Starmer would have blocked Mandelson role over vetting failure, says Lammy

“That obviously felt dramatic and serious and unexpected,” he said. “That was the first time I had heard this.”

Asked to clarify whether he or his advisers had been told about Mandelson’s vetting process, or had asked questions about it, during their time at the Foreign Office, he said: “No. And let me just be absolutely clear, in the years in which I have been both in this government and the last government, I have never had any official talk to me about vetting, or the detail of vetting, so I would remember if this had ever been raised with me.”

Robbins received the vetting outcome after Starmer had already announced Mandelson’s appointment and, despite a separate due diligence process, flagged the reputational risk of sending him to Washington.

Allies say he was simply following the rules to keep vetting from ministers, while some insiders have speculated the top civil servant was doing what he believed was expected of him at that stage. Others have suggested that mitigations were already in place after the due diligence report.

Lammy, who is also justice secretary and appointed Robbins to the role in January 2025, said he had found him to be an “outstanding” civil servant. “I don’t know what happened in this circumstance. I’m surprised and shocked by it. He was only a few weeks into the job,” he added.

The foreign affairs committee, meanwhile, published correspondence from the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, to the committee’s chair Emily Thornberry, which said: “I [the foreign secretary] have required the FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] to conduct a full review of all the information that the department has given to your committee on the security vetting process undertaken as part of Lord Mandelson’s appointment.”

The senior Labour minister suggested next month’s local elections were likely to be tough for the Labour party even before the Mandelson row – with polls predicting a brutal set of results across the country – and he regretted it was back in the news.

They said: “It feels to me like these are tough midterm elections. I’ve knocked on a lot of doors up and down the country, particularly in London … There is a mood that has continued of cost of living pressures and angst and concern about public services.

“Local authority elections are to some extent a referendum on concerns about public services. I suspect the electorate will be communicating how they feel to all political parties, but certainly to the governing party, that’s what you would expect.”

Asked whether they would be even tougher as a result of the Mandelson scandal, Lammy said: “Clearly the fallout of Peter Mandelson’s behaviour and the decision to appoint him has … rumbled on for months and months and months.

“I regret that this is back again in the news when actually most people are worried about petrol prices, how the closure of the strait of Hormuz and the war in Iran is going to affect (them).”