A fired top British Foreign Office official has levelled serious accusations against Downing Street, claiming Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office exerted unrelenting pressure on civil servants to fast-track the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the United States while sidelining critical security concerns.
Olly Robbins, who served as the Foreign Office’s most senior civil servant until his dismissal last week, delivered explosive testimony to a parliamentary oversight committee on Tuesday, pulling back the curtain on the chaotic vetting process that has plunged the Starmer government into its worst political scandal in months.
The controversy centers on Mandelson, a veteran Labour Party grandee who was tapped for the prestigious Washington post in December 2024, just weeks before Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration, and took up the role in February 2025. Mandelson was ultimately forced out of the post in September 2025, seven months into the job, after new details emerged of his long-documented close personal ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a New York prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
In his opening remarks to the committee, Robbins laid out how Downing Street’s urgent push for a quick appointment created a dismissive culture around mandatory security vetting. When he took the top Foreign Office role in January 2025, he said, there was a “very strong expectation coming from Number 10 that [Mandelson] needed to be in post and in America as quickly as humanly possible.” That urgency translated to unending pressure on his team, he added: “My office, the foreign secretary’s office, were under constant pressure, there was an atmosphere of constant chasing.”
Contradicting earlier public claims from Starmer, who has insisted all “due process” was followed during the appointment, Robbins confirmed that independent vetting officials had ultimately recommended against granting Mandelson security clearance. He clarified that the case was deemed “borderline,” with vetters leaning toward a denial, but that internal Foreign Office security analysts concluded the identified risks could be managed. Critically, he added, the risks flagged did not stem from Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein – UK media has previously reported the concerns centered on ties between Mandelson’s now-closed lobbying firm and Chinese entities.
Robbins also acknowledged that denying clearance would have created major political headaches for Starmer and the foreign secretary, and could have damaged early UK-US relations under the new Trump administration, but he insisted those factors did not drive the final decision to approve the appointment.
The confirmation that independent vetters recommended rejecting clearance, first reported by *The Guardian* last Thursday, has sparked renewed opposition demands for Starmer’s resignation. The prime minister has pushed back against calls to step down, blaming civil servants for deliberately concealing the recommendation from him and denying he misled Parliament in earlier statements about the scandal. Critics, including former senior civil servants, have accused Starmer of scapegoating Robbins to deflect from his own responsibility for the botched appointment.
The scandal has even drawn comment from former US President Donald Trump, who waded into the controversy this week via his Truth Social platform. Trump, who has previously criticized Starmer over what he sees as insufficient UK support for his actions in Iran, agreed that Mandelson “was a really bad pick” for the Washington post, though he added a brief optimistic note: “Plenty of time to recover, however!”
Beyond the appointment controversy, Mandelson, 72, is also facing separate scrutiny: UK police are currently investigating allegations of misconduct in office from his time as a Labour minister more than 15 years ago. He was arrested and released earlier this year in connection with the probe, and has not been charged, repeatedly denying any criminal wrongdoing.
On Tuesday, following testimony from Robbins, UK Parliament was set to hold an emergency debate on the scandal, requested by opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, who said there remain “serious questions about what [Starmer] knew and when.” In response to the growing outcry, Starmer announced Monday that he has launched a full review of the UK’s government security vetting process to prevent similar breakdowns in the future.