Senior civil servants back Olly Robbins after ‘totally unfair’ sacking by Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer is facing a furious civil service backlash to his decision to sack Olly Robbins, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, over his handling of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington.

Helen MacNamara, the former director general for propriety and ethics in Downing Street and deputy cabinet secretary, said Robbins had been “totally unfairly treated” and had done nothing wrong.

“I think he was trying to do what the prime minister wanted,” she told The Observer. “It’s bad to fire civil servants for the prime minister’s judgment. The problem is the fallout from the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador. There aren’t many people as good as Olly in Whitehall so how can it be in the national interest that he gets fired for this?”

She warned of a chilling effect on the civil service which would undermine the effectiveness of the government. “If, as soon as there’s any sign of trouble, people get chucked under the bus that’s going to make civil servants more risk-averse, cautious, less likely to want to put their head above the parapet. That’s bad for the country because you need bold, creative, confident public servants to deliver change.”

On Friday the prime minister accused Robbins of an “unforgivable” failure to warn him that Mandelson had failed his security vetting. But MacNamara said it was unlikely there was anything improper in Robbins’ decision to grant clearance to Mandelson against the advice of UK Security Vetting, the Cabinet Office team that carries out extensive checks on appointments to sensitive roles.

Having overseen vetting at the highest level when she was in government, MacNamara insisted the process was more nuanced than a simple pass or fail, particularly when it comes to political appointments. “Anybody saying it’s always binary has never been part of those conversations. It’s not a question of overruling, it’s a judgment you come to together. This does happen particularly with political appointments – they’re likely to have more interesting experiences, they haven’t always behaved as if they were going to have to go through this process, that’s partly the point of them.”

She said it was infuriating that Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, had blamed a “failure of the state” rather than taking responsibility as a minister. “This is just going to make everything worse between the civil service and government. That matters because the civil service is the only mechanism the government has to do things. If you’ve got a civil service that’s risk averse and nervous and worried about being fired then you can’t run the country well. Government is hard, you are always making trade-offs and you need to have an environment where people are prepared to take risks. The real consequence of all this is that it puts the civil service further and further on the back foot. The truth is the politicians want a system that saves them from themselves.”

MacNamara also said it was hard to imagine that such an experienced operator as Robbins would not have raised the matter with Chris Wormald, who was the cabinet secretary at the time the clearance was granted to Mandelson. “Then if that’s happened it’s the cabinet secretary’s decision whether to tell the prime minister or not. The right thing to do is to keep this in the civil service line because that’s the way vetting is done to protect the politician’s privacy.”

Downing Street said Wormald had “no recollection” of any communication with Robbins about the issue and it was a problem that Robbins had not “raised a flag” with his civil service boss. Starmer will address MPs  on Monday and set out “all the relevant facts”. Robbins himself is expected to mount a vigorous defence of his actions in evidence to the foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday.

One Labour source said No 10 needed to “dial down its language” because “if Olly Robbins has made an honest mistake in this saga so has the prime minister himself by appointing Mandelson in the first place. It would be another error to make Robbins believe the civil service is once again being made a scapegoat.”

Senior Whitehall figures have described a mixture of bafflement and fury at the removal of a senior and respected official, who only a few weeks ago was in the frame to become cabinet secretary.

Simon McDonald, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary, said yesterday that Robbins had been fired because No 10 “wanted a scalp and they wanted it quickly”. He told the BBC: “I cannot see that there was any process, any fairness, in giving him the chance to set out his case and that feels to me wrong.”

Last week, Ciaran Martin, former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, who is a friend of Robbins, claimed he would have been in breach of his obligations as a civil servant if he had informed the prime minister that the vetting team had flagged concerns about Mandelson. “Not only is there no duty to disclose the details of a vetting case, there is a duty not to disclose them,” he said.

Downing Street insisted that Starmer did not have a wider problem with the civil service. “The prime minister couldn’t be more impressed with how Antonia Romeo [the cabinet secretary] and Cat Little [permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office] have handled the situation. This is not us throwing all civil servants under a bus,” a source said. “Throughout this process one bit of the chain has been obstructive and that’s the Foreign Office. For several weeks there’s been concern that there is something they’re hiding.”

A cabinet minister said: “It was bad for [the prime minister] not to have been told but I don’t believe he lied.”

Mandelson’s appointment as Washington ambassador was announced in December 2024, before he had gone through security vetting. Robbins arrived as permanent secretary at the Foreign Office the following month and his allies claim he was in an invidious position because Starmer’s choice for the top diplomatic posting had already been made public.

In November last year, Robbins told the foreign affairs select committee that by the time the matter came across his desk it was “clear that the prime minister wanted to make this appointment himself”.

Before he was fired, he had been making the argument in Whitehall that the public appointments process must change to ensure that all the vetting of candidates is completed before any announcement is made. “You can now see why,” said one insider. “Olly Robbins was only a couple of weeks into the job when this issue came up. There had been lots of resistance in the Foreign Office to Peter Mandelson being appointed before he arrived and he didn’t want to be the bureaucrat who said after Keir Starmer had already announced the appointment – ‘we’ve got a problem’. It would have made the government look ridiculous. He just made it go away.”

Starmer has already admitted the decision to send Mandelson to Washington was a mistake but the ramifications of that error continue to reverberate. One Foreign Office source said: “Peter is like the gift that keeps on giving.”

Labour MPs are exasperated that the Mandelson scandal has erupted again weeks before crucial local, Scottish and Welsh elections. “People are livid and gobsmacked,” one influential backbencher said. Speculation about Starmer’s leadership has resurfaced. “This ‘he’s good at the war’ thing is wearing off. None of the possible contenders would be unable to do this current stuff – keeping out of the war and distancing from Trump,” one MP said. “It’s a matter of when not if [there is a leadership challenge].”

But most MPs think it is unlikely there will be an attempt to topple the prime minister in May, after what is expected to be a bad set of election results, because there is still no agreement on who should replace Starmer. One said: “We just have continued white hot fury and powerlessness.”

Photograph by PA Images via Alamy