Cabinet Office suggested Mandelson did not need security vetting, says Robbins as he describes ‘constant pressure’ from No 10 – live

Asked about his reaction to being sacked, Robbins said:

The very short answer is I don’t fully understand the reasons that I’m in the position I am in, but that is for a separate process for me to try to get to the bottom of.

As a human being, I’m desperately, desperately sad about it.

I love that job, I love that institution, I was proud to serve this government and any government that might follow it.

I hope I was doing it to the best of my ability. I was certainly doing it as hard as I possibly could.

I had wonderful colleagues who I miss deeply and the issues we were dealing with, and my colleagues are still dealing with, are of profound importance to the success of this government and the success of the country.

It’s been the proudest part of my career to lead that institution because of their work, not because of mine.

I just feel intensely proud of the people I’ve led and I wish them every success and wish I could still be with them.

Asked if he would have done anything differently, Robbins said there were various aspects of the system I think could be improved”.

But he said he was concerned about the way that the British state was “dissecting itself” in public over this.

He said he thought anything that undermined the integrity of the security vetting process could pose a risk to people working in embassies in Moscow or Beijing.

And he said he found himself “wondering who this helps” – implying this is a controversy that will help hostile states.

Emily Thornberry, the committee chair, challenged what Robbins said about how security vetting should not stop the state employing people with “interesting” lives. She said there was “interesting” – and then there was Peter Mandelson, and the threats that he posed.

Robbins said that the Cabinet Office due diligence process (which he thinks Mandleson should have failed – see 10.38am) covered Mandelson’s public record.

He said security vetting served a different purpose.

There’s not a sort of big surprise in the fact that Peter Mandelson had an interesting life.

What I say to you still is that DV is for a different purpose. It’s to establish vulnerabilities that lead to an unmanageable risk to UK national security. That’s the process I hope that we undertook in good faith.

Thornberry said Mandelson was a threat; he was leaking state secrets to a bank.

Robbins said that was not the reason for Mandelson being sacked; those emails only came out after he was sacked.

Robbins said that security vetting should not become a “pass/fail piety test”. He explained:

If we turn DV [developed vetting] into a pass/fail piety test, what we end up doing is robbing the British state of a lot of very, very capable people with complicated lives and potential vulnerabilities.

And I really, really don’t want that for the sake of this country.

If anything, this government needs to be served by an ever increasing range of people with broad experience and interesting lives, not suddenly find that the only people we can employ in sensitive roles are ones who raise no issues whatsoever.

Asked what would have happened if the Foreign Office had refused to give Mandelson developed vetting clearance, Robbins said that this would have caused “a real problem” for the government and the country.

He went on:

I was very conscious that if we went through the rigour of our process and decided against granting clearance that would have caused a real problem for the government and a problem for the country,

I was conscious of that without letting it influence my judgment, let alone transferring any of that atmosphere on to the people charged with actually making that assessment.

Robbins also said that vetting was one of the hardest bits of his job.

I hate doing it, honestly. It’s some of the most emotional things I got involved with in my time in the job.

I take those responsibilities extremely seriously. I have been prepared to follow through on tough advice.

Robbins said the leak to the Guardian of details of Mandelson’s vetting was “a grievous breach of national security”. He suggested he thought the leak happened once information about the UKSV process in this case was passed on to the Cabinet Office and No 10 as part of the process of scrutinising which documents will have to be published to comply with the Commons humble address.

He explained:

[This] probably flows from the rest of the evidence I’ve been giving you this morning. I think the system does not work if candidates for it don’t understand that this is an entirely different category of protection and losing that – I know it’s a cliche, but that trust, once gone, cannot be got back.

Thousands of people go through this process. Thousands and thousands of documents and sensitive issues and operations depend upon it. And I am struck and saddened that within I think days – probably only a small number of days – the Cabinet Office for their own reasons, deciding to open that up to share what they thought they’d found and their perceptions of it internally with No 10.

I’m not making accusations at anybody. It’s not my business to do so. I hope they’re being very rigorously investigated and the prosecutions will result, because this is a grievous breach of national security.

