It is one thing to glimpse the inner workings of government during extraordinary times. But it is another, and many times more telling, to gain a glimpse of the workings of government at – relatively – ordinary moments. This is what the first tranche of released papers relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as HM ambassador to the United States has provided, and it should provide more food for thought than it probably will.
The old boys’ network may have died a death but there are plenty of ways to elevate people into high-paying or prominent positions on the public payroll
Take, for a start and most obviously, the way that top appointments are made. For all that Sir Keir Starmer assured the House of Commons that ‘full due process’ had been followed, it clearly had not – or rather, it depends on what ‘full due process’ really means. It seems the approximate form had been followed, but not as it would apply to ordinary mortals, or even rank and file civil servants. Standard processes were accelerated, abbreviated, or ignored. A sort of due diligence was conducted but then its findings were largely ignored.
What this confirms is what almost anyone who has had anything to do with the workings of power in this country knows: there are rules for some and not others. The old boys’ network may have died a death – though some would contest that – but there are plenty of ways to elevate people into high-paying or prominent positions on the public payroll. The government (any government) is not such a stickler for formality and rigorous selection as it would have you believe.
Nor should the government, or anyone else, be allowed to get away with suggesting that the way Mandelson’s appointment was handled was a one-off, due to the unusual nature of the position – although the uniqueness of this job meant that in some respects it was. The point is that this is how appointments are made when a key individual has already made his or her choice.
Such shortcutting should not be tolerated for any top public sector job. But it should be totally out of the question where, as here, security vetting is concerned. Yet the released papers suggest this aspect is as flexible as pretty much everything else. It would appear that Mandelson received access to the highly classified material he would be privy to as ambassador in Washington well before his – somewhat cursory – vetting was complete. Might the intelligence services – ours and those of the US – not have something to say about this? Maybe, but security doubtless requires that we will never know.
In what passes for the British system, personal networks too often trump all, as is seen time and again. How else could someone such as the Australian business mogul, Lex Greensill, penetrate the inner sanctum of UK power, other than by virtue of an existing personal relationship with the then head of the civil service? And how did such an unimpressive and incurious individual as Paula Vennells (once CBE) become CEO of the Post Office – in which she remained oblivious to the Horizon scandal?
I name but two people here, whose appointments led to scandals that reflected as poorly on government as on them, but went unscrutinised until it was too late, in part or wholly because they knew the right people. Quizzing BBC bosses after the most recent resignations – following the Panorama programme’s splicing of a Trump speech and questions about its bias when reporting on the Middle East – one MP asked a BBC board member not only how he got his job, but how he had learned of the opening. These are questions that should be asked of everyone in prominent public positions. The so-called ‘revolving door’ between government and business that applies especially, but not only, to the defence sector, offers more examples of the importance of word of mouth and the selective application of the rules.
Another conclusion to be drawn applies to culture and language. The Mandelson papers show that several senior officials urged caution about the appointment. They included the National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Philip Barton, and the outgoing ambassador in Washington, Dame Karen Pierce. But they did this, as far as the documents show, in their own language of nudges and hints. Powell described the process as ‘weirdly rushed’ and ‘unusual’. He approached Starmer’s then chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, with his misgivings, which apparently resulted in ‘political conversations around this.’ Barton had ‘reservations about the appointment’.
Now maybe there are undisclosed messages that testify to more forthright views, but maybe not. In the civil service, and especially in the Foreign Office, there is a culture of understatement – the sort that dubs an outrage ‘unhelpful’ – which perhaps helped Starmer to dismiss the critiques of Mandelson more readily than he should have done. Mandelson-backers may also have harboured a suspicion that the warnings from the Foreign Office could reflect resentment on the part of an institution that was watching a prized appointment slip out of its orbit.
Here it is worth recalling the prelude to the appointment of Dame Antonia Romeo as head of the civil service, and the public objections raised, when her name was first canvassed, by her one-time senior at the Foreign Office. He insisted that he was speaking out only because the powers that be had refused to hear his objections in the formally prescribed way. Her supporters, on the other hand, talked of envy, resentment and misogyny. But how punctiliously would the procedures have been followed in that appointment, without such public interventions?
Speaking of the head of the civil service, let’s cast a glance towards her predecessor. Sir Christopher Wormald – like Mandelson, another personal appointee of the Prime Minister, albeit from inside the system. With Mandelson, public wrath has – inevitably perhaps – settled on his £75,000 pay-off. Compare this, though, with the settlement, many times higher, that was awarded to Wormald, who was essentially sacked for unsatisfactory performance and who will receive his gold-plated pension on top. By comparison, Mandelson’s pay-off looks positively parsimonious. Is it not time to re-examine pay-offs at the top of the public sector more broadly?
When all is said and done, of course, the buck stops with the Prime Minister, as he finally accepted this week, when he said: ‘It was me that made a mistake, and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of Epstein.’ The Prime Minister must also shoulder much of the blame if the appointments and vetting processes were little more than a formality (as they were), if he disregarded advice from those better-informed (however cryptic that advice may have been), and if he failed to understand, as he clearly did, the toxic nature of almost any association with Jeffrey Epstein.
The appointment of Mandelson to Washington should therefore be added to Starmer’s record of truly abysmal judgements when recruiting senior members of his team. But that is not quite the whole story. Mandelson’s appointment was also facilitated by particular characteristics of the UK’s political and government system, and the informal byways by which unsuitable and barely competent individuals can reach the top.
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