Starmer: ‘Unforgivable’ that I was not told Mandelson failed security vetting

Sir Keir Starmer said it is “unforgivable” that he was not told Lord Peter Mandelson had failed to pass security vetting for the role of ambassador to the US.

The Prime Minister said he was “absolutely furious” and it was “staggering” that he had not been informed the Foreign Office had overruled the recommendation from specialists in the UK Security Vetting team.

The Foreign Office’s top civil servant, Sir Olly Robbins, was sacked on Thursday night after the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper lost confidence in him over the scandal.

Sir Keir, who is in Paris for a summit on the Iran crisis, said: “That I wasn’t told that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting when he was appointed is staggering.

“That I wasn’t told that he had failed security vetting when I was telling Parliament that due process had been followed is unforgivable.

“Not only was I not told, no minister was told, and I’m absolutely furious about that.”

Sir Keir will face MPs on Monday under pressure from opponents to resign for misleading Parliament about the situation.

The Prime Minister said he would “set out all of the relevant facts” to MPs to offer “full transparency and full accountability”.

Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones said Sir Keir had not lied to the Commons and was not considering his position as a result of the furore.

Sir Keir will face MPs on Monday in a critical moment for his premiership, as Mr Jones acknowledged “it’s of a scale of a problem that we’ve not experienced in government before”.

The Prime Minister was not aware that the former Labour grandee was granted developed vetting against the advice of UK Security Vetting until Tuesday night, and other senior ministers including Mr Jones were unaware until The Guardian broke the story on Thursday.

The Prime Minister had previously told MPs that “full due process” was followed in the appointment process, leading to calls for his resignation for lying to the House.

But Mr Jones said Sir Keir would not quit and told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The Prime Minister was very clear that due process was followed.

“The fact that due process involved the right for the Foreign Office to ignore the recommendation of the security vetting team is astonishing.”

Asked if Sir Keir had considered resigning, Mr Jones told BBC Breakfast: “No.”

Mr Jones, the senior Cabinet Office minister, said he had suspended the right for the Foreign Office and a “small number” of other organisations to overrule recommendations from UK Security Vetting, the specialist unit charged with carrying out in-depth background checks for appointments to sensitive posts.

Documents produced by UK Security Vetting are tightly controlled.

Mr Jones said: “They go through financial, personal, sexual, religious and other types of background information and that is why it is kept extremely private on a portal that only a few people have access to.

“The Prime Minister was not given those documents because he would not routinely be given them about individuals’ appointments.”

But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the BBC: “What we have seen is deliberate dishonesty.

“It doesn’t matter which of these stories the Prime Minister has told us, he has lied, and that is resignation time.”

She added: “It is utterly preposterous that throughout this period the Prime Minister did not know that Mandelson failed his security vetting, and (after) all the questions that we’ve been asking over the last seven months, that he, the chief prosecutor, didn’t ask what happened with the security vetting – it just doesn’t add up.”

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: “Keir Starmer had already made a catastrophic error of judgment.

“Now it looks as though he has also misled Parliament and lied to the British public.

“If that is the case, he must go.”

The SNP, Green Party and Reform UK have also called for Sir Keir to resign.

Lord Mandelson, a political appointment rather than a career diplomat, was sacked from his Washington role last September when more details emerged about his relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019.

Sir Keir was already under fire over the decision to give Lord Mandelson the job, despite it being known that his dealings with Epstein continued after the financier’s conviction for child sex offences.

Questions over his judgment intensified after the first batch of documents related to the decision, published last month, showed that he was warned before announcing Lord Mandelson’s ambassadorship of a “general reputational risk” over his association with Epstein.

That warning stemmed from the first part of the checks, carried out by the Cabinet Office, which was based on information in the public domain at the time.