Of all the politicians to take up arms against Sir Humphrey, Keir Starmer is the most unlikely. After all, this dream-free embodiment of bland managerialism and stultifying bureaucracy is – as a former director of public prosecutions – the first prime minister to have served as a Whitehall permanent secretary. He is the mandarins’ mandarin.
Even giving the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt that this was an honest mistake, what it reveals about his judgment is utterly damning
Yet it is by rallying the country against the abominable blob that Starmer has spied a possible route out of the Mandelson scandal. Having fired the chief Foreign Office official Sir Olly Robbins at the end of last week, he complained in the Commons yesterday that ‘it is simply not good enough’ for senior civil servants to have failed to provide him with information relevant to national security. The Foreign Office’s wings had been clipped, he stressed, informing the House that FCDO officials would no longer be able to override UK security vetting decisions. The message was abundantly clear: the civil servants have let him and all of us down.
There is no doubt the civil service is utterly dysfunctional and needs drastic reform. If that was not already obvious before now, the Mandelson saga has made it amply clear. We have a set of rules, policies and procedures that enabled the UK’s most senior ambassador to fail vetting conducted by investigatory experts but nonetheless take up the role, and be granted the country’s highest level of security clearance and see all manner of state secrets – secrets that, in the considered judgment of the security professionals, he could not be trusted to see.
Clearly if Olly Robbins was ‘not allowed’ to tell the democratically-elected leader of this country the recommendations of UK Security Vetting, the system is absurd and need reforming.
But to allow the Prime Minister to put all the blame for this scandal at Robbins’s feet is equally absurd. After all, Robbins has implied he was simply following the rules to the letter, in line with the confidentiality of the vetting process. One would have thought Starmer – who loves to pose as Mr Rules and Mr Proper Process – would respect that.
Let us leave aside for a moment the utter lack of curiosity shown by Starmer and his aides about the probing into Mandelson. Leave aside as well the decision to announce Mandelson publicly as our new man in Washington before the vetting had been done, showing a total disregard for the process. Even giving the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt that this was an honest mistake, what it reveals about his judgment is utterly damning. Why, when it was clear to absolutely everyone that Mandelson had significant skeletons in the closet (to put it mildly), did Starmer and his aides push so relentlessly to give him the ambassador job? This was a man whose links with Epstein were well known and who had obvious and inevitable conflicts of interests through Global Counsel, the lobbying firm he co-founded; a firm whose biggest client we now know was linked to the Chinese military. Why did the PM expose himself to all the political risk that Mandelson’s appointment brought? More importantly, why did he expose the country to such national security risk? There were plenty of other perfectly good – even better – candidates for the Washington job, whether political appointees or career diplomats. What does it say about Starmer as a judge of character? What does it say about his ability to weigh up important matters of state and make the right call? What does it say about the relative importance he ascribes to national security versus securing plum jobs for his pals? That is the nub of this scandal.
We do not yet know whether the Prime Minister will survive. Much may depend on what Olly Robbins says this morning when he gives evidence to the Foreign Affairs select committee. But, tragically, perhaps the biggest casualty of this scandal will be the cause of civil service reform – precisely at the time our country is most crying out for it.
We are likely to see mandarins closing ranks, in thinly-veiled disgust at what they see as the shoddy treatment of one of their own. By squandering his political capital in throwing Robbins to the wolves, Starmer has lost the goodwill of those he needs to implement changes to the government machine. Any serious state reform now looks increasingly unlikely while he remains Prime Minister. As Tim Shipman has pointed out, ‘[Starmer] sacked [ex-Cabinet Secretary] Wormald for not doing what he wanted and he sacked Robbins for doing exactly what he wanted’. Civil servants have noticed, with Lord O’Donnell – the former cabinet secretary – writing in the Times that Starmer ‘now faces one of the worst crises in relations between ministers and mandarins of modern times.’ Driving through what the PM had revealed he wanted, and not putting up the sort of obstacles the blob often do, ended up costing Robbins his job. And to save his, Starmer has condemned us to months or even years more of state drift and decline.
Ameer joined the latest Coffee House Shots podcast to discuss the scandal:
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