7 takeaways from Olly Robbins’ evidence on the Peter Mandelson vetting saga

LONDON — The “Blob” can bite back, it turns out.

Days after Keir Starmer sacked him as the Foreign Office’s top civil servant, Olly Robbins, spoke for the first time Tuesday about a row over the vetting of Peter Mandelson to be Britain’s ambassador to the U.S.

The row centers on Robbins’ decision to unilaterally grant Mandelson full “developed vetting,” a security clearance, despite a vetting officer recommending it should be denied. Starmer sacked Robbins last Thursday for not telling him of the recommendation.

But Robbins hit back, accusing the government of a “generally dismissive attitude” toward the entire vetting process as time ticked down to Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. The risks were “well known and had been made clear to the Prime Minister,” he argued.

The testimony creates yet another moment of political danger for Starmer, who is battling the discontent of voters and his own MPs over the Mandelson appointment — despite insisting that it was Robbins, not him, in the wrong.

The details played out over two and a half hours in a stuffy room hosting the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee, where Robbins drank his way through three 750ml bottles of water and ranged from drama, to jokes, to tedious arguments over process.

POLITICO rounds up the main takeaways.

1. Robbins threw No. 10 under the bus

Robbins waxed lyrical about due process and insisted: “I’m not here to attack the prime minister.” 

Yet he had a stream of revelations that he knew would damage the PM — including a pre-planned bombshell. Robbins revealed people in No. 10 had wanted to secure a plum “head of mission” diplomatic job for Starmer’s then-Director of Communications, Matthew Doyle. 

This is particularly wounding for Starmer because Doyle, like Mandelson, has since been embroiled in a scandal over his past association with a pedophile. (Mandelson resigned over the depth of his friendship with the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in September, while Doyle campaigned in 2017 for a friend who had been charged with child sex offenses, and was later convicted.)

It was in March 2025, when Robbins was making large numbers of career civil servants redundant in a restructure. He told MPs he was “under strict instruction” from No. 10’s private office not to discuss the offer with then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy. “I felt quite uncomfortable about it and I kept giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the office, and was hard for me personally to defend,” he added.

“I don’t know what the origin of the suggestion was, and I don’t know who exactly was behind it or how serious it was,” he went on.

David Lammy speaks to reporters before a “Meeting in Defence of Democracy”, a meeting of leftist leaders seeking to rally against the threat to democracy from the far right in Barcelona on April 18, 2026. | Oscar Del Pozo/AFP via Getty Images

Doyle said after Robbins’ testimony that he had been unaware of any such discussion. “I have never sought any Head of Mission, Ambassador or any equivalent leadership-type posting,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “I was never aware of anyone speaking to the FCDO about such a role for me. My desire after leaving No10 was to stay in UK politics.”

Robbins aimed several other jibes at the PM, albeit in diplomatic language. He sought to correct Starmer’s insistence that Mandelson “failed” vetting, saying it was not that binary. “Apologies, chair, but others have [said it],” said Robbins pointedly.

He appeared to insinuate that someone in No. 10 leaked the vetting row to a newspaper. “The first I heard of this deep concern and briefing of it to the prime minister was only really hours before it appeared in The Guardian,” he said, with pursed lips.

And he said the leak itself was a “grievous breach of national security” that should trigger prosecutions and would mean the entire process of security vetting would never be the same. “This system does not work if candidates for it don’t understand that this is an entirely different category of protection … that trust, once gone, cannot be got back.”

2. Officials ‘thought there was no need’ to vet Mandelson

Robbins put his most damaging claim in his first paragraph — that parts of Starmer’s operation felt there was no need to give Mandelson security vetting at all. 

This is a direct challenge to Starmer, who has claimed he would not have given Mandelson the job if he had known a vetting officer recommended he should be denied clearance.

“A position taken from the Cabinet Office was that there was no need to vet Mandelson; he was a member of the House of Lords, he was a privy counsellor,” said Robbins. “In the end, the [Foreign Office] insisted and put its foot down. I understand my predecessor had to be very firm in person, but that was a live debate at the point of announcement.”

Robbins did not produce any evidence for his claim, and it is unlikely he will be able to do so. He only started his job as Foreign Office permanent under secretary — its top civil servant — in January 2025, midway through the Mandelson appointment process. 

But Robbins made a point of suggesting Starmer would have “looked at risks around Mandelson” before choosing him and made a “risk judgment that his political skills and nous in Washington [are] just what this country needs at this time. And he decided there’s not much more that any process can tell me ahead of me making this announcement.”

Strip away the processology, and this is Robbins endorsing critics’ core attack on Starmer — that the PM knew Mandelson carried risks and decided to appoint him anyway.

3. ‘Constant pressure’ from Downing Street

Appointing Mandelson — a veteran not just of Labour but of the party’s centrist tribe — was always unusual because British diplomats are usually politically-neutral employees of the diplomatic service.

