How does Keir Starmer recover from the Olly Robbins bombshell?

0:00Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? PayCore's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results. Visit paycore.com slash leaders and go from workflow to workflow. That's paycore.com slash leaders. This is a Global Player original podcast. Peter Starmer came to office saying that he wanted to clean up politics. They weren't going to have this constant round of scandal and cover-up and misbehaviour.

0:46And yet, where are we now? Mates and wives of mates and husbands of mates. And this person said it was like WAGs City Central. I think processes are going to change a bit as a result of this whole fiasco. Another friend of another paedophile being pushed into another top-notch ambassadorial role. I think it is almost impossible to see how Starmer comes back from that. Morgan McSweeney, the Chief of Staff, rang Sir Philip and said, in terms stronger than those that I can use before the watershed... I think you should. Well, I'll just say that it was just approve it with terms stronger than that.

1:31Does that accord with your impression? Just approve it. Was the pressure to approve Peter Mandelson in the job at the heart of what happened in that critical vetting process we now know so much about? The account from Sir Ollie Robbins of what happened and why is so starkly different from what Keir Starmer had to tell the Commons, that you're left wondering now whether it's Keir Starmer who can survive. Welcome to The News Agents.

2:08The News Agents. It's John. It's meatless. And it's hard to overstate the drama of what we witnessed today in that committee room with a bunch of MPs and a senior civil servant. And don't let the fact that he spoke in a quiet voice gull you to believe that this was quiet and inconsequential. It was massive what he was saying today because he set out a case that essentially torpedoed what Keir Starmer had said yesterday to the Commons, undermined a lot of the Starmer arguments and left an awful lot of people scratching their heads and saying, why was this man made a sacrificial lamb for a process that Downing Street itself was the author of, the master of, the creator of and should be the owner of.

3:08And yet it is Sir Ollie Robbins who has walked the plank and not Keir Starmer. Yeah. And what Robbins went on to tell us in his two hour appearance before the committee today was how much pressure there had been to OK the decision that would hurry Peter Mandelson into the Washington job. Let's just listen to him in his own words. I walked into a situation in which there was already a very, very strong expectation, and you will have seen the papers released already under the Humble Address, that coming from Number 10, that he needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible. The very first formal communication of this to my predecessor from Number 10 private office, being that they wanted all this done at pace and Mandelson in post before inauguration.

4:02As quickly as humanly possible. So hang on a second. There is this long vetting process. There is this cabinet office vetting process. There is this propriety and ethics process where everyone is meant to do their job thoroughly and report back. And Robin says, yes, we did do it thoroughly. We did do it properly. There was no question that the vetting was done properly. But the circumstances, the context of the time was just get this guy in. He says they were actually quite dismissive about the whole vetting process. He says that the Cabinet Office at one point said, oh, do we really need to do this again?

4:44And he also reminds us that, yes, Simon Case had told Keir Starmer, don't go ahead with the announcement before you've done the vetting. Olly Robbins said he was right. I would have said the same. And this is what torpedoes the Starmer argument yesterday. when Starmer says, if I'd have known, I would never have appointed Peter Mandelson. If I'd known there'd been a problem over the vetting, he would have never got the job. He'd already been given the job. Sir Keir Starmer already had the approval of the king. You had written to the US embassy to say that Peter Mandelson was coming out as our ambassador.

5:23You had flown in the face of the advice that... I mean, they get signed off from Donald Trump himself, right? It's the agrimal, they call it, between the two countries. Exactly. And then you've had the Simon case warning saying you must do vetting before you announce it. Ignored. You've had Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair's kind of chief of staff, who knew Mandelson well, saying, why is this appointment being made with such undue haste? And you've got Starmer, like a steam train, saying this has to happen. So I think the Starmer argument from yesterday that I'd have never appointed him just doesn't hold water.

