They say the process is the punishment. It’s certainly felt that way these past few days, as a bemused public have been subjected to an insufferable argument over vetting procedures, waged between prime minister Keir Starmer and former top Foreign Office mandarin Olly Robbins.
Starmer sacked Robbins last week, saying that Robbins’ failure to disclose that Peter Mandelson had failed his security vetting was ‘astonishing’. Robbins, for his part, says Downing Street had made clear that Mandelson should be railroaded into the post of ambassador to the US as soon as possible, niceties be damned. Plus, it wasn’t his place to raise vetting concerns anyway.
We had hours of Starmer squirming in the Commons on Monday – a session in which the word ‘process’ was uttered no less than 128 times. Robbins then spent hours in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee today, during which he claimed he could recite two books by heart: the Civil Service Code and the Book of Common Prayer. Miraculously, all of this has managed to make the Mandelson scandal – centred on a disgraced New Labour fixer and his alleged proximity to Russian oligarchs and globetrotting nonces – boring. The high drama has been ruined by clucking managerialism.
Starmer, long accused of being more civil servant than politician, looked almost in his element yesterday. He might not have any vision, or nose for public opinion, but the former director of public prosecutions clearly loves a bureaucratic bunfight. ‘I have now updated the terms of reference’, he said at one point, about his internal review into vetting. Words that will echo down the ages. You can imagine them carved into the plinth of his statue.
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