THE Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson did the job a national journalist should do over Sir Olly Robbins’s performance at the foreign affairs select committee: she refused to follow the herd in garlanding the sacked Foreign Office permanent under-secretary and instead exercised some scepticism.
She wrote a piece after the hearing headed ‘Keir Starmer and Olly Robbins deserve each other’ with the strapline ‘Forget common sense and integrity. We are now ruled by the “Process Men”, who artfully ignore the difference between right and wrong’.
She asked: ‘Did Sir Olly tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – or did he give a highly plausible yet partial account that put himself and his civil servants in the clear while dumping the Prime Minister in richly deserved deep doo doo? To be honest, I have my doubts.’
She pointed out that on January 28, 2025, United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV) recommended that ‘developed vetting’ (the most comprehensive level) for Peter Mandelson be denied. Had this recommendation been accepted by the Foreign Office, Mandelson would not have been appointed Britain’s Ambassador to the United States.
Pearson wrote: ‘Sir Olly insisted repeatedly that he was told at a meeting with the head of vetting [at the Foreign Office] that UKSV was “leaning towards recommending against, but it was a borderline case”. But was it really? A terrier-like Sir John Whittingdale [a former Culture Secretary and a Conservative member of the select committee] pointed out that there were three coloured boxes on the vetting sheet – green, amber and red. For Mandelson the tick was in the red box.’
Pearson said this appeared to be news to Robbins. ‘It was briefed to me that they were leaning against granting clearance,’ he said again. Whittingdale insisted: ‘We are told that recommendation for UKSV was denial.’ Robbins replied: ‘Those are recommendations, not decisions. My team will have gone through it and made an assessment.’
‘You what?’ Pearson exclaimed. ‘Recommendations, assessments, mitigations. It was peak Sir Humphrey. He speaks no speech recognisable to humans. And, therefore, we might argue, he takes no decisions, with which ordinary folk might agree. But they don’t ask us, do they?’
She concluded her piece: ‘Not obtaining security clearance before the plum job was handed out was a disaster – as Cabinet Secretary Sir Simon Case had warned, and Sir Keir and Sir Olly admitted as much. But the conclusion that Mandelson posed a threat to national security was frightfully inconvenient. A diplomatic crisis had to be averted. And so it was. But they won’t ever tell us how – a matter of national security, you know.
‘It is all very British – and by that I don’t mean Britain when it was run by a small number of highly competent people with the national interest at heart. This is the Britain of plausible deniability. The “Process Men” rule us until we unite and say we want common sense and right from wrong back.’
Pearson is surely right that Robbins has been part of the slippery culture that has prevailed in government since New Labour came to power in 1997. In fact, he achieved mandarin status within it. It was striking that the select committee did not properly question him about the culture that has created the Mandelson scandal. Robbins told the committee: ‘I have been a civil servant for 25 years. I can recite the Civil Service code and the Book of Common Prayer . . . We rigorously followed the process despite some people thinking it was not a process that needed to be followed.’
The Civil Service has a rule book that belongs to the pre-New Labour age of Christian Britain. But since the dark age dawned, civil servants have had to deal with thugs and tricksters in government. Their ethos is summed up in the instruction Robbins’s predecessor as permanent under-secretary, Sir Philip Barton, received from Stamer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, to expedite Mandelson’s appointment: ‘Just f***ing approve it.’
It was actually a reflection of that culture when the Labour chair of the select committee, Dame Emily Thornberry, insisted on repeating the instruction verbatim, in spite of her own quite impressively forensic cross-questioning of Robbins.
Until, the Lord willing, the nightmare is over and Britain is once again, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, ‘godly and quietly governed’, how can the culture that has taken root in government fail to produce more scandals?
Robbins will no doubt know by heart The Third Collect, for Aid against all Perils at Evening Prayer: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night: for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.’
Amen indeed.
