A fog of information has descended over politics.
With regards to the specific case of Sir Keir Starmer’s appointment of Peter Mandelson to be British Ambassador to the United States it is particularly thick.
It also means there is lower visibility of other issues that are also worthy of our attention but there’s very little chance of that in the next 48 hours.
There are some foundational points, however, that should help cut through this fog and seem too easily forgotten depending on who is being defended and who is being criticised.
Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney were determined to make a political appointment to the role of ambassador to the US despite there being a good field of alternatives, one of whom Christian Turner is now in the role and one who’d been doing it and could have done it a bit longer, and might in a crowning irony end up being the Permanent Secretary in the FCDO instead. There were others.
Political appointment’s to diplomatic roles are rare but not impossible. Blair made Paul Boateng High Commisioner to South Africa, Theresa May’s PPS George Hollingbery was our ambassador to Cuba. However it is not that common and the PM does not make the appointment. However badly a PM might want it or insist upon it, it is a Foreign Secretary that makes the appointment. This is important because David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary at the time has told the Guardian that Keir Starmer would never have made the appointment if he’d known Mandelson had “failed vetting”.
Except that Keir Starmer did just that. He himself announced it, before the vetting process had concluded.
Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney were well aware despite all that has subsequently come to light that Mandelson was a highly controversial choice. Not just a controversial choice for a role that had other good contenders but further that the role was one of, if not the highest and most important diplomatic posts the country has, and that Mandelson had, well before Labour even came to power, a chequered history that had cost him his job in Government, twice.
It’s remarkable that anyone at all thought vetting, necessary to take on this civil service position, though not conducted on Ministers, would be easy for someone with the nickname “The Prince of Darkness”. His relationship with modern time’s most prolific paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was known. His business dealings with China were known via his former company Global Council. And his relationship with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was known.
I’ve been through DV. It’s not a lovely experience but a necessary one. They are very thorough. Had I gone in with all of the above in my wake, I’d have expected the process to have had a fifty-fifty chance at best of clearance. DV is not an investigation of wrong doing but an assessment of risk. It spans anything and everything that might make one a security risk, or vulnerable to those who’d want access to that information.
We now know that Mandelson was such a risk. He’d previously shared emailed information with Epstein of all people shortly after discussions in Cabinet. It wasn’t secret, it might have been deemed sensitive.
We now know that Sir Oliver Robbins, as, at the time, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, had the decision whether or not to grant clearance, notwithstanding the red flags raised by the process. Whilst it is true that one doesn’t exactly ‘fail’ vetting, Robbins decided that mitigations could be put in place to manage Mandelson as Ambassador with DV clearance.
Right, so here’s where today and tomorrow become important.
In my time as senior adviser to a Foreign Secretary, Sir James Cleverly MP, political appointments came up three times. One was a wild idea in a conversation that sounded smart until we spent five minutes looking at the downsides and abandoned it almost immediately. The second was an MP who requested it, and we very quickly explained it was a non-starter, and the third we pushed forward. Labour blocked it as soon as they came in.
In the third case it was, correctly, explained to the Foreign Secretary that given it is their appointment, that should said appointment prove negative reputationally or professionally the ‘risk’ was owned by the Minister. Not by the civil service.
It is, truly unbelievable, that in the circumstances of the appointment of Peter Mandelson to the post of ambassador, neither the advisers to David Lammy, or his successor Yvette Cooper, nor a single individual in such a role in Downing Street wanted any kind of reassurance or indication, in order to protect their boss, and thereby their own jobs, that there were no issues that they should know about.
Sir Oliver Robbins declared at a select Committee hearing, sat alongside former Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald, that the appointment was made by Ministers, and yet now, his interpretation of ‘the rules’ was such that he took full own ownership of the risk by saying he was not allowed to reveal the details of the vetting process.
Well not strictly speaking: the detail is secret. The result should not have been.
Here’s where all the recent fog simply smothers my own experience.
Myself, Nick Timothy, Dominic Cummings, a friend with a senior military background, and other former SpAds have related occasions when we were told somebody had not cleared DV. And indeed were often given a vague reason as to why. So these rules seem not to have been rigorously applied. I myself have sought within the FCDO the sort of reassurance that should have happened around Mandelson. The request between two senior people with the same level of clearance would be along these lines:
“You are aware my boss, and yours, is about to speak to Parliament on this issue, and then go onto the media. We plan to say it was all above board, he went through the process to the letter of the rules, and there is nothing to see here, right? Can you look me in the eye and indicate whether that is accurate, or can you warn me of any issues that you have with this being said publicly. If you are not allowed to tell me, then is it not something you can tell the Foreign Secretary, and do you want me to facilitate that, quickly?”
This is neither unusual nor irresponsible. In fact it is doing your job. To look after the interests of your boss but also the integrity of the process. That it would seem nobody at all in a similar position to mine, but within the Labour operation, did so, frankly astonishes me. Or maybe they did?
And integrity is a word we’ve heard a lot about. Starmer is a man of integrity. The problem is, and I think he profoundly views himself this way, it blinds him. He practices a sort of circular logic. I am a man of integrity. Ergo I cannot make a decision that is wrong or flawed, because men of integrity wouldn’t do that. It stems from the self-defeating delusion that Labour has, that they are intrinsically ‘the good guys and the grown ups’. It’s a fatal flaw.
And would this were a one off.
But the ‘didn’t see, nobody told me, an official did all of this without my knowledge’ is a pattern. It was exactly the excuse for the collapse of the China spy trial just before the PM headed to China for what he hoped would be a big deal.
There are only two outcomes for Starmer. Either he is lying, or he is negligent and incompetent.
Is the cost of living crisis, the fallout of war (which by the way he is not ‘leading the response’ to, nor kept us ‘out of’) our ‘corrosive complacency’ about defence spending more important work for the UK Government, yes. Matthew Syed in the Times, was sort of right about that but this is not a one off problem
The reason this matters, and Kemi Badenoch is right to push so hard on it, is that it goes to the heart of the decision making, quality control, fact checking, and judgement within this Labour administration.
If “I didn’t know they didn’t tell me” is the defence on this, and other previous incidents, despite an almost mind boggling lack of curiosity over the consequences, then what does that say about the thinking in Downing Street on those more important issues. That’s the point.
Just as it wasn’t the breaking of Covid Rules that brought down Boris, despite Starmer and his team’s every effort to make it so, it was something else. It may be that no smoking gun exists, and this whole sorry Mandelson saga does not bring Starmer’s premiership to an end. It might just be the horrors for him of May 7th.
Either way Mandelson for Starmer, the last man standing in the bloodletting since it all blew up, has gone from Prince of Darkness to Banquo’s Ghost.