The row over the sacking of Sir Olly, who was the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, has dominated the past week.<\/p>\n
It emerged his department had given Lord Mandelson security clearance for the top diplomatic job in January 2025, despite concerns being raised during the vetting process. <\/p>\n
Lord Mandelson formally took up the role the following month, but was sacked seven months later over his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n
At PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch embarked on a series of questions to the prime minister over the evidence provided by Sir Olly.<\/p>\n
She asked whether the PM stood by his statement that due process was followed in Lord Mandelson’s appointment, to which he replied: “Yes, I do”.<\/p>\n
She said trying to get a job for Lord Doyle in the Foreign Office was “ridiculous”, adding: “He promised them [Labour MPs] probity; what he has given them is cronyism and an Old Boy’s Club where Matthew Doyle is being proposed as an ambassador.”<\/p>\n
The Tory leader demanded Sir Keir’s resignation, saying Sir Olly had been sacked for the failures of the prime minister, adding he “did not follow due process – yet he told the House he had”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The row over the sacking of Sir Olly, who was the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-544786","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\/544786","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=544786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}