6:00And you have to listen to this because it is Ollie Robbins describing how the pressure was, in his words, almost daily. There was an atmosphere of constant chasing. Daily phone calls. I couldn't say for certain daily, but I mean, certainly very frequent from private office to private office. Has this been delivered yet? Never any interest as far as I recall in weather, but only an interest in when. I mean, that is damning. No interest in weather, only in when. In other words, you are there to deliver what we've asked for. Just hurry up, which takes us back to the expletive at the very beginning.

6:49So Olly Robbins is in this position where the announcement's been made, the agreement's been made, the job is on offer. Peter Mandelson has already got, we understand, the Downing Street lanyard clearance before the vetting's been signed off. And what happens then is he goes to the vetting service, which is done through the Cabinet Office, and he asks them what they found. He doesn't see any of the forms that we're now familiar with. He doesn't see the red box of danger being ticked. That's what we heard today. But he does understand that there is a balance of probabilities. They are leaning towards saying that this could be risky, but it is for Ollie Robbins to make that decision himself.

7:43It's not for the vetting process. So he didn't overturn anything. And it's not for ministers. It is not for the prime minister. It all rests with the decision he made. And he says, yes, I did take that. given where we were in the process, given what I thought we already knew about Mandelson, I made the process to sign it off and that lay with me alone. I find the nerd in me kind of fascinated by learning about how government works. And we've learned a lot about the vetting process and what it means to have developed vetting. We're kind of all going to come away experts at the end of this process.

8:20But I'm also sort of fascinated by the bigger political picture of what has unfolded in this whole thing, where Ollie Robbins has behaved like successive civil servants have, that apparently it is to the discretion of the, you know, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office to decide whether there is a risk and how you manage that risk and what you do to mitigate it. And he has done that. But also the crucial point, and I hadn't really thought about this before is that if there is a red flag over somebody or a mitigation that needs to be do you pass that on around and make that part of general conversation when that could have such a bearing on someone's career for years to come the fact of the matter is that a lot of this stuff isn't minuted and that is a that's a separate issue which i think you mean written down written down and i think that there was frustration from emily thornbury the committee chair that not more had been written down but the idea is that you you take a decision i'm going to mitigate this and it's not for everyone to know what those mitigations were because this is highly confidential and the vetting process is meant to remain highly confidential between the person whose judgment it is to make it in this case the permanent under secretary at the foreign office and uk vetting service who've done the work and said these are the issues that we're concerned about.

9:46And according to Sir Ollie Robbins, and you know, whether we'll find proof of this, Ollie Robbins was not, didn't know about the traffic light system. All he knew was that he had been told that Mandelson represented a borderline risk and that it could be managed. Yeah. And one of the questions that you raised yesterday was why he didn't tell anyone else, why he didn't refer up, if you like, to his line manager, who would have been Chris Wormald, who was the cabinet secretary. And it's exactly the point that you've just made. He says, I felt that I had to take responsibility for that. Because as soon as you start sharing your concerns, you're essentially saying, right, it's on you now.

10:29Yeah, I'm subcontracting it out. I'm subcontracting it. I'm not taking responsibility. And so what you get is the idea of a guy who, as he says, knows the code of the civil service as well as he knows the common Bible. In other words, inside out. He has read that code. He studied it. He's been a top civil servant. He's been a civil servant for a quarter of a century. And so he is trying to make the judgments based on what he feels he's learned and the job that he has now been given. So he doesn't tell Chris Wormald and he certainly doesn't tell Keir Starmer because there is meant to be a dividing line between the decisions that the Foreign Office takes as civil servants and what ministers are told.

11:15All ministers, even the prime minister, has to know is that the decision has been okay. And that was very quietly effective because I think the impression was created by Starmer yesterday was that Ollie Robbins had behaved in a high handed, arrogant, out of touch manner where he had just taken power into his own hands and had no regard for anything else. and it was kind of the superciliousness of the civil service at work. And he was saying, no, no, no, this is just how we operate and how you have to handle very sensitive stuff like developed vetting. And so he was kind of arguing that everything he did was in compliance with normal civil service behaviour.

