Starmer did not lie and has not considered quitting over Mandelson row – Jones
Sir Keir Starmer did not lie to MPs and will not quit over the Lord Peter Mandelson scandal, his right-hand man in government has said.
Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones said Sir Keir was “furious” that the Foreign Office overruled a recommendation by security experts not to clear Lord Peter Mandelson to become UK ambassador to the US, something the premier only found out about this week. The Foreign Office’s top civil servant, Sir Olly Robbins, was effectively fired after the disclosure that officials took the rare step of overruling the recommendation from UK Security Vetting. Sir Keir will face MPs on Monday in a critical moment for his premiership, as Mr Jones acknowledged “it’s of a scale of a problem that we’ve not experienced in government before”. 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. But Mr Jones said Sir Keir would not quit and told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The Prime Minister was very clear that due process was followed. “The fact that due process involved the right for the Foreign Office to ignore the recommendation of the security vetting team is astonishing.” Asked if Sir Keir had considered resigning, Mr Jones told BBC Breakfast: “No.” Mr Jones, the senior Cabinet Office minister, said he had suspended the right for the Foreign Office and a “small number” of other organisations to overrule recommendations from UK Security Vetting, the specialist unit charged with carrying out in-depth background checks for appointments to sensitive posts. 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 including Mr Jones were unaware until the Guardian broke the story on Thursday. Mr 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.” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the BBC: “What we have seen is deliberate dishonesty. It doesn’t matter which of these stories the Prime Minister has told us, he has lied, and that is resignation time.” She added: “It is utterly preposterous that throughout this period the Prime Minister did not know that Mandelson failed his security vetting, and (after) all the questions that we’ve been asking over the last seven months, that he, the chief prosecutor, didn’t ask what happened with the security vetting – it just doesn’t add up.” Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: “Keir Starmer had already made a catastrophic error of judgment. Now it looks as though he has also misled Parliament and lied to the British public. If that is the case, he must go.” 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.
Published: by Radio NewsHub