There has been quite enough talk of process. In the past few days, we have heard more about vetting forms, meeting minutes and stultifyingly boring Whitehall bureaucracy than should fairly be inflicted upon the British public.
Yesterday’s Foreign Affairs Committee examination of who said what, where and when ended more to Sir Olly Robbins’s advantage than to the Prime Minister’s. Indeed, somewhat remarkably, Robbins seems to have won most of SW1 around to his cause thanks to his accomplished responses to Emily Thornberry’s questions – who, it should be said, looked to be having the time of her life.
Starmer has come across like a boss from hell, determinedly throwing his team under the bus for trying to implement a terrible decision he himself made
What could easily have been derided as highfalutin circumlocution in the best traditions of Sir Humphrey has instead been widely held up as a masterclass of a demolition job, delivered in a suit and tie. Robbins helped his cause with the odd display of wit (‘it’s nice of the committee to keep thanking me for my time. My diary is wide open’) – not a typical strength of the mandarin breed. But if his performance was met with impressed nods in Westminster it was above all down to the fact that he gave the impression of actually knowing what he was talking about, unlike Starmer who simply likes to talk of what he knows about, irrespective of the question.
Robbins is unlikely to emerge from this unscathed. He could be accused of having lacked common sense in failing to alert No. 10 to the fact that Mandelson had been judged by vetting authorities to be a ‘borderline’ case, with them minded on balance to ‘lean against’. By being keen to please, and wanting to deliver what Starmer and McSweeney had made clear they wanted, Robbins arguably failed to ‘manage upwards’ in not apprising the Prime Minister and his aides to the risks the vetting process had thrown up, even if Robbins and the Foreign Office security team decided these risks could be mitigated and therefore clearance issued.
But that is a relatively mild rebuke as compared with the claim facing Starmer. For Robbins’s central charge – that No. 10 not only piled pressure on the system to get Mandelson into post, but also showed a dismissive attitude toward the entire vetting process – is as damning as it is believable. For a man who wears his mastery of proper process as a badge of honour, this must be a brutal way for Starmer to fail – and potentially fall.
That all being said, process is ultimately the wrong prism to view this sorry saga. To see it only in those terms is to allow Starmer to engage in the sort of procedural obfuscation and bureaucratic stonewalling he revels in. I have written already about the questions this scandal throws up about Starmer’s judgment – which has been, in short, appalling. President Trump yesterday concurred that Mandelson was ‘a really bad pick’. Being admonished like a naughty schoolboy by everyone from his own backbenchers to the leader of the free world, is quite the unravelling for Starmer less than two years on from romping home with a 174-seat majority and Labour’s best election win in over two decades.
Quite how he achieved that victory continues to astound given Starmer’s sheer lack of political acumen that this crisis has demonstrated. By firing Robbins as quickly and as vindictively as he did so, and by his cries in the Commons chamber about ‘unforgiveable’ betrayal at the hands of the civil service, Starmer has come across like a boss from hell, determinedly throwing his team under the bus for trying to implement a terrible decision he himself made. The pile of discarded aides and officials grows ever larger as Starmer continues his search for a team he deems himself able to work with.
One of the challenges of this scandal is the experience of being torn simultaneously between, on the one hand, horror at the amount of unaccountable power held by non-elected mandarins and, on the other, the sense that any half-competent Prime Minister simply need not have ended up in a position of being blindsided in this way. There is something totally ridiculous about the Prime Minister screaming blue murder on account of being kept in the dark about something that he showed no interest in asking about.
If Olly Robbins ends up responsible for the downfall of Starmer, it will be the second Foreign Office permanent under-secretary in just four years to bring down a sitting prime minister. But while there is something instinctively uncomfortable about any official playing such a central role in the toppling of a democratically elected leader, it is hard to feel that Starmer has done anything but bring it upon himself. The end will, I suspect, come not in days but in months. But the Mandelson saga, which will rumble on yet, will leave an impression of ‘jobs for mates’ that Starmer will struggle to shake off, and will surely hasten his demise.
Would Starmer have really blocked Mandelson’s appointment? Ameer joins Tim Shipman to discuss the vetting row, on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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