Asked to clarify this, Robbins said that he was not an investigator. But he said he was able to “put two and two together”. He said soon after Keir Starmer was told about the UKSV’s conclusions about Mandelson (on Tuesday last week, at the meeting described in this minute) the story was in the Guardian.

Robbins told the committee that he did not accept Keir Starmer’s argument that he should have been given more details of Mandelson’s security vetting.

He said:

I hope it’s clear from everything I have said so far that I believe that’s a misunderstanding and a dangerous misunderstanding of the necessity of confidentiality of the process.

I’ve been interested, of course, over the last couple of days to read Lord Hague on this today and David Lammy even on Saturday, the former foreign secretary, deputy prime minister, where both have said in different language that they have never had vetting issues discussed with them in all their time as a minister and nor would they expect to.

I’m afraid that’s exactly the culture I have been brought up in. It’s supported by guidance. You are not supposed to share the findings and reports of UKSV other than in the exceptional circumstances where doing so allows for the specific mitigation of risk.

And here is more from what Robbins told the committee about the proposal for Matthew Doyle to get a diplomatic job. (See 10.29am.) Robbins said he was told not to discuss this with the foreign secretary, David Lammy.

Robbins said there were “several discussions initiated by No 10 with me about potentially finding a head of mission opportunity for Matthew Doyle who was then the prime minister’s director of communications”.

He went on:

I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then foreign secretary, which was uncomfortable.

Robbins said he “felt quite uncomfortable” about the proposals and kept “giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the office and was hard for me personally to defend”.

He said:

I found it very hard to think how I would explain to the office what the credentials of Matthew were to be in an important head of mission role when I was in danger of making very senior, very experienced diplomats leave the office.

Here is more from what Robbins told the committee about how the Cabinet Office though Mandelson could take up his post without going through security vetting. He said:

It was not, I’m afraid I don’t think at the point of his appointment and for days thereafter, it was actually a given that he would be vetted.

If you look at the documents submitted under the humble address there is no stipulation from number 10 that he should be vetted.

The welcome that was sent to him immediately afterwards doesn’t say welcome to the Foreign Office subject to vetting; the announcement put out on 20 December says that he will be out early in the new year, it does not say subject to vetting.

Robbins said the contract issued to Lord Mandelson after he was vetted said he must maintain his clearance “but nothing about his appointment actually, as far as I’ve seen in writing, stipulates it”.

Robbins went on:

There was then a debate between Cabinet Office, FCDO, about how to make sure that he is sent out to post with the appropriate clearance and that took several days and a position taken from the Cabinet Office was that there was no need to vet Mandelson.

He was a member of the House of Lords, he was a privy counsellor, the risks attending his appointment were well-known and had been made clear to the prime minister before appointment.

In the end, the FCDO insisted and put its foot down. I understand my predecessor had to be very firm in person but that was a live debate at the point of announcement and I think it’s important to make that clear to the committee.

Henry Dyer is a Guardian investigations correspondent.

Olly Robbins is artfully dodging questions from the committee about whether he would have changed his mind if he had actually seen the documents from United Kingdom Security Vetting rather than receive an oral briefing on them.

Robbins has made clear he was told that UKSV considered Peter Mandelson a “borderline” case and that they were “leaning towards” recommending clearance be denied, the Foreign Office security department felt the risk could be managed.

MPs on the committee have been focused on a template document published by Downing Street on Friday with a red box saying “clearance denied or withdrawn.” No 10 has briefed that this box was ticked in the UKSV form.

Robbins has said the UKSV form is one used across Whitehall, but that UKSV recommends and the FCDO decides on questions of security clearance, as opposed to other departments where UKSV makes decisions. (See 10am.)

But it was not the only red box ticked. So too was one noted “high” for “overall concern”.

According to Robbins, officials in the Foreign Office’s personnel security team had debated with UKSV some of its assessments about specific risks. He said that as a result some of those had “shifted up and down a bit” before he was briefed.

It is unclear whether the shifting has been documented, minuted, or noted in any way.

Robbins told the committee it was important to clear up “one of the most important misunderstandings” about UKSV (UK Security Vetting).

