How one sentence shows the Mandelson scandal has become more serious for Keir Starmer

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It’s safe to say that an hour-and-a-half hearing from a former civil servant before a parliamentary committee rarely gets the blood pumping.

Fair play, then, to recently sacked Foreign Office big cheese Sir Olly Robbins, who managed the extraordinary feat of making some actual news when he appeared in front of Dame Emily Thornberry and friends on Tuesday.

There’s one specific passage from Robbins’ evidence which does a better job of capturing the wide-angle view of the Mandelson fiasco than all the quibbling over process.

Asked if he had any regrets from the whole affair, he told the committee: ‘I regret that this [vetting] process was not done before announcement. I regret that the due diligence process – which threw up, as I understand it, serious reputational risks – didn’t colour the Prime Minister’s judgment in making the appointment. There’s quite a lot about this situation over the past year and a half that I regret.’

It was the second sentence there that caught my attention. It’s dripping in civil service-speak, but it essentially translates to this:

‘I’m sorry Sir Keir Starmer didn’t listen to all the people urging him to rethink appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.’

The Prime Minister was not told that the UK’s security vetting agency had recommended against granting Mandelson developed vetting – that’s a fact everyone seems to agree on.

But all the focus on what Starmer wasn’t told, and the (allegedly sidelined) role that vetting played in the appointment process, has eclipsed something even more urgent: what Starmer was told.

As Robbins said in his committee appearance, a due diligence report was compiled for the PM ahead of the appointment. You can actually read it online – it was released as part of the so-called ‘Mandelson files’ last month.

This is like a far less intensive version of vetting which largely relies on facts that are in the public domain. And it lists reputational risk after reputational risk, from his controversies under New Labour to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Starmer knew all of that, and appointed him anyway. Why?

There’s a very simple answer: the PM didn’t ignore these issues, he (or more accurately, his advisors) picked Mandelson because of them.

No 10 knew that Washington under Trump 2.0 would be unconventional, and decided they needed an unconventional ambassador to deal with it.

Someone who understood the thirst for wealth and power; who was familiar with what might generously be called the seedier side of politics; and who could stomach toadying to people with a reputation for being obnoxious.

In short, they chose a member of what’s become known as the Epstein class to deal with another member of the Epstein class. It was a big risk, but the nature of risk changes in a situation like that.

Unfortunately, while Donald Trump’s political identity is a maverick, Starmer is a stickler for the rules. When it all inevitably came crashing down, he stood to suffer the most – and that’s certainly happening now.

The PM’s insistence that he never would have appointed Mandelson if he’d known about the vetting issues represents his final desperate bid to grip on to that identity. But the painful truth is all too clear.

He decided to take a big risk once, and now he faces losing everything.

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