Starmer pleading ignorance over Mandelson won’t wash. Those who want him out are fired up again

Parliamentary dramas don’t come much more compelling than this. Sir Keir Starmer will tomorrow make the most personally consequential statement to the Commons of his time as prime minister. If he is to hang on to the job, he will have to formally apologise for misleading MPs and the public about the Mandelson scandal. Contrition will need to feel authentic. “Body language will be important,” remarks one cabinet minister. And he will need to be completely convincing that he didn’t knowingly tell untruths. It was deliberate lying over Partygate that undid Boris Johnson. MPs have to judge whether or not Sir Keir is guilty of the same crime against their rules.

There’s no doubt that the prime minister did mislead. At a news conference in Hastings in February, he declared there was “security vetting carried out independently by the security services, which is an intensive exercise that gave him [Mandelson] clearance for the role”. He repeatedly told the Commons that “full due process was followed”. Everyone reasonably took this to mean that Mandelson had been approved by the vetting process.

In the latest gobsmacking twist to this farrago, we now know that the opposite was the case. UK Security Vetting, the division of the Cabinet Office responsible for invigilating public appointments, hadn’t given the green light to Mandelson. They’d red-flagged him. Why they did so is an intriguing mystery. This predates the release of a tranche of the Epstein files which indicate that Mandelson, who denies wrongdoing, leaked government secrets to the paedophile financier during his time in cabinet, the revelation that led to him being charged with misconduct in public office.

Perhaps the people vetting were troubled by the friendship with the American millionaire that continued after Epstein’s first conviction for child sex offences. Perhaps their central concern was Mandelson’s business dealings with Russian or Chinese interests. We do not yet know. What we do know is that the Foreign Office then took the remarkable decision to set aside the warnings and give him security clearance anyway. Even more incredibly, if we are to believe Sir Keir’s account, no one bothered to inform the prime minister, a failure he calls “staggering” and “unforgivable”.

On the face of it, this is preposterous. After a deep background dive, the security vetters conclude Mandelson is unfit to occupy the juiciest post in the diplomatic corps, a role with access to extremely sensitive material. The Foreign Office gives him the OK regardless. And no one tells the bloke who is supposed to be running the country!

Is this remotely believable? Sir Keir needs it to be so because the crux of his defence is that he misled parliament because he was misled himself. Weirdly, it is kind of plausible that the first he heard about it was last week. Those of us who delve into the inner workings of Starmerland often find the centre of it occupied by a bizarrely detached prime minister. He can be extraordinarily uncurious about a lot of the things that go on inside his government. He is hugely reluctant to arbitrate when ministers are warring with each other over policy or personnel, even though you might think that to be a core function of his job.

Insiders report that he hates it when people bring him problems. We already knew that he signed off on sending Mandelson to Washington, a highly contentious posting to a crucial position at a critical time, without taking the trouble to interview him beforehand. He is also a prime minister who doesn’t like to be confronted with painful decisions. “Keir doesn’t like bad news and he doesn’t take to people who bring him bad news,” says one senior Labour figure. “So no one wants to be the bearer of bad news.”

That would be one way of explaining why Sir Olly Robbins, who was ousted as head mandarin at the Foreign Office late on Thursday, would keep such vital information from the prime minister. It would have been excruciatingly humiliating to bin the Mandelson appointment after it had already been announced. On the other hand, most of the embarrassment would have been felt not at the Foreign Office, but in Downing Street, which chose the fallen peer as Our Man in Washington.

Morgan McSweeney, the then chief of staff, did most of the pushing, though his friends claim he was also oblivious that Mandelson failed the vetting. This won’t dispel the swirl of suspicion that Sir Olly, a savvier operator than the typical mandarin, can’t have acted without some kind of sanction from someone at the political level in Number 10, the Cabinet Office or the Foreign Office. An alternative explanation favoured by some in Whitehall is that the civil servant didn’t ask because he had been given the very firm impression that Downing Street wanted Mandelson in Washington regardless of any risk.

It feels unlikely that a man of Sir Keir’s character would do something so sensationally reckless as deliberately lie, especially when there is a paper trail. So I incline to believe his people when they say he only discovered the truth on Tuesday last week. That leaves the question of why he didn’t, as Erskine May proscribes, correct the record in parliament at his first opportunity, which would have been at prime minister’s questions the following day.

You don’t need to be an expert reader of the runes to see that this is hugely damaging. It was a terrible mistake to send Mandelson to Washington in the face of prescient warnings not to do it from Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, who also complained that the process was “weirdly rushed”. It looks even more foolhardy now we know that he was given the thumbs down by the security vetting. “Oh god, it’s shocking,” groans one cabinet member. “It is another sinkhole that has emerged in front of us.”

The prime minister’s position, which seemed to have stabilised somewhat since it was in high peril back in February, is again precarious. Those who want him out of Number 10 are fired up. Even if this doesn’t do for him, it has entrenched the view of many Labour MPs that Sir Keir can’t possibly lead them into the next general election. Anxieties about his judgment and grip are acute. And his excuse for misleading parliament is that he was kept in the dark. Ignorance is a wretched alibi for someone who is supposed to be in charge, but it is the only defence he's got.

Photograph by Carl Court/Getty Images