Eleven times during his speech on Monday to the House of Commons on the Peter Mandelson scandal, UK prime minister Keir Starmer insisted he “wasn’t told” by officials that his ill-fated pick as Washington ambassador had failed security vetting.
It took one of his old adversaries, former Labour MP Diane Abbott, to home in on the crux of the issue that has, once again, raised questions over Starmer’s ability to keep his job.
“He keeps saying, ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t know’,” said Abbott, twice suspended from the Labour Party by Starmer. “The real question is ‘why didn’t he ask?’”
It isn’t often that Tories cheer for Abbott, an avowed socialist on the left wing of the Labour movement. On Monday they filled the chamber with roars of approval.
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The Labour benches opposite sat in a miserable, stony silence. Physically, they were behind their prime minister. Were they still, politically? That was unclear.
Starmer came to address the UK parliament after it emerged last week in a media report that Mandelson had, unknown to almost everybody, failed his official security vetting for the Washington post following his appointment in December 2024, yet he was still cleared by UK foreign office officials anyway.
Starmer says he only found this out last week, two days after it was revealed by The Guardian. He said he didn’t knowingly mislead the Commons over the issue in the past. On Thursday, he sacked the top civil servant in the foreign office, Olly Robbins, who had cleared Mandelson.
It has yet to be revealed why Mandelson actually failed the vetting – the process is shrouded in secrecy. But in the dining halls and bars around Westminster it is generally believed it may be linked to Mandelson’s past business connections to Russia and China.
Starmer sacked Mandelson as his Washington ambassador last September when papers released in the US revealed the full extent of his links to the sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. A further tranche of Epstein papers in February blew the whole saga up again, leading to the exit of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a former protege of Mandelson’s who had championed his appointment to the US role.
Starmer has been on the back foot ever since. If Monday’s meandering Commons address was his attempt to get back on the front foot, the UK prime minister may be in deeper trouble than he realises.
Starmer repeated his apology to Epstein’s victims and said he was “wrong” to have appointed Mandelson, who was twice ejected from Tony Blair’s cabinets for lying.
Starmer said he found it “staggering” that Robbins could keep from him that Mandelson had failed security vetting, even after the prime minister had said publicly that the vetting process had cleared him.
Robbins, Starmer revealed, had told the UK prime minister that he believed he wasn’t allowed to tell him. The prime minister rejected this.
“It could and should have been shared with me,” he said.
Near the end of his speech, Starmer said he knew that many MPs would find the facts as he was laying them out to be “incredible”. They all laughed heartily at that one – Starmer’s statement, to the ears of many opposition MPs, were indeed hard to believe.
As a sign of how much his stock had fallen, even the mild-mannered Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, called on Starmer to resign: “A prime minister in office, but not in power.”
Another unanswered question was why Robbins cleared Mandelson at all, if he had failed the vetting.
The suggestion from many opposition, and some Labour, MPs, is that it was because Robbins understood Starmer wanted him to be cleared, whatever happened with vetting. If that is ever proven, Starmer will be finished.
He survived his Commons showdown on Monday and now limps on to May’s local elections. For how much longer Starmer stays in post after that is anyone’s guess.
The sacked Robbins gets his say on Tuesday in front of a Westminster committee at 9am.
