Why Sir Keir Starmer still can’t move on from the Peter Mandelson mess

Everyone’s cross.

The prime minister’s furious. Whitehall’s angry. Labour MPs are frustrated. But giving a top official, Sir Olly Robbins, the boot has not brought an end to this fiasco, nor to the political blowback for Sir Keir Starmer.

As one party insider suggests in disbelief: “There’s no point Keir saying again and again he’s angry, when that’s exactly how the public feels about him!”

The prime minister’s original decision to give Peter Mandelson the US ambassadorship, one of the best jobs in the land, had risks from the start that could be seen from space. Now we know the former Labour minister didn’t clear security checks, perhaps it was even, in the words of one government source, “absolutely mental” – a disastrous episode of “don’t ask, don’t tell” spreading political poison months on.

First you have to understand, I’m afraid, the labyrinth of Whitehall’s process. As we revealed in September, No 10 was warned about Peter Mandelson’s links with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before giving him the job. Those warnings were in the first government report that checked out the Labour peer’s background, produced by the Cabinet Office’s Propriety Department.

Starmer’s team asked Mandelson three further questions after that report and were satisfied with his answers, although they now believe he misled them.

Step two: crucially after the prime minister had given the former Labour minister the job, there was a security check, known as developed vetting. As we reported in the autumn, that’s a standalone confidential process, which involved an in-person interview, financial checks, and “ought to have been completely forensic”, said one senior figure. To protect confidentiality, the details of those investigations would not have been passed on to No 10 or ministers.