Keir Starmer must quit over Lord Mandelson row, says John Swinney

Scotland’s First Minister has called on Sir Keir Starmer to quit over the revelations that Lord Peter Mandelson was appointed US ambassador despite failing a vetting process.

John Swinney is the latest party leader to urge the Prime Minister to resign after calls from the Tories, Reform, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

The Labour leader has said he was not told by the now-sacked Foreign Office official, Sir Olly Robbins, that he had overruled security advice on Lord Mandelson.

Sir Keir said he was “absolutely furious” and the failure to inform him was “staggering”.

Speaking to reporters in Dundee as he unveiled the SNP’s election battle bus, Mr Swinney said it was the Prime Minister’s “incompetence” that was “staggering”.

He said: “I have no reason to doubt that the Prime Minister only found out this week, but if he did, it demonstrates a startling level of incompetence that he only found out this week.

“This issue has been kicking around for months and the Prime Minister has made very definitive statements to the House of Commons and to other media events where he has definitively said the full vetting process was carried out and left the impression it had been successful.

“Clearly, he hadn’t checked that point and that is a staggering level of incompetence on the appointment of an ambassador to the most significant ambassadorial role.”

Mr Swinney said the “incompetence” was “incompatible with being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom”.

He added: “He’s not up to the job because by his own admission he has accepted that he made a mistake with the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the ambassador to the United States.

“But having made that mistake, he’s also now admitting that he didn’t even go through proper consideration as to what would be all the issues that should be looked at in that appointment.

“That’s a level of incompetence that should worry us all about his capacity to be Prime Minister and that’s why I don’t think he can carry on being the Prime Minister.”

It comes after a former Whitehall civil servant claimed Sir Olly had been “thrown under the bus” by No 10.

Lord Simon McDonald, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office from 2015 to 2020, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Number 10 “wanted a scalp and they wanted it quickly”.

Lord Mandelson, a political appointment rather than a career diplomat, was sacked from his Washington role last September when details emerged about his relationship with paedophile 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 the peer’s dealings with Epstein continued after the financier’s conviction for child sex offences.