A former senior official in Britain’s foreign ministry has claimed he faced “an atmosphere of pressure” from Downing Street to approve Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to Washington, in incendiary evidence to MPs on Tuesday.
Olly Robbins, sacked last week by British prime minister Keir Starmer as head of the foreign office, said he encountered “a genuinely dismissive attitude” to the vetting of Mandelson, who failed an internal security check.
“There was a very strong expectations . . . coming from Number 10 that he needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible,” Robbins said on Tuesday, at the start of a marathon appearance before MPs.
His comments will intensify pressure on Starmer, who said on Monday it was “incredible” that Robbins had failed to alert him or other officials to the red flags raised about Mandelson’s appointment.
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Robbins, who is taking legal advice on his sacking, attempted to turn the tables on Number 10, claiming he authorised Mandelson’s appointment under duress from Starmer’s office.
In a separate damaging revelation, Robbins said Starmer last year asked him to find a “head of mission” diplomatic role for Matthew Doyle. The former Number 10 director of communications, who left his role in March last year, was stripped of the Labour whip this year over his links with a convicted sex offender.
“I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then foreign secretary, which was uncomfortable,” Robbins said, referring to David Lammy. “It was, to be honest, hard to find something that I thought might be suitable.”
During two-and-a-half hours of questioning on the Mandelson affair, Robbins said that when he took up his post as head of the foreign, commonwealth and development office on January 20th last year, he discovered “what I felt to be a genuinely dismissive attitude to his vetting clearance”.
He noted that by the time Mandelson was vetted, Starmer had already announced his appointment as ambassador to the US, King Charles had been informed and the New Labour grandee was receiving highly classified briefings.
“There was an atmosphere of constant chasing,” he told the Commons foreign affairs committee. “Very frequent [phone calls] from private office to private office, [asking] ‘has this been delivered yet?’.
A failure to grant Mandelson’s security clearance “would have damaged” relations with US president Donald Trump’s White House, Robbins added.
Senior figures in the cabinet office believed there was not even any need to vet Mandelson for the job of US ambassador, Robbins revealed.
Nevertheless, he said developed vetting was carried out to the “normal high standards” by the in-house UK Security Vetting (UKSV) team and that he complied with all the rules.
Robbins said: “UKSV considered Mandelson a ‘borderline’ case, leaning towards recommending that clearance be denied.”
But to astonished looks from MPs, Robbins said he never saw the written vetting report on Mandelson and that he was only told about its conclusions verbally.
Robbins acknowledged that MPs might find this “odd” but said it was standard practice. Emily Thornberry, Labour committee chair, exclaimed: “This is a wholly exceptional circumstance?” Robbins replied: “No.”
Robbins said the red flags raised about Mandelson did not relate to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, but declined to go into details.
He said “mitigations” had been imposed on Mandelson related to his contact with previous business clients, via the Global Counsel lobbying firm that he founded, which included Chinese firms.
Starmer on Monday expressed dismay that Robbins did not report the vetting red flags even after Mandelson was sacked as ambassador last September.
But Robbins said he still did not see the written report at that point, even though “he considered the possibility of taking the unusual step of asking to see the UKSV documentation”.
He said that having taken advice from theforeign, commonwealth and development office and cabinet office, he “decided to adhere to normal practice and did not pursue this further”.
As a consequence, even as a political and media storm raged around Starmer last year, neither Robbins nor any minister or Downing Street official had actually seen Mandelson’s vetting report.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, said that “the ‘constant pressure’ Number 10 applied to the appointment and their ‘dismissive attitude’ to vetting Mandelson” made it clear that Starmer’s claim that “full due process” had been followed was not true.
“Keir Starmer has misled the House,” she said. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
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