11:58And then he was asked about, well, could you imagine a set of circumstances where vetting was denied to Peter Mandelson? What do you think would have happened if you denied clearance? How would you have gone about that? What would the impact of that be? Would it even be possible? So maybe this is the first time remembering back to the Chair's introduction where I can abandon the civil servant's response of saying that's a hypothetical question. I think it would have been very difficult indeed, Mr. Carden. I mean, again, if I can walk you back to the situation I came into the post in, we had been through all of these steps very publicly in which the Prime Minister's nominee had been put out there to the public, announced, blessed by the King, agreed by the US Government.

12:51We were in receipt of formal letters from Number 10 telling us to get on with it quickly. We had engineered agreement to arrive just before the inauguration, as required by that original letter that's been published as part of the Humble Address response. So I'm not trying to hide from your question, but I suppose all I can do is agree with the premise that against that backdrop the foreign office saying okay but sorry we can't grant him clearance would have been a very very difficult problem and so you are left with that situation where you feel that ollie robbins had no option but to approve because that is what downing street willed that he did his best that he went through the vetting process that he kind of put in place mitigations for Peter Mandelson, but it would have been impossible.

13:43The train had travelled so far down the track that to say, no, no, we've got to back up two miles now, would have just been unthinkable. And so the idea that Ollie Robbins has been fired in such a peremptory way on Thursday night, last Thursday night, I still think is just jaw-dropping. So he has painted the picture of a prime minister who a had already announced before the vetting was completed okay against better advice b was not really in control of the facts didn't understand about the division between the civil service and ministers in terms of what they were told and after all that comes the bombshell.

14:30Another friend of another paedophile, we are told being recommended for an ambassadorial role. And at that point, all gloves are off. We'll be back.

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15:59So, put aside the man who we now know was friends with a paedophile and got an ambassadorial job, Peter Mandelson. and turn your mind to Robin's next revelation, that he was asked to find an ambassadorial role, what they call a head of mission. It's just one below an ambassador. For Keir Starmer's then chief of communications, a man called Matthew Doyle, who was recently suspended over his links to another paedophile. And this is Robin's response to being told in March of last year that it would be really great if somebody at the Foreign Office could find Matthew Doyle a cushy job. There were several discussions initiated by Number 10 with me about potentially finding a head of mission opportunity for Matthew Doyle, who was then the Prime Minister's Director of Communications.

17:07And I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then Foreign Secretary, which was uncomfortable. but the context here Mr Morello was I was still in my early months in the job but I'd already concluded as indeed I think I gave evidence to this committee about not long afterwards that the Foreign Office needed quite serious reform. I was in the process of talking to the top team about quite a profound restructuring involving job losses and I found it very hard to think how I would explain to the office what the credentials of Matthew were to be in an important head of mission role when I was in danger of making very senior, very experienced diplomats leave the office.

17:55It was an absolute jaw-dropper when you heard Matthew Doyle's name thrown into the mix of all of this, because you expected everything just to be about the appointment of Mandelson, and then to find out that Downing Street, and presumably the political office in Downing Street, so not the civil servants, had been campaigning for Matthew Doyle, who is a lifelong Labour comms person who's been around since the Blair years. He then went to work for Tony Blair. He then comes back to be killed. He's a political person, not a civil servant. For all the faults and problems and dangers and risks attached to Peter Mandelson, he'd been an EU commissioner.

18:36You know, he was used to negotiating trade deals. He had had a distinguished kind of, you know, career. Problematic, yes, but distinguished. I mean, Matthew Doyle had been a press officer. That's all he'd ever been. And suddenly the idea that Downing Street is trying to shoot, presumably, Keir Starmer wants Matthew Doyle out as press secretary because they didn't think he was that good at the job. And so what can we find him? Can you find him a nice ambassador's job somewhere? Look, the fact that Robbins told us today that he was told by Keir Starmer's private office not to tell David Lammy, who is the Foreign Secretary, because Matthew Doyle is still in the post and may not have known that Starmer was trying to replace him.

