UK Official Testifies on Pressures in Mandelson's Ambassador Appointment and Withdrawal
Sir Olly Robbins, former chief of the U.K. Foreign Office, testified before the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee on pressures from Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office to appoint Peter Mandelson as U.S. ambassador despite security concerns. He detailed attempts to bypass vetting and appoint another ally, Lord Matthew Doyle.
news.sky.comU.K. U.S. despite security risks. There was an alleged attempt by the Cabinet Office to exclude the appointee from security vetting for the role. There were regular calls and constant chasing from the Number 10 private office to push the appointment, with a strong expectation that the appointee needed to be in post in America as quickly as humanly possible.
The appointee, a known friend of a paedophile and Jeffrey Epstein associate, became ambassador to Washington. The former official stated the prime minister was warned of the risks through Cabinet Office checks but pushed the appointment through anyway.
He added that the political consequences of overruling the decision on the appointment would have been catastrophic because the appointment had already been announced publicly.
The prime minister’s office was dismissive of security concerns about the appointee, according to The New York Times. The former official defended his actions amid the row over the appointee's vetting, as noted by BBC News. A committee member challenged the former official on the appointment during the committee grilling.
The committee member stated: 'Really the nub of this is how on earth did this happen? This doesn't stack up, does it? Because in the end, he lost his job because he was a threat, and that should have been revealed with the Developed Vetting. He was leaking secrets from the British state to a foreign bank, that's pretty serious.'
The former official responded: 'That was not known at the time of his withdrawal, to my knowledge, certainly it wasn't publicly known. It wasn't known in records available to me or to others in the Foreign Office. What was known was that the basis on which the Prime Minister thought he had received assurances from the appointee about those connections from his past life with Epstein.
The Prime Minister can speak for himself, but I remember him visibly angry that, in his view, he'd been deceived about those connections. That was the point at which he required of me to withdraw the appointee from Washington.
The prime minister required the former official to withdraw the appointee from Washington, which the former official described as a very difficult day of his professional life, but he thinks the prime minister did the right thing. The former official also revealed an attempt by No 10 for the Foreign Office to find an ambassador role for a former director of communications at a time when top diplomats were at risk of losing their jobs under departmental restructuring.
The individual was under strict instructions not to tell the then foreign secretary about the demand for his appointment.
The former official felt very uncomfortable about the instructions regarding the appointment and kept giving advice that finding a role would be very hard for the office and hard for him personally to defend. The individual was later made a peer but had the Labour whip withdrawn earlier this year after it emerged he had campaigned on behalf of a friend who had been charged with possessing indecent images of children.
British papers mocked Prime Minister Keir Starmer's address to the House of Commons on Tuesday, in which he defended himself over the vetting scandal, according to France 24.
