Robbins faces MPs over Mandelson vetting secrecy claims, Starmer says

Sir Olly Robbins was under pressure to explain how a warning that Lord Mandelson had failed the highest level of government security checks did not reach Sir Keir Starmer before the appointment went through. The question now goes beyond one ambassador and one private warning: it goes to who in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, No 10 and the Cabinet Office knew what, and why the chain of accountability broke down.

Starmer told MPs on 20 April 2026 that he discovered on 14 April that the Foreign Office had overridden the security vetting recommendation and withheld that fact from him. He said he would not have appointed Mandelson had he known he had failed vetting. The prime minister also said the information should have been shared when Mandelson was appointed, when he was later sacked, and when he ordered a review of the vetting process. He said Sir Chris Wormald should have been told when he was asked to review the appointment process last September, and that Yvette Cooper should have known when she was answering questions from the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

The appointment timeline has become central to the dispute. Mandelson was announced as ambassador to Washington, D.C., in December 2024, before in-depth vetting was complete, and formally took up the post on 10 February 2025. UK Security Vetting began the process in late December and on 28 January 2025 recommended that Developed Vetting clearance be denied. Developed Vetting is the highest level of government security clearance. The Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office then granted clearance anyway.

Mandelson lasted seven months in the post before being sacked over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He later resigned from the House of Lords. The episode has now turned into a test of whether senior officials treated a failed clearance as an operational matter to be managed, rather than a political warning that should have been escalated to the top.

The Foreign Affairs Committee has asked Robbins to give evidence on 21 April 2026, after he had already appeared before MPs alongside Wormald on the vetting and clearance process. The committee said recent reporting showed Mandelson had failed Developed Vetting and that the FCDO had overruled that decision. Robbins’s evidence is likely to be central because he has already said it was clear Starmer wanted to make the appointment himself, while Wormald told MPs that civil servants had no veto over the prime minister’s preferred appointee.

Downing Street is now trying to push responsibility back toward the Foreign Office, saying Robbins and the FCDO overruled the failed vetting without informing Starmer, David Lammy, or anyone in No 10, including Morgan McSweeney. The Ministerial Code requires ministers to give accurate and truthful information to Parliament and correct inadvertent errors at the earliest opportunity, while ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament are expected to resign. That places the focus squarely on how far the warning travelled, and whether this was a one-off lapse or a deeper blind spot in how appointments and security clearance are handled at the top of government.