The process is an ass

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.

This has all been a tedious lesson in why procedure, though it has its place, is no substitute for politics. Or judgement. You’d be forgiven for thinking the problem with Mandelson’s appointment was the failure of the process, even though the dogs in the street could have told you that Mandelson’s latest flirtation with high office was bound to end in disgrace, as all the others did.

Certainly, to the extent we can say anything definitive about this arcane scandal, it’s that the process is an ass. According to Robbins’ testimony, it was totally right and proper for officials not to tell ministers about the outcomes of security vetting. Given Mandelson was reportedly deemed to be a potential national-security risk, due to his dealings with Russian and Chinese firms and heightened exposure to blackmail, the idea that officials should just keep mum seems absurd. Robbins even said it was ultimately the right decision to give Mandelson clearance to take up his post in DC.

But procedure is also often a cloak for politicians to hide behind – to evade accountability for political decisions. Starmer knew who he was getting into bed with. He had been told as early as 2023, while in opposition, that the spooks were worried about Mandelson’s business activities. He clearly decided the Prince of Darkness’s diplomatic star power would make up for his priced-in dodginess, then looked the other way while the officials made it happen. Even if Starmer had no idea about the vetting issue specifically, that hardly exonerates him from making such a terrible call in the first place.

Politics can be grubby. Bending the rules, and making use of a few questionable characters, is sometimes the cost of doing business. But there is a limit. Plus, Starmer’s double sin is to pretend he doesn’t play this game while also playing it badly. Having no idea what he wants to do, or how to do it, he has deferred to Blairite ghouls like Mandy, whose original service to the nation served only to boost their status on the globalist jetset.

It is delicious that Keir Starmer’s sanctimonious burbling in opposition is now colliding with reality. Far from banishing sleaze, untruths and incompetence from politics, he has been exposed as an inept middle manager who can’t even do the shady stuff right; a man whose last defence is that he had no idea what was going on within his own government. But the answer to this isn’t better processes, but in politicians of judgement and substance. Starmer clearly isn’t one of them.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.