Sir Olly, who has held a number of senior civil service roles and served as Theresa May’s chief Brexit negotiator, was appointed permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in January 2025.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Labour MP Emily Thornberry, who chairs the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, said she felt she had been “misled” by Sir Olly when he gave evidence to her committee last November about Lord Mandelson’s vetting.<\/p>\n
“We gave them direct questions and they half answered it, but they missed out the bit that was important… he didn’t pass the vetting,” she told the BBC.<\/p>\n
Friends of Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief adviser at the time who resigned in February over his role in Lord Mandelson’s appointment, told the BBC he had not known about the conclusion of the vetting process.<\/p>\n
The developed vetting process is carried out by UK Security Vetting, a specialist agency within the Cabinet Office, and is designed to make sure individuals are unlikely to abuse their access to secret material, or be subject to blackmail or bribery.<\/p>\n
It includes checks on a candidate’s credit history and criminal record.<\/p>\n
Those being vetted also have to undertake an interview with a specially trained vetting officer, which can cover areas including candidates’ health, friendships, family and sexual history.<\/p>\n
The BBC understands Lord Mandelson had no knowledge about the judgements reached during his vetting process until it was reported in the media, and that no-one at any level raised anything about it with him following his vetting interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sir Olly, who has held a number of senior civil service roles and served as Theresa May’s chief…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-535484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}