Keir Starmer ‘threw Olly Robbins under the bus’ in wake of Mandelson vetting row

Exclusive: Helen MacNamara calls Starmer’s decision to sack Olly Robbins ‘unacceptable’
A former deputy cabinet secretary has said the prime minister threw Olly Robbins “under the bus” in the wake of the Lord Peter Mandelson ’s vetting revelations.

Sir Keir Starmer fired the Foreign Office ’s most senior civil servant after it was revealed that the department overruled security vetting for Lord Mandelson 's appointment as UK ambassador to the US.

Downing Street is attempting to claim that Sir Keir was only made aware of the issue this week when documents detailing his appointment came to light.

The prime minister has said it was “staggering” and “unforgivable” that he had not been told earlier, adding he was "furious".

However, the Independent revealed on 11 September last year that MI6 had failed to clear the then-Labour peer, largely because of concerns over his business links to China.

Those concerns were put to No10, but the then-director of communications, Tim Allan, insisted: “Vetting done by FCDO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] in normal way”.

The former top civil servant has been formally asked to give evidence on the vetting of Lord Mandelson next week.

He previously told a Commons committee it was “clear that the prime minister wanted to make this appointment himself”.

In the grilling in November, Sir Olly said he said he understood that Sir Keir “took advice and formed a view himself, and we then acted on that view”.

Helen MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary and co-host of The Independent’s politics podcast In The Room, spoke about the topic in an exclusive clip and said that Sir Olly was “following [the PM’s] judgement”.

Helen and Cleo have already examined the PM’s obsession with ‘process’ in relation to Mr Mandelson and spent an episode painfully combing through the first Mandelson tranche in previous episodes.

On Robbins, MacNamara said: “Some of the time, what you are doing as a very senior civil servant is deciding to take the risk onto yourself rather than pass everything up the chain.

Sometimes you're saying that the right thing to do here is, I will not say this to the prime minister in all of the detail.

I will take responsibility for holding some of this information myself because that is the right thing to do.

“If this can happen to Ollie Robbins with all of his skills, all of his ability, all of the things that he actually offers to the country day in, day out, and yet still, he's somehow being fired for the prime minister's misjudgment, then what signal does that send to everybody else?

She criticised the prime minister for axing Sir Olly, calling it a “reactive” and a “throwing under the bus”.

She added: “Let Olly explain in public actually what he's done and what he's not done.

And then you can make a judgment.

“Doing exactly what the prime minister wanted him to do last January on the basis of information that the prime minister was aware of, because even by the standards, if that's the case, that's totally unacceptable.”
Watch Helen and Cleo’s full reaction here
Former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara and ex-No 10 special advisor Cleo Watson are the co-hosts of The Independent’s politics podcast, In the Room .

New episodes drop every Friday.

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