Sir Olly and the mitigation of Mandelson

UK politics has been dominated in recent weeks by fallout from the appointment and subsequent sacking of Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to the United States.

Despite the Prime Minister making contradictory statements to Parliament, which means that at least some of those statements must be incorrect, and then refusing to correct the record, Sir Keir Starmer has avoided an investigation by the Privileges Committee, but perhaps only because he ordered all Labour MPs to vote to spare him.

Instead of allowing an examination into his own highly questionable conduct, the Prime Minister sacked Sir Olly Robbins, the civil servant who was head of the Foreign Office until two weeks ago. Robbins was sacked on the grounds – now looking quite absurd – that he had failed to tell the Prime Minister something that he couldn’t possibly have told the PM for the simple reason that Robbins didn’t know it.

Number 10, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons

The story gets worse for supporters of Starmer. But let’s pause there for a moment to unpack the details underlying the summary above.

Before appointing Mandelson to the post of Ambassador, the Prime Minister’s team went through a process of due diligence. The facts they gathered about Mandelson would doubtless have been numerous for someone with such a notorious career behind him. Amongst them were:

• Mandelson had twice been sacked or resigned in disgrace from Tony Blair’s Cabinet (although a subsequent investigation of the second matter held that he had done nothing wrong) before returning to the Cabinet under Gordon Brown.

• Mandelson had been a director of Sistema, a Russian company with links to Putin, and he continued as a director even after the invasion of Ukraine.

• Mandelson had been friends with convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. The extent of the friendship seems not to have been fully uncovered by Starmer’s people, perhaps because it was delegated to two of Mandelson’s friends to make the relevant enquiries.

Nothing uncovered by the due diligence process was seen as an obstacle to Mandelson becoming an ambassador to Trump’s USA. So Mandelson’s appointment was announced, even though he had yet to go through vetting. It’s required for all such appointments.

The vetting process is carried out by UK Security Vetting (UKSV). It is highly confidential. Those being vetted are asked to respond to a wide range of intrusive questions. They cannot be expected to do so unless they are promised confidentiality. So we don’t know what is in the vetting file, but such documents as have been published indicate that the conclusion section of UKSV’s report included ticks in two red boxes, one stating that Mandelson was deemed to be a “high concern” and the other recommending that clearance be denied.

For some appointments, that would be the end of the matter. UKSV’s word is final. But, for Foreign Office appointments, UKSV’s word is only a recommendation. The final decision is taken by the Foreign Office, who – we have been told by Sir Olly – take the view that, in order to be able to appoint to senior roles people who have led interesting lives, it is necessary to accept some degree of risk, with mitigation put in place to manage the risk. Sir Olly has given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that he decided that risk mitigation was the right way forward for Mandelson.

It may seem astonishing that Sir Olly was prepared to override a UKSV assessment of “high concern”, but it’s not nearly so astonishing as the fact that Robbins wasn’t told of the “high concern” assessment. He wasn’t shown UKSV’s report. He was given only an oral summary by a colleague called Ian Collard, who was, at the time, Director of Estates, Security and Network in the Foreign Office. Robbins was told by Collard that UKSV’s conclusion was “borderline”. Robbins further recalls Collard saying that UKSV were “leaning toward recommending that clearance be denied”, a recollection which Collard supports, although he does not recall his precise words.

At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Sir Keir Starmer told Parliament that it was “an error of judgement” warranting instant dismissal that Robbins did not tell Starmer that “UKSV recommended with red flags that clearance should be denied and there was high concern”. But if that was Starmer’s view, he seems to have sacked the wrong man. As explained above, Robbins was in the dark about the red flags, just as much as Starmer. If anyone deserved the sack, surely it was Collard?

Well, no, actually. That is because we now know that Collard wasn’t told either. In a letter sent by the current (acting) head of the Foreign Office to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 27 April 2026, it is stated very clearly that Collard did not see UKSV’s report: “He was briefed orally by his team.” He did not see the report until after Mandelson had been sacked, many months later.

So, when Sir Olly Robbins made the ultimate decision to grant Mandelson “developed vetting” status, he did so on the basis of an oral briefing from Ian Collard, who was, himself, relying on an oral briefing from his team. Neither of them knew that the vetting officer(s) had concluded “high concern”. And neither of them knew that the officer(s) had recommended against granting clearance. They knew only that, in Sir Olly’s words, UKSV was “leaning towards ... denial”.

That is a conclusion that most commentators, and certainly the Prime Minister, seem to regard as incompatible with “borderline”. But the Foreign Office letter records that, when Collard looked back at the document in September 2025, he saw that the final case assessment did, in fact, include: “Overall, I believe that this is a very borderline case” in addition to “high concern”.

Clearly, in the mind of the report writer, “high concern” was not to be equated with “clear fail”. It was possible to be “high concern” and yet “very borderline”.

To those unfamiliar with risk management, the two notions may seem incompatible. But it seems that, in the language used by UKSV, “high concern” simply denotes something along the lines of “needs careful mitigation”.

The vetting of Mandelson has attracted the attention of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Hence, the evidence from Sir Olly Robbins and the letter from the Foreign Office, both mentioned above. The Committee has yet to conclude on the matter - the behaviour of the Foreign Office, not behaviour of the Prime Minister - but its Chair, Dame Emily Thornberry, told ITV’s Peston programme last night that Starmer was right to sack Robbins because he didn’t keep any records of the decision to give vetting clearance.

If failure to keep records is a sacking offence, it is worth noting the Government’s own failure to keep any records about its decision to give the role to Mandelson (ie the decision they announced prior to his vetting). This was one of the criticisms that the Conservative Shadow Cabinet Office Minister laid against the Government (ministers, not the civil servants) just one day earlier during the Parliamentary debate into whether the accuracy of the Prime Minister’s account of these matters warranted investigation by the Privileges Committee.

Parliament has now been prorogued until 12 May. For the time being, the last main parliamentary speech on this topic was that of Darren Jones MP, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, to whom fell the task of closing the debate on Tuesday, arguing against the motion to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee.

Challenged whether he was willing to repeat to the House the statements made by the Prime Minister which the Opposition argues were not correct and which he was claiming were totally justified, Jones ducked and weaved. Specifically, when asked to repeat Starmer’s claim that “no pressure whatsoever” was put on the Foreign Office to give Mandelson clearance, Jones repeated the words, but prefaced them with “the Prime Minister said”.

It was plain for all to see that he wasn’t prepared to risk making the statement in his own name. The same was the case for the other statements that have been challenged. One can only infer that he saw it as too high a risk for which there were no mitigations in place.

Update 5 May 2026: Yesterday, Martin Stanley provided a senior civil servant’s take on this topic, in which he includes a specific response to the astonishment that I articulated above regarding the reliance placed by Robbins and Collard on briefings, without seeing the actual report written by UKSV, when the two of them created the relevant mitigations to enable clearance to be given. Definitely worth a read.