Dear Subscribers,
It is a cliché to say that a week is a long time in politics. But it nevertheless conveys some truth. Starmer started the week by amending the Hillsborough law to overrule the intelligence services for maximal candour and transparency. By the end of the week it had been revealed that Peter Mandelson was appointed US Ambassador despite having failed the security vetting process.
Starmer has pleaded ignorant. And he maintains that ‘no minister had been told’ that Mandelson had failed to pass security vetting. Blame has been ascribed to elements of the ‘system’. The fall guy is one Sir Oliver Robbins, a career civil servant (nicknamed ‘Sir Humphrey’), who was the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in January 2025.
Some have noticed that Mandelson had been appointed a month before – at which time Robbins was working in the City. Moreover, the Guardian has reported that Starmer’s Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo, and the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, Catherine Little, had known about it since March. And to be sure, David Maddox for the Independent reported Mandelson’s failure to clear security vetting back in September when he was sacked. The Prime Minister will face the Commons next week to face accusations of misleading parliament and breaking the ministerial code.
Despite the haunting of Mandelson’s ghost, Starmer’s government is remains committed to reversing Brexit. It was reported in the Guardian that ministers are looking to introduce a new EU-UK reset bill in pursuit of its long-held ambition for ‘dynamic alignment’. The bill would ‘allow the UK to quickly implement evolving single market rules if it determines it is in the national interest, without having to face full parliamentary scrutiny each time [my italics].’ The Guardian smugly refers to ‘Henry VIII powers’ in justifying this. It is, however, nothing less than an assault on parliamentary sovereignty, as Bill Cash says in the Telegraph.
Lastly, this week the BBC has reported its investigations into the abuses of the asylum system, provoking Shabana Mahmood to launch an investigation. The BBC reports that immigration lawyers have been telling asylum seekers to feign homosexuality and/or victimhood of domestic abuse in order to secure permanent residence. But, as Gawain Towler writes for Spiked, ‘This has been going on for decades. Decades during which successive home secretaries of both parties stood at despatch boxes and talked about the integrity of the system, the rigour of the process, the robust safeguards in place, while the asylum industry quietly got on with its work… laughing all the way to the legal aid pot.’
Blog
France and Britain are great powers brought low by little men by Robert Tombs
With both nations crying out for a heroic figure like De Gaulle to fight their corners, they are stuck with lightweight leaders
Media
John Bew in the Spectator: What’s Britain’s place in the post-Iran world order?
Maurice Cousins for Spiked: How climate monomania destroyed the British economy
Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph: The Mandelson affair is a failure of our system, not one prime minister
Key Points
Did Starmer know?
Starmer has claimed that he found out only on Tuesday about Mandelson. Charles Moore has made the case for believing Starmer’s ignorance in the Telegraph (see above). He argues that the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act means that ‘Officials alone are in charge of decisions arising from the security vetting process. They do not refer them to ministers.’ Moore concludes that it ‘is yet another example of the world created by both parties in this century, in which unaccountable officials, sometimes described as “independent”, are empowered to make decisions which ought to rest with ministers accountable to Parliament.’
Are we convinced by Moore? He certainly has a point about the constitutional conflict between our elected representatives and the deeper elements of the state. But might he be taking the Yes, Minister-esque duping of ministers by officials too literally?
One of the most vociferous critics of the SW1 officialdom has been Dominic Cummings. In light of the Mandelson scandal, he has written: ‘The PM is often told by officials details from vetting, leak inquiries, investigations by intel agencies etc. This is because the PM in our constitution is often the only constitutional authority deemed able to make a political judgement about things including risk assessments of appointments.’
Again: ‘If the vetting people came back with concerns, the proper action was UNQUESTIONABLY for officials to take this to the PM for him to make a judgement about the pros/cons and risks of his own political appointment…This is the only proper way for such a problem to be resolved.’
Cummings’s point is that whilst the rules Moore refers to might make it seem as though officials act imperviously to ministers, in reality this is not so: the buck does in fact stop with the Prime Minister. This is because Mandelson’s appointment was ultimately political. And Starmer had ‘made clear he was pushing it [the appointment of Mandelson] through before various checks were done and regardless of various checks already done.’ It would have been inevitable, in Cummings’s view, that Starmer would have been informed about the failure to clear Mandelson for security vetting.
Moore and Cummings represent the cases for believing or disbelieving Starmer’s professed ignorance. Much remains to be seen and will be played out next week – in the Commons by Starmer and in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee by Robbins.
