Sir Keir Starmer has sacked the Foreign Office’s top civil servant, is personally messaging his Labour MPs and clearly trying to come up with some sort of defence after the major news broke that Peter Mandelson, his pick for US ambassador, was appointed despite failing his security vetting.
The problem for Starmer is that none of these measures does anything to address the remaining issue of whether the Prime Minister has repeatedly misled the Commons – the press and public, too – over the latest Mandelson scandal. One that gets to the root of why on earth he was ever appointed in the first place.
“Security vetting, carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise, that gave him clearance for the role.” Those were Starmer’s own words at a press conference. They were, on the basis of yesterday’s reporting showing his failed vetting was overruled, plainly untrue. At best the reasoning could be incompetence, ineptitude, ignorance. At its worst, lies.
In the House of Commons chamber, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch questioned Starmer. At PMQs on 4 February, he asked: “Did the official security vetting he received mention Mandelson’s ongoing relationship with Epstein?”. Starmer’s answer began “yes it did”. Surely then Starmer must have seen the vetting which then means he would have known Mandelson failed.
Downing Street has released a statement insisting that neither the Prime Minister nor any government minister was aware that Mandelson had failed his developed vetting until earlier this week. If true (implausible), it raises alarming questions about the degree to which Number 10 was ignorant of its own government’s most consequential personnel decisions. If false then we are in far more serious territory.
And it is leaning to false. How could Starmer tell Badenoch in the Commons that yes, he knew what the vetting mentioned, if he had never received or seen the vetting.
A letter from the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper last year even wrote of National Security Vetting that while the process may be independent of ministers, they “are not informed of any findings other than the final outcome”. The final outcome, which was that Mandelson failed his vetting.
Opposition leaders have moved quickly. Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of three potential resignation issues: “If he has misled Parliament, as it looks like he has, he should resign. If he has broken the ministerial code, as it looks like he has, he should resign. If he withheld documents by a cover-up from Parliament, he should resign.”
Even if, despite all of this, he is somehow found to not have directly misled the Commons, part of the Ministerial Code requires ministers to provide accurate information to Parliament and “correct any inadvertent errors at the earliest opportunity”. From the recent reporting, the Prime Minister was definitely aware from Tuesday that Mandelson’s vetting had failed and yet not on that day, nor the next day before PMQs, nor the day after that did he think to declare it to Parliament. A failure in itself.
Beyond the immediate headlines, all of this damages the one thing left of the Starmer brand ‘Mr Process’. This is a Prime Minister who built his political identity around the idea of upholding the rule of law and integrity, holding others to account. Week after week, he persisted with Boris Johnson on the argument that ministers who mislead Parliament must face consequences – and resign. Now he faces those same accusations, just as Labour is approaching what one might charitably describe as electoral armageddon at the local elections. ‘The process was followed,’ when it clearly wasn’t, is an excuse most will find inconceivable.
There are now three distinct problems compounding each other. There is the original scandal of the appointment itself – a man with documented links to Jeffrey Epstein appointed as Britain’s top ambassador. There is the months-long insistence by the government that due process was followed when it appears it was not. And there is now the question of what ministers and their advisers knew, and when they knew it.
Mandelson resigned last September. In theory the story should have died with him. Instead, it has mutated into something far more dangerous: a direct challenge to the Prime Minister’s honesty, at exactly the moment he can least afford it. The US ambassador, Downing Street chief of staff, Downing Street head of communications and now permanent under secretary in the Foreign Office have all gone. There’s only really one person left to go.
The Conservatives know better than most that a leader who has lost the trust of colleagues and country rarely recovers it. Labour MPs might want to study that lesson carefully.