavement programme director Ebony Riddell Bamber reopens the series with this remarkable piece asking: what would repairing the harm of enslavement actually look like? Patrick
Tom Vanderbilt is wistfully – and slightly oddly – nostalgic about old-school street scams, which he says he much prefers to the faceless phone-snatchers of today. Martin
This time in April is traditionally understood to have been the week of William Shakespeare’s birth. To celebrate, the Guardian’s former theatre critic Michael Billington ranks all 35 of the plays. Patrick
Daniel Lavelle explains how, after the release of various snippets of evidence from US intelligence, he dropped everything and went UFO-chasing in the US. Martin
Zoe Williams is funny (as always) on the unspoken social rules of dropping off her niece at university. Patrick
Sport
Football | Ferdi Kadıoglu, Jack Hinshelwood and Danny Welbeck were all on target as Brighton moved above Chelsea into sixth place with an emphatic 3-0 win.
Football | Karren Brady made a shock announcement that she has stepped down as West Ham’s vice-chair after 16 years.
Boxing | The world heavyweight title contender Lawrence Okolie has pledged to clear his name after a failed a drugs test before his bout against Tony Yoka this weekend.
The front pages
Our Guardian print edition opens the day with “Robbins accuses No 10 of applying huge pressure over Mandelson job”. Similarly the Financial Times reports “Robbins tells of No 10 pressure to approve role for Mandelson”. The Times splashes on “Starmer on the ropes over Mandelson vetting fiasco” while the Telegraph has “Labour MPs vent fury at ‘toxic’ No10”. Gleefully the Mail reports “Starmer’s support starts to crack” while the Mirror goes a bit Metro with “Eye of the Starm”. Speaking of the Metro its headline is “Peers pressure” as it focuses on claims of a bid to get Lord (Matthew) Doyle a diplomatic job. The i paper runs with “Wounded Starmer given public dressing down by his cabinet”. Something else entirely in the Express: “Hero manager Sean must get his job back!”. He “tackled” a shoplifter in Morrisons.
Today in Focus
The security report the UK government doesn’t want you to see – podcast
Fiona Harvey tells Nosheen Iqbal why the climate crisis is a threat to national security
Cartoon of the day | Rebecca Hendin
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
In many UK cities, we have to learn to live alongside foxes. In some cities in Germany, racoons are the main wild companion. But in Nepal, the recovery of wildlife populations near Chitwan national park has been so dramatic that some megafauna walk down the street in the middle of the day. This photo essay by James Whitlow Delano has extraordinary photos of a wild rhinoceros in the middle of nearby cities. Human-wildlife conflict has become a problem as populations of rhinos, tigers and other species have recovered, but James also profiles some of the extraordinary conservationists keeping the peace.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
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