Robbins indicated that politics ran through the whole process. He told MPs there were “very frequent” phone calls along the lines of “has this been delivered yet.” He added: “Throughout January [2025], my office, the foreign secretary’s office, were under constant pressure. There was an atmosphere of constant chasing.”

Olly Robbins spotted leaving Downing street in March, 2019. | Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

Calls took place between private offices, staffed by civil servants, and Robbins said he did not know who directed them. But his insinuation was clear. Robbins noted that Starmer’s then-chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was close to Mandelson.

Robbins did confirm that he never received a direct call about the Mandelson appointment from any No. 10 political aides.

He also declined to engage with claims, raised at the hearing by committee chair Emily Thornberry, that McSweeney phoned Robbins’ predecessor Philip Barton and said words to the effect of: “Just fucking approve it.” 

One government official told POLITICO they were informed of such a conversation between McSweeney and Barton in late 2024. However, McSweeney told POLITICO he did not call Philip Barton directly or swear at him. Barton declined to comment. 

While saying he did not remember Barton using those words, Robbins said Barton’s handover “contributed to my strong sense that there was an atmosphere of pressure and a certain dismissiveness about this [developed vetting] process.” 

4. But Robbins insists he was acting alone

It would be easy to lose a key point — that Robbins insists he has no regrets about granting security clearance to Mandelson, and would do it again regardless of pressure.

He did not tell No. 10 about the UKSV recommendation, believing the confidentiality of the process forbade him from doing so, and discussed it only in a meeting with the Foreign Office’s security chief Ian Collard.

He didn’t seek legal advice about whether he could tell the PM — which is what Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo and Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary Cat Little did when the vetting recommendation landed on their desks last month.

In this sense, Robbins’ testimony is supremely helpful to No. 10. Downing Street has vehemently denied claims by Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch that Starmer “lied” about what he knew, and accusations by Labour MPs that Starmer is too incurious. This shows the testimonies align; the difference is in why Robbins behaved the way he did.

Robbins said he was following a well-worn process. “I didn’t need legal advice. It’s set out in guidance, it’s set out in parliament,” he said. Starmer told MPs on Monday that Robbins’ behavior “beggars belief.”

Robbins declined to say if the PM asked him why he made his decision.

5. Mandelson had access to top-secret files

At the heart of all this are questions about who can view top-secret files inside government.

U.S. President Donald Trump (left) and Peter Mandelson address reporters in the Oval Office at the White House in May 2025, in Washington. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Robbins confirmed Mandelson had access to the most secret intelligence files after the vetting process.

In reality, it’s complicated. Once a person has “developed vetting” clearance, there is no standalone vetting process to view all files classified under the “STRAP” system. Instead, there is a case-by-case risk analysis in which vetted people are shown individual files on a need-to-know basis.

Robbins said Mandelson’s appointment was not rushed — it was merely moved to the “top of the queue” — and he did not remember the intelligence services raising any concerns about the ambassador’s access. 

He added the Foreign Office security department believed the highest-concern risks “could be managed and/or mitigated,” and that he himself had “many discussions” with Mandelson about how to manage his shareholding in Global Counsel, the lobbying firm he co-founded. 

In other words, argued Robbins, the system worked as intended.

6. There are still many grey areas

Much of the vetting saga has been lost in arguments about process and grey areas, and Robbins’ hearing was no exception.

A baffling revelation about the detail, though, was that even Robbins himself did not see a full written recommendation on Mandelson’s vetting.

Instead, he said the recommendation was relayed to him in an oral briefing in which he was told it was a “borderline case,” and that officers were merely “leaning” against recommending Mandelson’s clearance. 

No. 10 has since seen a document from UK Security Vetting that it claims says something different — definitively stating Mandelson should be denied clearance.

This suggests there are problems with clear communication in the secretive vetting system that may need to be cleared up.

There continue to be other areas of dispute over the detail between Robbins and No. 10.

Robbins told MPs he regretted that the vetting was not carried out before Mandelson was announced — siding with Simon Case, the former cabinet secretary, who told Starmer similar during the process. But Starmer’s allies have indicated that Robbins is changing his tune here, given he told MPs in November that it is “normally the case” for external appointments to happen subject to future vetting.

7. But … none of this is actually to do with Epstein

Zoom out, and for many Labour MPs, the big picture here remains that Starmer appointed the friend of a convicted pedophile (Epstein) despite knowing they had a long-standing relationship.

Yes, Mandelson had known links to China through his business dealings, but that has never been the political dynamite of the story within the Labour Party.

So it is supremely ironic that this specific vetting row … has nothing to do with Epstein.

Robbins revealed very little about what the vetting file said, but did say: “I was told that the risks did not relate to Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.”

Esther Webber contributed reporting.