Olly Robbins Top Foreign Office civil servant, is out as Starmer government again reels from the Mandelson scandal.
Olly Robbins is out. Keir Starmer is still in. That tells you everything you need to know about how power works in this country.
Dennis Skinner said it better than anyone alive or dead could say it now. “When posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants.” He was not speaking in abstract. He was describing a system so ingrained in British public life that its practitioners no longer even notice they are doing it.
Watch them not noticing now.
Sir Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, has been removed from his post. Starmer and Yvette Cooper, it is reported, have lost confidence in him.
Confidence… That is the word they use when they mean something they cannot say plainly. What they mean is: you are inconvenient. What they mean is: someone must carry this, and it will not be us.
It will not be Starmer, who made the appointment. It will not be David Lammy, who was Foreign Secretary when the overrule was authorised. It will not be anyone whose name appears on a ballot paper or a ministerial car. It will be the civil servant. It will be the man whose job, in theory, was to do what the politicians instructed.
The Guardian’s investigation revealed that Mandelson failed his security vetting in late January 2025, after which the Foreign Office reached for a rarely used authority to override the recommendation from security officials. Robbins was the chief civil servant in that department at the time. It was Yvette Cooper and Robbins who wrote jointly to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in September 2025, stating that Mandelson’s vetting had “concluded with DV clearance being granted by the FCDO.”
That statement, we now know, omitted the fact that the clearance was only granted after a failed assessment was overruled. Parliament was not told that. Parliament was managed.
Now Robbins is out, and Cooper remains at the Foreign Office. Draw your own conclusions about who was managing whom.
This is how the system purges itself while protecting itself. A resignation here, a sacking there, and the man at the top emerges unblemished, sorrowful, learning lessons. Morgan McSweeney went first, taking “full responsibility” for advising Starmer on an appointment Starmer had plainly already decided to make. Now Robbins follows. The servants fall in sequence so that the master need not fall at all.
Here is what must not be forgotten in the noise of the sacking. Starmer did not appoint Mandelson despite their relationship. He appointed him because of it. Mandelson was his mentor. His fellow member on the Trilateral Commission. His closest ideological ally and architect of the New Labour settlement, Starmer, has worked his entire career to restore. The vetting failure, the Epstein association, the financial crisis leaks, the arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office: none of it altered the fundamental fact that Mandelson was always going to be Starmer’s man in Washington, because Starmer needed his man in Washington. The rest was paperwork.
Kemi Badenoch has stated that Starmer told Parliament three times that full due process was followed, and that the Prime Minister must take responsibility. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens have called for his resignation, with the Lib Dem leader saying that if Starmer misled Parliament and lied to the public, he must go. These are not fringe voices. These are leaders of the official opposition and the third largest party in Parliament.
The calls are not going away because Robbins has been removed. If anything, removing Robbins raises the question more sharply. If the permanent secretary carried responsibility for the overrule, what was his instruction? Who gave it? A permanent secretary does not reverse a security vetting decision for the Washington ambassadorship on a personal whim. Someone, somewhere above him, needed that decision made.
The Ministerial Code is not ambiguous on the matter of misleading Parliament. It says that ministers who do so are expected to resign. Starmer has not resigned. He has instead cultivated a careful posture of the wronged man, betrayed by process and by people who did not tell him what he needed to know. That posture has now cost Olly Robbins his career.
In a functioning democracy, the person who makes the decision carries the consequence. In the Britain that Starmer has constructed around himself, the decisions float free of the decision-maker and attach themselves to whoever is most expendable. It is an old trick. It is a class trick. It is, as Dennis Skinner understood, what posh boys do when the walls close in.
The victims of Jeffrey Epstein were owed a Prime Minister who would not place their abuser’s intimate associate into the highest diplomatic posting in British public life. They were owed honest answers. What they are getting instead is a procession of sackings designed to make the scandal look like a management failure rather than a failure of character at the very top.
Robbins is out. Starmer is in. And somewhere in the machinery of this government, a decision was taken that the security assessment of trained professionals mattered less than the political needs of one man. Nobody has yet named the person who made that decision. Nobody in power appears to be looking.
That is not a coincidence. That is the point.
The servants have been sacked. The master is still at the table. Britain deserves a Prime Minister who carries the consequence of his own decisions, not one who hands it downward until it disappears.
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