19:20This is when it gets really murky. This is where it gets really kind of disgusting, actually, because up until this point, you're thinking, was this an error of judgment? Was the Mandelson thing a sort of, you know, ambition over good sense? Was he trying to fit around an unconventional president like Trump? What were there mitigating reasons why it made sense? And now it just looks like cushy jobs for the boys. And actually, over the weekend, I was talking to somebody who was describing how just about all the junior ministerial roles, not the cabinet level ones, which were made by Starmer, but the junior ministerial ones were all, they believed, made by Morgan McSweeney.

20:11and they described it how it was basically mates and wives of mates and husbands of mates. And this person said it was like WAGs City Central, like the Wives and Girlfriends Committee. In other words, what you are starting to question, right, is the very integrity of the whole decision making process around Keir Starmer, which is, were you just finding your mates jobs or worse? Were you trying to fire people, but giving them consolation prizes in some of the highest offices in the world? Emily, you and I have been at the BBC for years where we saw people who were crap at their jobs. They were the editor of a bulletin or something like that.

20:58And they're crap at their jobs and they're suddenly become managing editor, paperclips and desks. and you feel that surely the prime minister isn't doing the same thing in downing street where you're trying to get rid of a oh i don't know what can we do with him oh i'm sure the foreign office can find himself an ambassadorship somewhere this at a time when the foreign office is undergoing cuts and restructuring and ollie robbins to his credit by the sound of it pushed back pretty hard and said no way and it as we now know that did not happen and but matthew Dore was then given a peerage for his efforts as having been the press secretary at number 10 Downing Street.

21:37And so I do think that, you know, Keir Starmer came to office saying that he wanted to clean up politics, that he wanted politics to weigh less heavily on people's lives and that they weren't going to have this constant round of scandal and cover up and misbehaviour. behaviour and yet where are we now where are we now when we listen to sir ollie robbins a senior civil servant who has been fired who is out of a job apparently for doing his job and doing it quite well and it was interesting listening to ollie robbins talking about some of the emotional part of stress that this has been thank you again mr carmen thank you for the generous way you asked the question but I should be careful here.

22:28The very short answer is I don't fully understand the reasons that I'm in the position I am in but that is for the separate process for me to try to get to the bottom of. I am, oh well, I mean as a human being I'm desperately, desperately sad about it Mr Carden. I love that job, I love that institution, I was proud to serve this government and any government that might follow it. I hope I was doing it to the best of my ability. I was certainly doing it as hard as I possibly could. I had wonderful colleagues who I miss deeply. And the issues we were dealing with, and my colleagues are still dealing with, are of profound importance to the success of this government and the success of the country.

23:12It's been the proudest part of my career to lead that institution because of their work, not because of mine. and you say kind things about my distinguished career. I just feel intensely proud of the people I've led and I wish them every success and wish I could still be with them. Look, we sat rapt listening to the evidence that Ollie Robbins gave. And I'm trying to think of an occasion where a civil servant, so senior, was fired so quickly with kind of just thrown out of the building like they were a scoundrel and had been caught stealing money from the till. And I have just left incredulous about the decision made to fire him.

23:56And I would ask, has there been a more egregious and shameful decision by a political master, the Prime Minister, to get rid of someone as a way of saving their own skin? Because it's hard to see it in any other light. Is Ollie Robbins perfect? No, probably there were decisions and maybe things that made along the way. But my God, this was a political decision made by Downing Street and they only wanted one answer. And Ollie Robbins tried to do his best in as proper a way possible to give them what they wanted. And now he finds his life upended by that. Yeah, I mean, if you just rewind back to Thursday, to the brilliant Pippa Courant and the breaking of the story in The Guardian that Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting.

24:47I mean, honestly, there is a world in which that story was not as big as Keir Starmer made it. Keir Starmer could have said, if he'd been over on top of the briefing, he could have said, well, I understand that UK vetting, you know, were leaning against it, but that was not a decision that they had to make. It was one for the Foreign Office and that was taken. And I didn't have anything to do with that because that's the separation of powers. He could have left it there. The fact that he has this tantrum and fires Ollie Robbins is actually the beginning of the problems. Right. He could have just said, yeah, of course, there were going to be differences.

