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Political selections for ambassador posts should be subject to a veto by MPs, a parliamentary committee has recommended, as it made damning criticisms of how Peter Mandelson became Britain’s top diplomat in Washington.
The foreign affairs select committee concluded that Mandelson’s appointment was “nothing short of disastrous”, “highly damaging” for the British government and “painful and offensive to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein”.
Keir Starmer’s unusual decision to make a political appointment to the UK’s most high-profile ambassadorial role came under growing pressure from September ۲۰۲۵, when Mandelson, a longstanding figure of the Labour party, was sacked after the emergence of email exchanges with Epstein published by the US Department of Justice. Ambassadors are typically drawn from the UK’s diplomatic service of career civil servants.
The cross-party group of MPs, which scrutinises the work of the Foreign Office, were denied the opportunity to question Mandelson before he was appointed or took up his posting. Given the disastrous way the appointment unravelled, the committee has argued all political appointees to diplomatic posts should have to appear before them and be subject to a veto.
The committee, chaired by the Labour MP Emily Thornberry, said its initial queries after Mandelson’s withdrawal from Washington did not lead to “full answers” from the government, but rather “partial truths”. But months later, in April ۲۰۲۶, the committee heard further evidence over several days from some of the key officials who played a part in Mandelson’s appointment.
Their testimony came in the wake of revelations from the Guardian that the Foreign Office had overruled the recommendation of the UK’s security vetting agency, which had concluded in late January ۲۰۲۵ that Mandelson should not be awarded the high-level security clearance necessary for nearly all roles in the department. Among the vetting agency’s concerns, according to sources, were his associations with senior figures in China, Russia, and Israel, as well as a £۱m loan.
But by the time senior civil servants in the Foreign Office were reviewing the vetting agency’s findings, Mandelson had been announced by Starmer as the next ambassador to the United States. The role had been approved by the US government and King Charles.
The committee has recommended public appointments should not be announced until security clearance has been granted.
Starmer’s government was forced to publish hundreds of pages of documents about Mandelson’s appointment, but despite this unprecedented release, the committee felt there were still “unanswered questions”.
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They criticised the “appalling” record keeping by the Foreign Office and Downing Street that has left MPs unclear whether the evidence documenting the key decisions of Mandelson’s appointment exist, have been lost, or were passed to the Metropolitan police, who are withholding some documents which may be relevant to ongoing investigations.
But among the documents that do exist is extensive correspondence between senior officials around the time Mandelson’s appointment was announced by the prime minister in December ۲۰۲۴. They were debating whether Mandelson needed security vetting, on the basis he was a member of the House of Lords and the privy council, a centuries-old group of advisers to the monarch.
The committee said it was “extraordinary” more time seemed to be spent on this question than whether the vetting process “would throw up problems that should have been a bar to his very appointment.”
Starmer, who has apologised for appointing Mandelson, faces further criticism over his decision to sack the head of the Foreign Office, Olly Robbins. Robbins was one of the top civil servants who decided to give Mandelson security clearance with “mitigations” on what he said was a “borderline” finding by vetting officials, although no evidence of those mitigations or to justify a description of “borderline” has been published.
Starmer said he lost confidence in Robbins for failing to tell him Mandelson had failed vetting. The committee said Robbins believed he was “delivering the outcome that was wanted” and concluded his dismissal “seems to have been taken without full due process and the establishment of the facts”.
It is Robbins who may have the last laugh. As Starmer, a fellow former high-flying civil servant, prepares to leave Downing Street, there is some suggestion his successor, Andy Burnham, may bring Robbins back into government as national security adviser.
