Two knights of the realm have in recent days revived the ancient sport of jousting. Sir Keir Starmer threw down a challenge to Sir Oliver Robbins, whom he accused of a disgraceful failure to pass on warnings about Lord Mandelson’s unsuitability for the post of Ambassador to the United States.
Sir Keir betrayed a certain lack of chivalry by throwing Sir Oliver under a bus, which is not how one knight should treat another.
On Tuesday morning, Sir Oliver emerged from under the bus, bruised but not flattened, to answer questions from Dame Emily Thornberry and the rest of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about this sorry affair.
According to Sir Oliver, Sir Keir was all along determined to make Lord Mandelson our man in Washington, and got the Cabinet Office to carry out a “due diligence report” which said this was fine.
Downing Street, Sir Oliver testified, took “a generally dismissive attitude” to the idea of security vetting for Lord Mandelson: it suggested this was not required for someone who was a member of the Privy Council and the House of Lords.
Throughout January 2025, Sir Oliver said, the Foreign Office, where he only started as Permanent Under-Secretary on 20th January, was “under constant pressure” from Downing Street to rush through Lord Mandelson’s appointment, to which the Prime Minister gave final assent before the security vetting which had nevertheless been commissioned by the Foreign Office had been carried out.
On 29th January 2025 Sir Oliver was told in an oral briefing that the report of the vetting had classified Lord Mandelson as “a borderline case”, which sounds like the title of a novel by Graham Greene, and was “leaning towards recommending that clearance be denied”.
Dame Emily reminded Sir Oliver that the Civil Service Code says officials “must not ignore inconvenient facts”.
Sir Oliver replied that “I could recite the Code to you, along with probably the Book of Common Prayer it’s one of two things I can hold in my memory”.
Prayer Book Anglicans confess at Morning and Evening Prayer:
“We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts… We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”
Sir Oliver speaks the Anglican language of compromise and humility. Sometimes he may have been too willing to compromise, as when he was Theresa May’s Brexit negotiator, or tolerated Mandelson’s appointment to Washington.
But think of the outcry there would have been if he, an unelected official, had sought on unspecified security grounds to quash that appointment.
Sir Oliver was trying, while respecting the rules, to be helpful, and to avoid throwing his weight around. His reward was to be kicked in the teeth.
Sir Keir talks like a prig. At heart he may be a decent man, but under attack he becomes intolerably self-righteous.
Human rights law, in the practice of which he was formed, is one long appeal to a universal morality of recent invention – and as Sir Noel Malcolm has pointed out, of non-existent philosophical foundation – which is held to take priority over the common law, shaped over centuries to local circumstance.
How the prig loves to believe that he (the prig is almost always he) has a higher understanding than the vulgar herd with its prejudices, profanities and elections.
The prig is always in earnest and regards jokes with suspicion, for as George Orwell remarked, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
When Starmer said on Monday, while striving to justify his conduct in the Mandelson affair, “I know many members across the House will find these facts to be incredible,” he was greeted with a roar of laughter, having by accident told a joke.
How he tries to coerce our approval, by demonstrating that as Prime Minister he has with unwearying self-righteousness upheld the rules which lesser men break.
Our history offers examples of successful prigs. Gladstone, in the course of his titanic career, was always able to demonstrate not only to his own satisfaction but to the delight of his supporters that he was in the right.
One of Gladstone’s opponents, the MP and journalist Henry Labouchere, said that while he had no objection to Gladstone’s habit of concealing the ace of trumps up his sleeve, he did object to his repeated claim that it had been put there by Almighty God.
Sir Keir strikes moral attitudes unsupported by Almighty God. To fill this spiritual void we get appeals to recently drafted principles, rules and codes of conduct which are supposed to enshrine the higher liberalism, but which actually stand as much in need of interpretation as any other code.
Mankind is not perfectible, and the politician is usually obliged, in the absence of a perfect solution, to choose the lesser of two evils.
Starmer declined to explain on Monday why he was so set on sending Mandelson to Washington. It is no longer the done thing to express admiration for Mandelson’s long experience and high abilities. Nor could the Prime Minister suggest it might be an advantage to have an ambassador who moves in the same social circles as the President.
Nor was it expedient to say he was sending Mandelson to Pennsylvania Avenue as a just reward for services rendered during Sir Keir’s meteoric ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party and the prime ministership.
The Seven Principles of Public Life, known also as the Nolan Principles – selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership, in case you happen not to have these at your fingertips – lay down that “holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest”.
But the main resource of every Prime Minister since Sir Robert Walpole has been patronage. The loyalty of one’s followers is bought, or rewarded, by conferring coveted jobs on them.
There are over a hundred ministerial offices to fill, and one may note also the headlong creation of peers, privy councillors, knights and dames.
Sir Keir the prig would never dream of being candid with us about this. Nor will he stop handing out such baubles in whatever time remains to him.
Sir Oliver the upright official revealed in his evidence that the Prime Minister’s office inquired in vain about an ambassadorship for Matthew Doyle, a former Downing Street Director of Communications to whom with our customary ruthlessness (not one of the Nolan Principles) the adjective “disgraced” is nowadays attached.
The country can only take so much priggishness. Most people now feel Sir Keir has delighted us long enough.