Starmer blames UK foreign office in bid to his save job

LONDON — Keir Starmer said UK Foreign Office officials repeatedly let him down by not disclosing Peter Mandelson had failed his security vetting before being installed as U.S. ambassador, as Britain’s embattled premier sought to limit the damage of the ongoing saga around the appointment.

“It beggars belief that throughout the whole timeline of events, officials in the Foreign Office saw fit to withhold this information from the most senior ministers,” Starmer told the House of Commons in a high-stakes appearance on Monday. Mandelson’s failed vetting “could and should have been shared with me on repeated occasions, and therefore should have been available to this house and ultimately to the British people.”

Starmer is heading for a showdown with the senior official he fired over the saga, former Foreign Office chief Olly Robbins, who approved Mandelson’s security clearances despite the vetting outcome. Robbins is due to speak to Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, a moment of potential danger for the premier if he reveals damaging new details about the appointment.

The renewed questions about his decision to name Mandelson as U.S. envoy in late 2024 have piled fresh pressure on Starmer ahead of a crunch set of local elections on May 7, in which polling suggests the governing Labour Party will suffer heavy losses. If that materializes, Starmer is seen as vulnerable to a leadership challenge, not least because it will be the culmination of a series of crises and policy missteps for the premier.

The prime minister told the chamber that he only found out last Tuesday that the Foreign Office had granted Mandelson clearance against the express advice of UK Security Vetting, the agency in charge of the due diligence. He said the country’s top civil servant at the time of the appointment — then Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald — had also not been told at the time that Mandelson had failed vetting.

The difficulty of Starmer’s situation was laid bare by his own words when he acknowledged that “many members across the house will find these facts to be incredible” — prompting a sarcastic roar from opposition benches.

While Starmer didn’t apologize to MPs for inadvertently misleading it — despite repeatedly telling the chamber that due process was followed in Mandelson’s vetting and appointment — he did apologize for appointing him.

“I should not have appointed Peter Mandelson,” Starmer said to Parliament. “I take responsibility for that decision, and I apologize again to the victims of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who were clearly failed by my decision.” Starmer also said he’d followed the standard process in naming Mandelson to the post before he had been vetted.

Gilts underperformed European and U.S. peers on Monday, with the UK 10-year yield six basis points higher at 4.82%. Longer-dated bonds, which tend to be more sensitive to political and fiscal risks, sold off more slightly than shorter notes.

Opposition Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch attacked Starmer for not updating Parliament sooner about the new revelations concerning Mandelson’s failed security vetting, and said Starmer hadn’t shown enough care with the appointment.

Starmer “is so lacking in curiosity that he chose to ask no questions about the vetting process,” Badenoch said, having provided Starmer sight of her questions in advance and urging them to be posted online. “He asked no questions about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. He asked no questions about the security risk Mandelson posed. Apparently, he didn’t even speak to Peter Mandelson before his appointment.”

Badenoch also asked six questions of the premier that she said she’d taken the “unprecedented step” of giving to him in advance. They included asking him if he accepted now that it was not true to say due process had been followed, and asking him to confirm no one in Number 10 had known of the vetting failure before last Tuesday.

Starmer is likely to care more about how well his statement is received by Labour back benches. Early interventions included Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, who said it appeared that “for certain members of the Prime Minister’s team, getting Peter Mandelson the job was a priority that overrode everything else, and that security considerations were very much second order.”

Left winger John McDonnell, a veteran backbencher, said the episode had “damaged” Labour and urged Starmer to “clear this toxic culture out of our party.” Another backbencher, Sarah Champion, asked if a risk assessment was carried out before Robbins was fired, while Alistair Strathern, asked what the premier was doing to "ensure that in the future it’s our democratic decision makers who are put in the full picture for these crucial judgments.”

Other Labour detractors of the premier were largely confined to the party’s left wing with Members of Parliament including Apsana Begum, Kim Johnson and Richard Burgon all asking critical questions.

The Mandelson scandal has repeatedly surfaced to bring political heat onto the premier since last September, when Bloomberg News revealed the depth of the envoy’s relationship with the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer sacked Mandelson, but further details emerged when the U.S. Department of Justice published millions more files relating to Epstein at the end of January.

The following month, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and his communications director, Tim Allan, quit, prompting long-time Starmer ally and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to call for the premier to go. Starmer survived that when every member of his cabinet publicly declared their support, but ministers have been more reticent since last week, when the Guardian revealed that Mandelson failed vetting by UK agencies but was given security clearances anyway and confirmed as U.S. ambassador.

The House of Commons also in February voted to force the government to release thousands of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment, a process of disclosure that the government has already begun.

In the first set of documents released, it has already emerged that at the time of Mandelson’s appointment, the country’s then top civil servant, Simon Case, had advised Starmer that if he chose to make a political appointment, he should “give us the name of the person you would like to appoint and we will develop a plan for them to acquire the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential conflicts of interest or other issues of which you should be aware before confirming your choice.” Starmer went ahead and said he was appointing Mandelson before the vetting was carried out.

“I want to make clear to the House that for a direct ministerial appointment, it was usual for security vetting to happen after the appointment, but before starting in post,” Starmer told the Commons. “That was the process in place at the time.”

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With assistance from Rose Henderson and Alice Gledhill.

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