Sir Olly Robbins is taking legal advice after being sacked by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer as head of the Foreign Office, as he prepares to answer MPs’ questions over the Lord Peter Mandelson vetting scandal.
Robbins feels aggrieved over his dismissal and is consulting lawyers ahead of an appearance before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, according to people briefed on the matter.
One senior former Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office official said Robbins’ sacking — which was announced at 10.52pm on Thursday — had been “ugly”.
“Starmer has been casting around for someone to blame, other than himself. It wasn’t just the firing, it was the pile-on afterwards. It’s another person thrown under the bus,” the person added.
The prime minister, who has rejected calls to resign, will use a statement to the House of Commons on Monday to set out his own account of events, in which he will lay the blame for the affair on Robbins.
Starmer will argue he should have been told by Robbins that Mandelson had failed a vetting check before he took up his post as UK ambassador to Washington, and that it was “staggering” he had been left in the dark.
Number 10 figures believe Robbins missed four chances to speak out about the failed vetting: when it first crossed his desk, then when Mandelson was sacked in September over his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, then again when the government was forced by parliament to release related correspondence, and finally last month when ministers pledged a review of security vetting.
Cat Little, Cabinet Office permanent secretary, found out that Mandelson failed the vetting in late March while gathering files to release to MPs.
“Cat had to battle Olly to get the documents . . . it has been a battle to get stuff out of the FCDO,” said one Downing Street figure.
Robbins’ friends said they did not expect the former mandarin to be “vindictive” on Tuesday but that he would give a full account of what happened. “He’ll be thoughtful and strategic,” said one. Robbins declined to comment.
His dismissal has sent a chill through Whitehall, with warnings that Starmer’s willingness to dismiss senior staff will deter people from taking top jobs.
“No one really feels they know how to succeed and know they will very readily get dispensed with,” said a former official, noting that Starmer had only recently disposed of the head of the civil service, Sir Chris Wormald.
Sir Simon McDonald, former permanent secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said on Saturday: “Number 10 wanted a scalp and it wanted it quickly . . . I cannot see that there was any process, any fairness, any giving him the chance to set out his case, and that feels, to me, wrong.”
Whitehall officials and friends of Robbins believe that he thought he was doing his job by imposing measures that mitigated the risks highlighted by the vetting report.
One colleague said Robbins had been left in “a very particular position” because of Starmer’s determination to send Mandelson to the US and the vetting rules under which the FCDO was working.
By the time the New Labour grandee failed his “developed vetting” — an intrusive and highly personal process carried out by an in-house team of security experts — he was already packing his bags for Washington.
Starmer had announced the appointment on December 20 2024 and Mandelson was told he would receive confidential briefings from January 6, before the formal vetting had taken place.
Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s then chief of staff, was said by Downing Street insiders to be impatient to finalise the formalities, with Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president on January 20. Mandelson took up the post on February 10.
Robbins’s allies said Starmer already knew about Mandelson’s longstanding relationship with Epstein when he announced his appointment in December.
A report prepared by Whitehall on December 4 and handed to Starmer concluded there was a “general reputational risk” over the Epstein relationship, while Mandelson’s business links with Russia and China were well known. He had resigned from his advisory firm Global Counsel before the 2024 general election but maintained a stake in the company.
Robbins has confirmed that the developed vetting also raised flags about Mandelson’s business dealings. But he previously told MPs that he put in place “mitigations” to deal with perceived conflicts of interest.
Robbins is expected to argue on Tuesday that by putting in place such mitigations, he had addressed the red flags raised in the vetting process.
He will also argue that the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 made civil servants responsible for vetting rather than ministers, saying secretaries of state “do not cover national security vetting”.
But former cabinet minister Jack Straw, who introduced that legislation, argued there was nothing in the Act that “remotely prohibits officials informing the prime minister” about such issues.
Robbins’ close friend Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of GCHQ, told the BBC earlier this week: “As far as I can tell, from what little we know, there is no abuse of process . . . Not only is there no duty to disclose the details of a vetting case, there is a duty not to disclose them.”
Downing Street believes the fact that Little told Starmer about the vetting result — albeit not until this week — showed Robbins could have approached the prime minister months ago.
“Robbins’ position is there was no way he could have given the information to anyone. Now, yes, there are complications around it, but Cat shows that if you put in the hard yards with the legal and security people, there was a way to tell the PM,” said a Number 10 figure.
One Labour official who knows Starmer well said that while McSweeney, a protégé of Mandelson’s, wanted to send him to Washington, Starmer was never that close to him.
“Keir didn’t even really like Mandy, and suspended his judgment as he does so often,” the person said. “At that point, the machine took it [Mandelson’s appointment] as his intention and does what the British state does, which is bend the process to the signal it thinks is being broadcast from the principal.”