Reap and ye shall sow. Remember all the occasions Keir Starmer urged Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to resign and take responsibilities for the failures or misdeeds of their governments? If you play holier than thou, the don’t be surprised when people hold you to the same standards as you held other people to.
Keir Starmer constantly reminds us that he was a top barrister. Top barristers know that ignorance is no defence in a court of law. It follows therefore, that it is no defence in the court of public opinion.
If it really is true – and I have my doubts – that no one in Number 10 knew that Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting, then that says an awful lot about the way Keir Starmer runs his government. What you don’t know can’t hurt you seems to be maxim.
It stretches credulity to the extreme to believe that Olly Robbins didn’t feel it was worth mentioning to anyone in Number 10 that he had overruled the official vetting process. Surely, an experience civil servant like him – and remember he was a spook at one time – would have at least informed the Cabinet Secretary, who would then have been duty bound to inform the prime minister?
It may be now that Starmer’s habit of throwing people under the bus to save his own skin might catch up with him. He despatched Chris Wormald, the previous Cabinet Secretary with no notice whatsoever to give the impression he was making a new start in the running of the Number 10 operation. He’s now done the same to Olly Robbins. Neither man owes Starmer anything and it there are already rumours that Robbins is determined not to be the Fall Guy for all this. Wormald may also like to exact a little revenge.
A former No 10 Chief of Staff told me on Friday he found it inconceivable the PM would not have been informed. Another former adviser told me: “It is well documented that this PM reads all advice notes, hardly ever marking them but returning them to red box without comment. Hard to believe that the PM sat in his downing st bunker reading every bit of advice bar this one. And if it was not sent to him, it is difficult to believe that he runs Whitehall so badly that they only send him notes with good news. He can’t be reading much at the moment if that’s the case.” Ouch.
If the system really does allow a senior civil servant to overrule security vetting, the system stinks. And if Olly Robbins defence really is that it would have been inappropriate to tell the Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister he had done so, we have a civil service that has gone rogue.
In the end the buck stops with the man at the top. Starmer will do his best to wriggle out of this on some kind of technicality, but the trouble is that the whole country knows the hole think stinks. We see you, Prime Minister.
He has undoubtedly misled Parliament. It doesn’t matter that it may not have been deliberate. He failed to check his facts at the time and ask any questions about the vetting process. When he was informed what had happened on Tuesday evening, he didn’t rush to Parliament and clarify and correct what he had said. If The Guardian hadn’t got the scoop, none of us would be any the wiser. By not going to Parliament on Wednesday morning, that in itself is a breach of the Ministerial Code and would require his resignation. Boris Johnson resigned over something far less serious, when he misled Parliament over Partygate. Starmer’s problem is that this involves national security, not eating cake.
What may save Starmer’s skin in the short term is the lack of any other obvious leader to take over. Burnham is not in Parliament, Angela Rayner is still under investigation by HMRC and Wes Streeting’s opponents are trying to smear him, depicting him as Mandelson’s protégé. Shabana Mahmood may be popular in Parliament, but Labour Party members won’t vote for something they see as more right- wing than Wes Streeting.
What a pickle.
And he’s only got himself to blame. We were told in July 2024 that the adults were back in the room.
Oh how we now laugh.