Keir Starmer Faces the Mandelson Music
The appointment scandal around his former ambassador to the U.S. is reaching a crescendo.
By Dominic Green
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London
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be fighting for his political life when he enters the House of Commons Monday afternoon. For the third time in seven months, Mr. Starmer must explain how he appointed Peter Mandelson, a disgraced Labour Party fixer, as Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. in December 2024.
In September 2025, it emerged that Mr. Mandelson’s ties to another fixer, the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had been deeper and more enduring than Mr. Starmer thought. Mr. Starmer claimed that Mr. Mandelson had misled him and the Foreign Office’s security vetting team. Mr. Mandelson resigned.
The “Epstein files,” released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30, further exposed Mr. Mandelson’s mendacity, and further implicated the judgment of Mr. Starmer and his officials. Mr. Starmer again insisted that he didn’t know nuttin’. This time, he blamed his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, for pushing Mr. Mandelson’s candidacy. Mr. McSweeney resigned. The Metropolitan Police are investigating Mr. Mandelson for misconduct in public office.
Third time’s a charm. On April 16, the Guardian reported that Mr. Mandelson had “failed” security vetting by the Foreign Office. But, the Guardian said, the chief mandarin at the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins, “overruled” the findings. He withheld them from Mr. Starmer and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, and allowed Mr. Mandelson, a security risk, to take up Britain’s most important diplomatic posting. Mr. Robbins resigned hours before the story broke.
“That I wasn’t told that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting when he’s appointed is staggering” and unforgivable, Mr. Starmer insisted on April 17. “Not only was I not told, no minister was told.” He felt, he said, “absolutely furious” about this illegality, and promised to “set out all the relevant facts” before Parliament on Monday “in true transparency.”
Mr. Robbins’s allies are whispering that he, like Messrs. Mandelson and McSweeney before him, is a fall guy. Mr. Starmer announced Mr. Mandelson as his ambassador, they say, before the Foreign Office had time to vet him. By the time Mr. Robbins took up his job at the Foreign Office, the deal was already sealed.
Mr. Starmer’s account is simpler, and happens to accord with the Guardian story that precipitated Mr. Robbins’s resignation. In this version, Mr. Robbins and the Foreign Office acted like a government within a government. The mandarins arrogated control over Britain’s most important diplomatic posting at a critical moment in British-American relations, and serially misled Britain’s elected leaders.
Mr. Starmer accuses the mandarins of an unprecedented breach of protocol, and a sustained assault on British democracy. I find this implausible for several reasons.
First, Mr. Mandelson’s dubious connections were public knowledge long before Mr. Starmer appointed him. The vetters, and Mr. Starmer too, needed only to open a newspaper to see that Mr. Mandelson was the wrong man for the job.
Second, on Sept. 10, 2025, Mr. Starmer told the House of Commons three times that “full due process” was followed in Mr. Mandelson’s appointment. Mr. Starmer now claims that he, his ministers and the Cabinet Office in 10 Downing Street were “not told” about its findings. These statements seem impossible to reconcile.
Finally, Ms. Cooper co-signed a September 2025 letter with Mr. Robbins in which they assured Parliament that the investigation into Mr. Mandelson had been “conducted to the usual standard set for developed vetting.” If, as Mr. Starmer and Ms. Cooper now insist, they weren’t told about the vetting process, why did she sign the letter?
Mr. Starmer asks us to believe that he is an incompetent and weak leader, manipulated by Mr. Mandelson, misled by Mr. McSweeney, and then manipulated and misled again by Mr. Robbins and Britain’s “deep state.” The farrago of incompetence, weakness and corruption in Mr. Starmer’s 22-month premiership exceeds the extensive precedents of recent British politics, so it isn’t impossible that he is, as he claims, simply useless. But it is unlikely.
Britain’s state bureaucracy is powerful but dysfunctional. The deep state of national security officials is partnered with a shallow administrative state. Its grasp on the country’s manifold crises, from crime to welfare fraud to broken borders, is weak. The Mandelson scandal, which is now the Starmer scandal, shows how the shallow state works, and why it is failing. When power is diffused into unaccountable bureaucracies, so is responsibility. Before Mr. Starmer slid into a safe Labour seat, he was a human-rights lawyer and served as director of public prosecutions. A backroom fixer by vocation, he is now hoisted on the petard of his own procedures.
In February, his damage control strategies included accepting a parliamentary vote to release “all papers relating to Mandelson’s appointment,” and allowing the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee to read everything. The Guardian reported on April 16 that “senior government officials” are now considering withholding documents related to Mr. Mandelson’s security vetting from the committee. If Mr. Starmer releases all the papers, we will learn whether he and his ministers are telling the truth. If he doesn’t release them, he will overrule the House of Commons and be caught in a lie. Mr. Robbins’s pre-emptive resignation has deprived Mr. Starmer of his fall guy. Expect him to be shocked, just shocked, when he receives Ms. Cooper’s resignation.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.