Allies of Sir Olly Robbins on Friday tried to reject the idea that the top civil servant had failed to sound the alarm about Lord Mandelson’s vetting problems.
Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre — and friend of Robbins — told the BBC that security officials did not make binary clearance decisions on appointments, such as Mandelson’s move to become ambassador to the US.
But that argument was torpedoed on Friday evening after Downing Street released the template used by a specialist team of vetting officers at the Cabinet Office, showing that they used a traffic-light system.
In the case of Lord Mandelson, the security officials had ticked both red boxes marked “high concern” and “clearance denied or withdrawn”, according to people familiar with the situation.
Robbins was sacked on Thursday night by the prime minister as permanent secretary at the Foreign Office because of his “unforgivable” failure to pass on the information.
Cat Little, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, found out about the failed vetting in late March and told cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo.
In a memo released by Number 10 on Friday evening, Dan York-Smith, a senior civil servant, wrote to colleagues on Wednesday this week saying: “On reviewing the file she had therefore learned that the recommendation from the vetting officer had been that DV [developed vetting] should not be granted to Peter Mandelson.”
A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said that Little had embarked on “expedited checks” on the vetting summary document that took weeks to complete, before ascertaining whether the politically explosive information could be shared with Sir Keir Starmer.
“As soon as these checks were conducted, the prime minister was informed,” the spokesperson said.
Another part of Robbins’ defence — via allies — is that he did not tell anyone in Downing Street about the vetting process around Mandelson because he was not allowed to under civil service rules.
Martin argued it was Robbins’s role to decide whether to grant security clearance or not. “Not only is there no duty to disclose the details of a vetting case, there is a duty not to disclose them,” he told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme.
Another person close to the situation said Robbins was an “extreme scapegoat”, given he had never been keen on Mandelson’s appointment and was only trying to do Starmer’s bidding.
Both Mandelson and Robbins declined to comment.
One former senior government official said they believed Mandelson’s “Russian and Chinese contacts” were the primary issues flagged up during his vetting. It took him a while to disclose all his financial affairs, the person added.
Some officials did not seem to view Mandelson achieving security clearance as a crucial hurdle before showing him sensitive information, documents released by the Cabinet Office last month suggest.
One email indicates that Mandelson received his developed vetting security clearance on January 29 2025. But a separate email from Robbins’s predecessor, Sir Philip Barton, to Mandelson the month before explicitly said there were plans to brief the peer “at higher tiers” from January 6.
The DV process is thorough and involves a questionnaire and interviews. It seeks answers on a range of subjects, such as: a person’s financial affairs, including debts, sex life and proclivities; relationship history; associations with people of certain nationalities; and connections to certain countries.
Conducted by a specialist team in the Cabinet Office, it also involves interviewing nominated figures close to the person being vetted.
Vetting matters were not ordinarily flagged to ministers, in order to avoid undue influence over the matter, one official said.
People have been blocked from certain sensitive roles in recent years because of issues flagged during the vetting process. At least one candidate for a special adviser role during the last Conservative administration was barred from the job on this account, according to a former cabinet minister.
Tory shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy said on Friday that he had been aware of such an incident when he was chief of staff to Prime Minister Theresa May.
“When I was in No 10, somebody failed developed vetting before their proposed appointment to a sensitive post. We were told immediately, and were advised — correctly — that this person could not be appointed. Who gave that advice? Sue Gray — later Starmer’s chief of staff,” Timothy said on X.
Mandelson’s paid employment by a Russian conglomerate called Sistema was flagged in the due diligence pack prepared for Downing Street ahead of his appointment as US ambassador.
The Labour peer served from 2013 as a non-executive director of Sistema, which was the majority shareholder of a defence technology company called RTI.
The same memo observed that RTI’s chair was “Yevgeny Primakov, a Putin ally and former prime minister”, and that Mandelson had “remained on the board until June 2017, long after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014”. Primakov died in 2015.
Mandelson was still listed as a non-executive director of Sistema in 2016 in the House of Lords register of interests. He continued to hold a shareholding in the Russian group until at least 2020, the Lords register shows.
The due diligence also noted that Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel included Chinese clients such as TikTok and Shein and said that he was “seen as an advocate for closer UK-China relations”.
The document mentioned that Mandelson “gave a speech at the University of Hong Kong where he claimed that the rule of law and independence of the judiciary remain intact there”.
It also said: “The website of Global Counsel still contains his flowery account of his October 2018 meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping.”