{"id":681600,"date":"2026-07-09T03:33:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/681600\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T03:33:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:33:12","slug":"ambassadorial-appointments-should-be-subject-to-veto-by-mps-committee-recommends-uk-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/681600\/","title":{"rendered":"Ambassadorial appointments should be subject to veto by MPs, committee recommends | UK news"},"content":{"rendered":"

Political selections for ambassador posts should be subject to a veto by MPs, a parliamentary committee has recommended, as it made damning criticisms of how Peter Mandelson<\/a> became Britain\u2019s top diplomat in Washington.<\/p>\n

The foreign affairs select committee concluded that Mandelson\u2019s appointment was \u201cnothing short of disastrous\u201d, \u201chighly damaging\u201d for the British government and \u201cpainful and offensive to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein\u201d.<\/p>\n

Keir Starmer\u2019s unusual decision to make a political appointment to the UK\u2019s most high-profile ambassadorial role came under growing pressure from September 2025, when Mandelson, a longstanding figure of the Labour party, was sacked after the emergence of email exchanges with Epstein<\/a> published by the US Department of Justice. Ambassadors are typically drawn from the UK\u2019s diplomatic service of career civil servants.<\/p>\n

The cross-party group of MPs, which scrutinises the work of the Foreign Office, were denied the opportunity to question Mandelson before he was appointed or took up his posting. Given the disastrous way the appointment unravelled, the committee has argued all political appointees to diplomatic posts should have to appear before them and be subject to a veto.<\/p>\n

The committee, chaired by the Labour MP Emily Thornberry, said its initial queries after Mandelson\u2019s withdrawal from Washington did not lead to \u201cfull answers\u201d from the government, but rather \u201cpartial truths\u201d. But months later, in April 2026, the committee heard further evidence over several days from some of the key officials who played a part in Mandelson\u2019s appointment.<\/p>\n

Their testimony came in the wake of revelations from the Guardian that the Foreign Office had overruled the recommendation of the UK\u2019s security vetting agency<\/a>, which had concluded in late January 2025 that Mandelson should not be awarded the high-level security clearance necessary for nearly all roles in the department. Among the vetting agency\u2019s concerns, according to sources, were his associations with senior figures in China, Russia, and Israel<\/a>, as well as a \u00a31m loan.<\/p>\n

But by the time senior civil servants in the Foreign Office were reviewing the vetting agency\u2019s findings, Mandelson had been announced by Starmer as the next ambassador to the United States. The role had been approved by the US government and King Charles.<\/p>\n

The committee has recommended public appointments should not be announced until security clearance has been granted.<\/p>\n

Starmer\u2019s government was forced to publish hundreds of pages of documents about Mandelson\u2019s appointment, but despite this unprecedented release, the committee felt there were still \u201cunanswered questions\u201d.<\/p>\n

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They criticised the \u201cappalling\u201d record keeping by the Foreign Office and Downing Street that has left MPs unclear whether the evidence documenting the key decisions of Mandelson\u2019s appointment exist, have been lost, or were passed to the Metropolitan police, who are withholding some documents which may be relevant to ongoing investigations.<\/p>\n

But among the documents that do exist is extensive correspondence between senior officials around the time Mandelson\u2019s appointment was announced by the prime minister in December 2024. They were debating whether Mandelson needed security vetting, on the basis he was a member of the House of Lords and the privy council, a centuries-old group of advisers to the monarch.<\/p>\n

The committee said it was \u201cextraordinary\u201d more time seemed to be spent on this question than whether the vetting process \u201cwould throw up problems that should have been a bar to his very appointment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starmer, who has apologised for appointing Mandelson, faces further criticism over his decision to sack the head of the Foreign Office, Olly Robbins. Robbins was one of the top civil servants who decided to give Mandelson security clearance with \u201cmitigations\u201d on what he said was a \u201cborderline\u201d finding by vetting officials<\/a>, although no evidence of those mitigations or to justify a description of \u201cborderline\u201d has been published.<\/p>\n

Starmer said he lost confidence in Robbins for failing to tell him Mandelson had failed vetting. The committee said Robbins believed he was \u201cdelivering the outcome that was wanted\u201d and concluded his dismissal \u201cseems to have been taken without full due process and the establishment of the facts\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is Robbins who may have the last laugh. As Starmer, a fellow former high-flying civil servant, prepares to leave Downing Street, there is some suggestion his successor, Andy Burnham, may bring Robbins back into government as national security adviser<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Political selections for ambassador posts should be subject to a veto by MPs, a parliamentary committee has recommended,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-681600","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\/681600","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=681600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}