Plenty in Westminster knew the Lord Mandelson saga was going to cause the prime minister more grief.<\/p>\n
But no one, outside a very select few in the bowels of government, we now know, could have predicted this.<\/p>\n
The expectation was No 10’s next appointment with Mandelson related anguish would be the next deluge of documents Parliament has demanded and which are expected to be published soon.<\/p>\n
They are still to come, but it was the collection and processing of the bits of paper associated with that exercise that has prompted this extraordinary 24 hours.<\/p>\n
As the Cabinet Office pulled together this information, the Guardian revealed, external<\/a> that a row broke out internally about whether this crucial detail about Lord Mandelson’s vetting should be included in the cache.<\/p>\n In other words, there was the prospect it might not be, and not long later it did then see the light of day via the newspaper’s investigations team.<\/p>\n What has followed might be best described as a messy, noisy palaver.<\/p>\n A prime minister not noted for hyperbolic or emotive language in public has unleashed a volley of vitriol – a chain of events “staggering,” “shocking,” “unforgivable,” he claims.<\/p>\n And yet a friend of Sir Olly Robbins, the defenestrated lead civil servant in the Foreign Office, said the soon to be former mandarin was being unfairly traduced.<\/p>\n Prof Ciaran Martin, who has worked in government himself and so is schooled in the protocols of Whitehall, told The World at One on Radio 4 that Sir Olly was a stickler for exactly those precedents and was right not to tell Sir Keir Starmer, given how inevitably prying and personal the vetting process is.<\/p>\n And yet privately from many others there is a sense that the current public accounts of what happened are literally incredible.<\/p>\n Why was the prime minister so apparently lacking in curiosity about both the process and its outcome?<\/p>\n And was Sir Olly really acting unilaterally, and if he was, did he really need to?<\/p>\n It is worth thinking about the timeline here, the chain of events and the context of the time.<\/p>\n It was publicly announced, external<\/a> that Lord Mandelson would be British Ambassador to the United States five days before Christmas, in December 2024.<\/p>\n Just under three weeks later, it was announced , external<\/a>Sir Olly Robbins had been appointed the new Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, its most senior civil servant.<\/p>\n And a few weeks after that, Lord Mandelson failed his developed vetting.<\/p>\n Sir Olly, just weeks into the job, learnt this knowing that Lord Mandelson had already been appointed.<\/p>\n The prime minister wanted to send this Labour grandee to Washington. Imagine the brouhaha if the appointment had been unannounced, if he had had the job taken from him before he even started.<\/p>\n And all this was going on at just the point that Donald Trump was about to begin his second term in the White House \u2013 the very reason Lord Mandelson was given the job in the first place, as he was seen as the political savvy, charming, wily consigliere who could win over the White House.<\/p>\n In other words, he was the unconventional ambassadorial appointment to deal with the unconventional presidential victor.<\/p>\n Getting a job, and it being publicly announced, before the vetting process is complete is unusual, I’m told. And yet it happened in this instance despite the high profile nature of the job and the high profile and colourful nature of the person who had got it.<\/p>\n One person said to me the Foreign Office usually advises prospective future employees to avoid handing in their notice on their previous job until their vetting is signed off \u2013 because until it is, the job can’t be guaranteed.<\/p>\n But that didn’t happen in this case, such was the rush to get Lord Mandelson out to Washington pronto.<\/p>\n So now we await the further tussle of the embattled knights, Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Olly Robbins, potentially one day after another in parliament in a few days time. Sir Keir will appear on Monday afternoon and there is an invitation for Sir Olly to do so on Tuesday, in front of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.<\/p>\n One already elbowed out of a job; the other, the prime minister, who’s done the elbowing, narrowly avoided the same fate at the hands of his own party in February.<\/p>\n And yes, it was this same wider row about Lord Mandelson swirling then too.<\/p>\n Supporters of the prime minister say the case made by Prof Martin, that Sir Olly was dutybound not to tell the prime minister, adds credibility to their insistence that Sir Keir only knew about all this earlier this week – and so has not lied.<\/p>\n They also say the Guardian’s latest story,, external<\/a> confirmed by the Cabinet Office, that two other senior civil servants knew about Lord Mandelson’s vetting fail last month, are case studies in how the Whitehall machine should work \u2013 checks and due process followed by telling the prime minister \u2013 rather than other examples of No10 being kept in the dark.<\/p>\n But the Conservatives and others point to a story, external<\/a> from the Independent’s political editor David Maddox last September which claimed then that Lord Mandelson didn’t clear security vetting.<\/p>\n