Starmer is Finished. But, More Importantly, Britain’s System of Government is Fundamentally Broken

We are about to witness an implosion in British politics with a real risk that we will reach entirely the wrong conclusion.

Keir Starmer is already a lame duck Prime Minister but – like many who hold that office – he is stubborn and thus likely to stagger on until the untenability of his position is punched into him by his Parliamentary colleagues.

Starmer’s political obituary will read that he misled Parliament (or at best was economical with the truth), that he ran a No. 10 operation that was out of control and alienated many of his own MPs, that his judgement on the big decisions he was actually willing to take (few in number) was deeply flawed and that his unpopularity with the British public led his party to electoral oblivion (Labour has every chance of coming in fifth place in both vote share and council seats won on May 7th).

But despite the fact that Starmer is in no way equipped to be PM, I think the real tale is that Britain has now become essentially ungovernable.

In a period of over half a century from 1964, only eight different people occupied the office of Prime Minister. We are now on the verge of moving on to our sixth PM in a single decade.

The political debate in Westminster is focused on whether ‘full due process’ was followed and whether Starmer has been deceitful about his actions, inaction and baseline knowledge.

I hope we soon can move on to consider the obvious reality that the process itself is clearly and utterly insane.

How should we expect to go about appointing an ambassador to the United States (or similar role)?

To piece together the various pieces of testimony we have received and to attempt to render them into some sort of coherent story, we can just about deduce that the process is as follows:

The Prime Minister can decide whether he wants to make a political rather than diplomatic appointment. Most appointments fall into the latter category; in which case the machinery of the bureaucratic state will offer up a name. The PM can veto this, in which case he will be offered alternative names until he is content.

If he wants to go down the political route and decide for himself who the nominee is then things can get very messy.

In this case, there was initial confusion about whether a political appointee would need security vetting at all if already a privy councillor or member of the House of Lords.

It seems clear that No. 10 thought this was unnecessary (or certainly unhelpful) in the appointment of Peter Mandelson, but the mandarins at the Foreign Office ‘pushed back’.

The vetting (at least its final stages) was then carried out by the chief bureaucrat at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (in this case, Sir Olly Robbins, although he was in the absurd position of carrying out these duties after the appointment had occurred).

One element of the process was to engage the services of United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV). This agency sits under the auspices of the Cabinet Office, not the Foreign Office. Its findings are not binding on Olly Robbins, but he is professionally obliged to consider them.

However, he isn’t actually allowed to know the precise findings as these are – in Sir Olly’s own words – in a hermetically sealed box which he is not permitted to open. This metaphorical box sits under lock and key somewhere in the Cabinet Office.

Sir Olly therefore attended a meeting in which a maximum of two other people were present in which he recounts he was told that UKSV’s view is that the Mandelson appointment is “borderline” and officials are “leaning against”. No paperwork appears to exist.

However, somewhere else in the bureaucratic system are two pieces of paper, colour-coded (for the hard of thinking) into green, amber and red. These apparently show that UKSV did not consider the situation borderline at all (which would presumably be coded as ‘amber’). They show that UKSV’s position was that Mandelson presented a serious risk and should not be appointed – with two red boxes ticked.

Not only were these colour-coded warnings not shared with Sir Olly. He says he was not even aware that such forms existed and was wholly unfamiliar even with the template.

The so-called “due process” now becomes even more bizarre.

It turns out that – for two reasons – it doesn’t much matter that Sir Olly didn’t see these forms.

First, they are only advisory. Olly Robbins can decide that although there are some legitimate concerns raised by UKSV, these can be mitigated in some fashion (perhaps a divestment of shares in a company by the appointee, for example). It turns out that this is the conclusion that Sir Olly reached (albeit he was apparently labouring under the misapprehension that the UKSV position was essentially ‘amber’ rather than ‘red’).

Second – and even more jaw-dropping – is that even if Olly Robbins had seen these forms, he tells us he is strictly prohibited from sharing them with the Prime Minister anyway.

The PM – in a desperate attempt to excuse his disastrous decision to appoint Mandelson – alighted upon a strategy of seeking to persuade us that information which was withheld from him was so significant that it would have led him to a very different and very dramatic course of action: to recall Mandelson from Washington.

There is no suggestion that Starmer bothered even to ask what UKSV’s conclusions were and, had he done so, he would have been rebuffed. But apparently two red flags on a piece of paper that Sir Olly Robbins was unaware existed – and could not legally have furnished to the PM anyway – would have tipped Starmer’s stance from (a) being desperate to get Mandelson to America as fast as possible to (b) cancelling the appointment immediately, even though it had already been made and would have been excruciatingly embarrassing to rescind.

Robbins was therefore summarily dismissed after a 25-year career in the civil service, apparently without even being given the opportunity to explain his actions. This hardly seems in the spirit of the Government’s new Employment Rights Act. Sir Olly appears to have watertight grounds for unfair dismissal and can surely expect a major payout at the taxpayers’ expense.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how the process ‘works’.

It’s also worth noting that absolutely none of this would have come to light if the Americans had not released the Epstein Files. Quite where this leaves those worried about foreign intervention in domestic politics is unclear.

When I was at university in the early 1990s, I was unsure what I wanted to do with my life (an affliction which many insist continues to this day!) I sought advice from a tutor who told me I should consider what type of career I wanted – something like academia where you have an infinite amount of time to reach the perfect conclusion or something like management consultancy where you have a strictly limited amount of time to come to the best decision you can.

He didn’t tell me that there was a third option of working for the state bureaucracy where you apparently have a near-infinite amount of time to reach the wrong decision.

Starmer is finished. But, more importantly, Britain’s system of government is fundamentally broken.

Someone is going to have to fix it.

Mark Littlewood is Director of Popular Conservatism. This article originally appeared in Mark’s PopCon newsletter. You can sign up here.