25:28Of course, there are going to be discrepancies. This is why we do it properly. There are going to be very fine balances in the decision making process. But I had to step back from that and allow my brilliant professional civil service to carry that out. He didn't. Right. He walks right into the row and he fires Ollie Robbins. And I genuinely think that was actually the beginning of this set of problems, not the end. I mean, in terms of did Ollie Robbins do anything wrong? Look, you've already commented on the fact that Emily Thornberry is getting pretty annoyed that there isn't more stuff written down.

26:03We'd like to see a few more notes. We'd like to see a few more minutes. Could you just tell us if there were phone calls, you know, who you spoke to or the rest of it? He doesn't seem to reveal the detail of where those records were kept, or he says that he hasn't got those records anymore. And I guess there is still a question over, if he was doing it again, would he really pass Mandelson? Would he really have passed Mandelson knowing that there was this sort of balance of danger and that the vetting office was leading against it? What would he respond to that? I guess he's already responded.

26:36He said, look, it would have been incredibly awkward for UK-US relations because the thing had been done. It was a fait accompli. Look, I think processes are going to change a bit as a result of this whole fiasco. And it's ugly, the fiasco that we have witnessed over the past few days. And we've seen a very, very good civil servant sacrificed, it feels like, to save someone else. So that part of it is clear. I think there are still persistent questions and I'm interested now to see that Yvette Cooper has come out to talk about the idea that Matthew Doyle nearly got a job. Yvette Cooper says she's extremely concerned about the claim by Ollie Robbins that Starmer tried to appoint Matthew Doyle, his then comms director, as an ambassador without informing her predecessor.

27:24And she says, I was the Home Secretary at the time that I understand this had taken place. So I was not involved and don't know the circumstances. I am, of course, extremely concerned at any suggestion that the permanent secretary or permanent under secretary of the Foreign Office would be told not to inform the foreign secretary. I can also confirm that the case that he raised, it would not have been an appropriate appointment. So I think number 10, I think Yvette Cooper, by making this statement, has pointed a finger back at number 10 and saying, what the frigging hell was going on with you saying, find an ambassador job for Matthew Doyle?

28:02This looks quite ugly. And there is a beautiful irony that Keir Starmer might in the end be brought down, not by Peter Mandelson, but about the attempt to appoint Matthew Doyle. Because at this point, it's not like a pattern, right? Which outside of the Westminster bubble no one had heard of Matthew. Nobody had heard of. But this is the trouble. I think the public is generous up to a point about something that looks like a genuine mistake. When it looks like a pattern of behaviour, when it looks like cushy jobs, when it looks like let's see what we can get away with now and please don't tell my colleague David Lammy, then it starts looking really grubby.

28:41And I think that's where people just lose faith. And that is where expectation and reality are in such sort of sharp disharmony. You know, with Boris Johnson, when he was prime minister, and there were all these scrapes, was anyone surprised? No. We kind of knew that Boris Johnson was charismatic, but a bit of a rogue. Keir Starmer promised the British people something very different. And whilst it may not have been proven that he has lied, I think what emerges is a feeling that he is slippery, legalistic, evasive and will do what is necessary to preserve himself. And that ain't a good look when you've told people to vote for me because I am going to clean up our politics.

29:29I should say we haven't had a response to the Doyle claims yet from number 10. And we're pretty keen to hear what they tell us. We have heard on some of the other claims that, and this is in response to whether officials in the office have been nagged or cajoled or bullied by Morgan McSweeney, they say no. This is their words. As I said earlier, there's a distinction clearly between asking reasonably for updates on the appointment process. I would draw a distinction between the idea of pressure and, you know, being kept informed about the process and the progress of the appointment. So they will push back on the idea of the context that that we just wanted updates.