A Prime Minister in the dark, or in denial? Mandelson vetting row raises serious questions, writes Andrew Marr

It isn’t a pretty one. The Prime Minister says he is furious and incredulous he wasn’t told about Peter Mandelson‘s vetting. Robbins says that’s because he wasn’t interested: Number Ten was “dismissive” of it.

The Foreign Office had been put under “constant pressure” to clear Mandelson, in phone call after phone call. Having decided to check his suitability only after appointing him - against advice - Downing Street simply wanted to know when the peer was going to be given a thumbs-up by the system. This had to be done as fast as humanly possible: there had never been any interest “in whether, but only an interest in when.”

The main problem for the prime minister is that this makes his posture in the Commons yesterday look completely ridiculous. He presented himself as an innocent, bewildered party left entirely in the dark for inexplicable reasons - almost a bystander in his own government.

But this now seems completely impossible. His own private office had piled on the pressure to just get it “****ing done.” Starmer’s assertion yesterday is that if he’d known about the vetting, he would not have appointed Mandelson. That is now very hard to believe.

Robbins rightly did not divulge any details of the problems with Mandelson's vetting, nor had he seen them himself. The wrinkle is that Robbins thought - though he hadn’t seen the detail - that the decision to refuse Mandelson clearance was a “borderline” one, and could be mitigated. Going through the paperwork published so far, and given what was already known about his Russian and Chinese connections, that is not the impression MPs have.

He did not tell the prime minister because that would have broken the law and civil service codes about privacy. Anyway, Starmer had already made the decision, told the King and begun the process in Washington. Blocking it would have caused serious diplomatic problems.

Meanwhile, we learn that another part of the Mandelson clique, the former head of communications Matthew Doyle, who had also protected a former paedophile, was being suggested for another senior diplomatic position. What is the Foreign Office supposed to make of this?

At any rate, the result is that an incurious leader has fired a diligent servant for doing what he was told. This was a grim morning for the prime minister and further damaged his reputation. This scandal is, I’m afraid, not even halfway over and will grind on for some time.

Talking to Labour MPs this morning, there is a mood of despair. The parliamentary party has not resolved to remove Keir Starmer, even if they have diminishing faith in him. No alternative leader has come out to declare themselves. The most obvious one, Andy Burnham, is still blocked by the party from standing in a by-election. The cabinet seems frozen and voiceless.

If you were an opposition leader, what you would most want is a badly wounded Prime Minister with no exit route for his party. That is, more or less, where we are today.

Plenty of people will think this is a dizzyingly complicated and ultimately unimportant story. They are completely wrong: we are moving towards a Reform-led upending, not just of the Labour Party but of British social democracy.

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Andrew Marr is an author, journalist and presenter for LBC.

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