Sir Keir Starmer claims he was not told Mandelson failed security vetting calling it 'unforgivable'

Sir Keir Starmer said it is “unforgivable” that he was not told Lord Peter Mandelson had failed to pass security vetting for the role of ambassador to the US.

The Prime Minister said he was “absolutely furious” and it was “staggering” that he had not been informed the Foreign Office had overruled the recommendation from specialists in the UK Security Vetting team.

The Foreign Office’s top civil servant, Sir Olly Robbins, was sacked last night after the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper lost confidence in him over the scandal.

Sir Keir, who is in Paris for a summit on the Iran crisis, said: “That I wasn’t told that Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting when he was appointed is staggering.

“That I wasn’t told that he had failed security vetting when I was telling Parliament that due process had been followed is unforgivable.

“Not only was I not told, no minister was told, and I’m absolutely furious about that.”

Sir Keir will face MPs on Monday under pressure from opponents to resign for misleading Parliament about the situation.

The Prime Minister had previously told MPs that “full due process” was followed in the appointment process, leading to calls for his resignation for lying to the House.

The Prime Minister was not aware that the former Labour grandee was granted developed vetting against the advice of UK Security Vetting until Tuesday night, and other senior ministers were unaware until the Guardian broke the story on Thursday.

On the morning media round, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, accepted the situation was embarrassing and “the Prime Minister is furious”.

He told LBC Radio: “Given the nature of the problem here, not just in terms of the appointment, but the position that it has put the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers in as a consequence of the decision to overrule the recommendation of UK Security Vetting, and the fact that the system even allowed for that to happen in the first place, it’s of a scale of a problem that we’ve not experienced in government before.

“It is beyond unacceptable.”

Asked if Sir Olly had resigned or been fired, Mr Jones said: “He has lost the confidence of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, which is effectively a dismissal.”

Mr Jones said information on the vetting process could be released to Parliament under the terms of the motion passed by MPs demanding access to the files relating to Lord Mandelson’s appointment.

Documents produced by UK Security Vetting are tightly controlled.

Mr Jones said: “They go through financial, personal, sexual, religious and other types of background information and that is why it is kept extremely private on a portal that only a few people have access to.

“The Prime Minister was not given those documents because he would not routinely be given them about individuals’ appointments.”

Kemi Badenoch said the Prime Minister is “taking the public for fools” and questioned why Foreign Office officials would overall security vetting procedures.

The Tory leader told the BBC: “The Prime Minister and ministers like Darren Jones are taking the public for fools, they must think that everybody is stupid. Why would officials overrule an appointment of a politician?

“Let’s remember, Peter Mandelson was not a civil servant who they were covering up for, he was a Labour Party member who had been brought in from outside.

“Why would officials say, ‘Well he’s failed the security vetting, but let’s not tell the Prime Minister’, why would they do that? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t buy this story. I don’t think that they would overrule vetting unless it was for something minor,” she added.

Mrs Badenoch said Sir Keir had breached the ministerial code by failing to notify Parliament that he had told it “something that isn’t true” at the earliest opportunity .

“The earliest opportunity was Wednesday, during Prime Minister’s Questions, why didn’t he tell anyone that?” she said.

“If it is true that they only just found out, they had an opportunity to say so, and they did not. That itself is a resignation offence.”

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has called for the Privileges Committee to investigate the Prime Minister, in the same way it did with Boris Johnson over Partygate.

He said: “We need to get to the bottom of exactly what Keir Starmer knew when, and whether he intentionally misled Parliament over this appalling scandal. The public deserves the truth, not another cover up.

“If it turns out that Starmer was aware at the time that Mandelson’s security vetting was overruled, that would represent a major abuse of power and a betrayal of the national interest.

“Boris Johnson eventually resigned after misleading Parliament. If Starmer has done the same, he must be held to the same standard.”

The Green Party and Reform UK have also called for Sir Keir to resign.

Lord Mandelson, a political appointment rather than a career diplomat, was sacked from his Washington role last September when more details emerged about his relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019.

Sir Keir was already under fire over the decision to give Lord Mandelson the job, despite it being known that his dealings with Epstein continued after the financier’s conviction for child sex offences.

Questions over his judgment intensified after the first batch of documents related to the decision, published last month, showed that he was warned before announcing Lord Mandelson’s ambassadorship of a “general reputational risk” over his association with Epstein.

That warning stemmed from the first part of the checks, carried out by the Cabinet Office, which was based on information in the public domain at the time.

The second was the highly confidential background vetting by security officials, which followed the announcement but came before Lord Mandelson took up his role in February 2025.

Information unearthed in this process, including any concerns, is never shared with ministers, and the result is binary, either clearing the candidate or barring them.