{"id":538414,"date":"2026-04-18T21:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T21:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/538414\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T21:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T21:32:08","slug":"starmer-would-have-blocked-mandelson-role-over-vetting-failure-says-lammy-keir-starmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/538414\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmer would have blocked Mandelson role over vetting failure, says Lammy | Keir Starmer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Keir Starmer would have blocked Peter Mandelson from serving as the UK\u2019s ambassador to Washington had he known he failed security vetting<\/a>, David Lammy has said, as he attempted to shore up the prime minister amid damaging fallout from the row.<\/p>\n

In his first public comments on the vetting affair, Lammy said it was \u201cinexplicable\u201d that Oliver Robbins, the former top civil servant who was forced out of the Foreign Office this week, had opted to leave Downing Street in the dark over the outcome.<\/p>\n

Starmer has been under intense pressure<\/a> since the Guardian revealed on Thursday that the Foreign Office had overruled a decision to deny Mandelson security vetting clearance. He will face MPs on Monday as he attempts to limit the damage to his premiership.<\/p>\n

Lammy, the deputy prime minister, said he had been \u201cshocked and surprised\u201d<\/a> when he first learned last week what had happened.<\/p>\n

But he insisted neither he nor his advisers at the time had known about \u2013 or asked for information on \u2013 the vetting process or its conclusions. Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary, have also said they were unaware until this week.<\/p>\n

Lammy did, however, admit there had been \u201csome time pressures\u201d on the Foreign Office last January to confirm Mandelson in post as Donald Trump was re-entering the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a feeling that obviously Trump had won the election in November, he was moving into the White House, and it would be good if we had an ambassador. So there were some time pressures around that I recall at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"StarmerStarmer says it is \u2018staggering\u2019 and \u2018unforgivable\u2019 he was not told Mandelson failed vetting \u2013\u00a0video<\/p>\n

In his interview with the Guardian, Lammy said: \u201cI have absolutely no doubt at all, knowing the PM as I do, that had he known that Peter Mandelson<\/a> had not passed the vetting, he would never, ever have appointed him ambassador.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe prime minister was not particularly close to Peter Mandelson. He hadn\u2019t worked with him in the past, as some of us had. He was weighing a decision, but I\u2019m quite sure had he known that, he would not have become ambassador. Therefore this is inexplicable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lammy was on a military flight back from the Middle East when he was summoned to the cockpit by the captain who told him that No 10 needed to speak to him urgently over the radio.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat obviously felt dramatic and serious and unexpected,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the first time I had heard this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked to clarify whether he or his advisers had been told about Mandelson\u2019s vetting process, or had asked questions about it, during their time at the Foreign Office, he said: \u201cNo. And let me just be absolutely clear, in the years in which I have been both in this government and the last government, I have never had any official talk to me about vetting, or the detail of vetting, so I would remember if this had ever been raised with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Robbins received the vetting outcome after Starmer had already announced Mandelson\u2019s appointment and, despite a separate due diligence process, flagged the reputational risk of sending him to Washington.<\/p>\n

Allies say he was simply following the rules to keep vetting from ministers, while some insiders have speculated the top civil servant was doing what he believed was expected of him at that stage. Others have suggested that mitigations were already in place after the due diligence report.<\/p>\n

Lammy, who is also justice secretary and appointed Robbins to the role in January 2025, said he had found him to be an \u201coutstanding\u201d civil servant. \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened in this circumstance. I\u2019m surprised and shocked by it. He was only a few weeks into the job,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The foreign affairs committee, meanwhile, published correspondence from the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, to the committee\u2019s chair, Emily Thornberry, which said: \u201cI [the foreign secretary] have required the FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] to conduct a full review of all the information that the department has given to your committee on the security vetting process undertaken as part of Lord Mandelson\u2019s appointment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lammy suggested next month\u2019s local elections were likely to be tough for the Labour<\/a> party even before the Mandelson row \u2013 with polls predicting a brutal set of results across the country \u2013 and he regretted it was back in the news.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cIt feels to me like these are tough midterm elections. I\u2019ve knocked on a lot of doors up and down the country, particularly in London \u2026 There is a mood that has continued of cost of living pressures and angst and concern about public services.<\/p>\n

\u201cLocal authority elections are to some extent a referendum on concerns about public services. I suspect the electorate will be communicating how they feel to all political parties, but certainly to the governing party, that\u2019s what you would expect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked whether they would be even tougher as a result of the Mandelson scandal, Lammy said: \u201cClearly the fallout of Peter Mandelson\u2019s behaviour and the decision to appoint him has \u2026 rumbled on for months and months and months.<\/p>\n

\u201cI regret that this is back again in the news when actually most people are worried about petrol prices, how the closure of the strait of Hormuz and the war in Iran is going to affect (them).\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keir Starmer would have blocked Peter Mandelson from serving as the UK\u2019s ambassador to Washington had he known…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-538414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538414","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=538414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}