Ding ding! Round two – or is it round 22? – of the Mandelson saga was underway in the Foreign Affairs Committee. Sir Olly Robbins was going to give his side of the story.
There was a narrative that the past Tory government was at war with the civil service. In fact, it seems that for all its presentation as a government of sensiblism, Labour are the ones decimating the upper echelons of the Sir Humphrey class. I suspect senior mandarins are diving into doorways every time a bus comes down Whitehall at speed, lest Sir Keir arrive to throw them unceremoniously under it.
Fresh from beneath the wheels of the Number 12 to Dulwich Library was Sir Olly. He was polite, he was put together. He revealed that he knew parts of two texts off by heart – the Civil Service Code and the Book of Common Prayer. As a member of the Prayer Book Society, I should probably declare an interest here: short of adding that he enjoys the Roger Moore Bond films, I’m not sure if Robbins could have said anything more perfectly calculated to endear him to me.
Still, this glimpse of a hinterland alone was refreshing in the Westminster world of brain-dead MPs and scurrying client journalists who believe history began in 1997 and who can quote more Gillian Duffy than they can Geoffrey Chaucer. A shame he didn’t scribble the words of the Nunc Dimittis to Sir Keir in his resignation note: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’.
Robbins’s Assistant Curate-like demeanour was light years away from that of Emily Thornberry. The chair of the committee was loving every minute of it. She was like the cat who got the Jersey, full-fat, megarich, still-warm-from-the-cow cream. She delivered her lines as if she were in an am dram production of The Graduate. ‘We hope you’re going to feel a bit freer to give fuller answers’, she purred at Sir Olly. She delighted in the camp interruption of proceedings, as when she inserted the F-word to correct the transcript of what a rather milksop Lib Dem had tried to bowdlerise as merely a sweary phone call from Morgan McSweeney. She presided with hauteur and visible enjoyment. She might as well have been played by Alastair Sim.
Yet there was steel behind Thornberry’s questioning. Her initial purring to Robbins was a disguise for her, basically, accusing him of being equivocal when he’d been in post and last appeared before the committee. In an absolute first-rate simile, Thornberry described some of Robbins’s past answers thus: ‘It’s a little bit like, you know, saying, “I had to run to work today”, but not saying that you were chased by a bear.’
She routinely tried to get Robbins to explain whether there were further concerns about Mandelson which were not in the public domain. Mandelson was a long term enemy of Thornberry’s, and you know what they say – if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by. Today Thornberry wasn’t just waiting by the river: she was there on a specially constructed pleasure terrace with a triple G&T and a Benson and Hedges in hand.
Robbins’s performance before the committee wasn’t a flashy affair, replete with ‘zingers’. Far more devastating was the simple juxtaposition it drew between a bright and diligent man attempting to do a difficult job, and the Downing Street chimps and yes-men who tried to gerrymander both him and the system into giving the answer they wanted to hear. Every criticism was delivered in irreproachable ‘more in sorrow than anger’ tones. He deftly painted the Prime Minister and his team as unpleasant juveniles, without ever giving the impression of this being his intention.
Yet for all Thornberry’s panto energy and its contrast with Robbins’s quiet dignity, the entire affair was explosive. With each bit of evidence Robbins took a wrecking ball to Sir Keir’s narrative which he had tried to establish yesterday. Downing Street had wanted Mandelson in post ‘as quickly as humanly possible’. As a result there was a ‘dismissive attitude to his vetting process’, Robbins said.
In short, his implication was that No. 10 essentially didn’t think Peter Mandelson needed vetting. This is not only intensely damaging for the Prime Minister but also a sign that he might have lost it completely. There are men with terrifying Cyrillic tattoos who are less obvious candidates for vetting than Peter Mandelson. There are sworn members of the Chinese Communist party who are less obvious candidates for vetting than Peter Mandelson. There are domestic pets which have been run over in suburban side-streets which are in less obvious need of a vet than Peter ‘Multi-Resignations’ Mandelson. Indeed, the only reason one might think that Mandelson wasn’t worth vetting was because he was such an obvious wrong’un that the process would be a foregone conclusion.
He was clearly hoping to inflict the maximum damage on Starmer possible
On the subject of which, Sir Olly revealed that he was in a rather awkward position to rush through Mandelson’s appointment and ‘under constant pressure’ to make the necessary approvals just happen. He declined to name who was applying the pressure, but gave Thornberry enough room to then immediately state, with all the subtlety of a heat-seeking cruise missile, ‘we know that Morgan McSweeney was a protege of Mandelson’, leaving nobody in any doubt about who was meant.
Indeed the whole Harold and Maude-esque two-step between Robbins and Thornberry was a masterclass. And every single second of listening to it would have been like walking over hot coals for a certain Sir Keir Starmer.
Deliciously, and clearly hoping to inflict the maximum damage on Starmer possible, Sir Olly then also revealed that Downing Street wanted to appoint Matthew Doyle, another close friend of a paedo, as an ambassador as well. Where were these people thought to be the best candidates to represent British interests recruited from? Neverland Ranch?
Starmer unambiguously managed to lose round one in the Commons yesterday, as he was laughed at and accused of lying. He will look back on that session as if it were an aromatherapy appointment compared to round two. Robbins and Thornberry between them painted a picture of Starmer as incompetent, deceitful and frankly unpleasant. And they thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Truly, this polite knifing was civil service with a smile.
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