Pressure on Starmer as he prepares for PMQs while Mandelson row continuespublished at 07:21 BST
07:21 BST
Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent
Some weeks it’s hard to predict what Kemi Badenoch will ask about at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). This is not one of those weeks.
She will presumably seize on the elements of Olly Robbins’s evidence yesterday where he described the pressure from No 10 to approve and expedite Lord Mandelson’s appointment.
No 10 denies that they put pressure on the Foreign Office. There is also an important nuance here which is that Robbins’s argument is that he withstood the pressure, and that his decision to approve Mandelson’s security clearance was unrelated to the pressure he felt.
His accusation matters nevertheless, because at the core of why Keir Starmer professes to be so angry now is that he says he would have cancelled the appointment of Mandelson had he known about the vetting concerns.
Robbins, on the other hand, describes a No 10 so determined to press ahead with the appointment that it was even mooted at one point that there be no vetting at all.
Those two accounts are hard to reconcile.
This morning, Starmer’s team is drawing some comfort from the fact that Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who chaired yesterday’s hearing, has backed Starmer’s decision to sack Robbins, saying he should have told No 10 more details of the vetting process.
Dan Carden, another Labour MP on the committee, takes a different view. He’s said Robbins was “put in an impossible position” and has “had the goalposts moved”, adding: “Why he was sacked… still needs answering”.
It will be a PMQs where it’s not just what Badenoch asks that matters, but also the mood among Labour MPs sitting behind Starmer while he answers.