UKSV do not deny clearance in the Foreign Office.

They make findings and they make a recommendation.

I was told that that recommendation was that they “leant against” and it was a borderline case. That’s the conversation I relayed to the committee. They do not deny clearance.

The Foreign Office grants or denies clearance on the basis of a hugely experienced and capable personnel security team that responds to the fact that the Foreign Office is under more threat than the whole of the rest of government put together.

Robbins said that the security directorate at the Foreign Office took the final decison about vetting. He said they normally took that decision themselves, but sometimes they passed it up the system.

Occasionally that gets escalated up the line. And in this case, as I’ve made clear, it came to me for a sense check at the end.

Robbins said UKSV and the Foreign Office’s security directorate talk all the time. He went on:

The conversation I recall it on 29 January was that they had debated some of the assessments that UK has being made about specific risks and indeed … some of those had shifted up and down a bit.

And then the Foreign Office had reached his assessment and briefed me on it.

So I can understand why we are all today focussed on the starkness of the form, albeit a form I have never seen.

But the conversation has briefed to me was a dialogue between the two in which – clearly I’m not trying to pretend otherwise – there was unease in UKSV and the Foreign Office had to work out whether it could manage and mitigate that unease.

In response to a question from Emily Thornberry, Robbins told the committee that he thought Peter Mandelson appointment should have been blocked following the due diligence scrutiny carried out by the Cabinet Office. This is the ‘soft vetting’ that happened before the security vetting.

Robbins said:

Due diligence was done before the appointment. And I think that has been now released in the humble address papers.

What I am, what I feel sad about, is that the prime minister’s nominee went ahead despite that due diligence.

Robbins confirmed that he did not tell No 10 about the recommendation from UKSA about Mandelson.

He said:

And months and months later, when in the immediate aftermath of Mandelson’s sacking, we were obviously thinking internally about how to respond to legitimate questions this committee and others had about that process.

My recollection is, in a way, I wasn’t surprised by the direction from No 10 was we must make clear that these decisions were taken entirely independently of ministers and that they were not consulted other than to be told the outcome.

Emily Thornberry asked Robbins if he could confirm that No 10 suggested that Matthew Doyle should be given an ambassadorial job somewhere.

Doyle, who is now a peer, was Starmer’s head of communications at the time. He was also close to Peter Mandelson, and he was one of the No 10 people asked by Keir Starmer to question Mandelson about his links with Jeffrey Epstein ahead of Starmer’s decision to appoint him.

Doyle has had the Labour whip suspended in the Lords over his own links with a friend convicted of a child sex offence.

Robbins said he did not know where that suggestion came from.

He went on:

It was serious enough for the No 10 private office to bring up the head of the diplomatic service and ask for a forward look of available head of mission jobs. And that’s the point at which I thought that I needed to lay down some markers.

He also said that Mandelson was asked if there might be a job available for Doyle in the US embassy team.

Robbins was asked about a repor from Sam Coates at Sky News that Morgan McSweeney, the then chief of staff to the PM, called Philip Barton, Robbins’ predecessor as head of the Foreign Office, asking him to speed up the Mandelson vetting approval. McSweeney reportedly told Barton: “Just fucking approve it.”

Robbins said that when he took over there was a “strong sense that there was an atmosphere of pressure and a certain dismissiveness about this process”.

But he said he does not recall Barton using those words. Barton is not the sort of person who would report language like that, he said.

Robbins was asked to clarify what he was saying about the recommendation from UKSV.

Asked if he was saying he was told that security vetting should be denied, Robbins said that he was telling the committee what he was told at that meeting. He was told that the decision was “borderline”, and that they were leaning against granting approval.

Q: So you did not see a form with the red box ticked?

Robbins said he had never seen a form like that until the template was published by No 10.

He stressed that UKSV’s findings were “recommendations and not decisions” to the Foreign Office.

What my team will have done, I’m sure, is break that down, go through the specific issues that have led UKSV to their concern and then make an assessment as to whether they can be managed. And that’s what came to me.

Robbins was asked more about the meeting he had with his head of security about Mandelson. They said they could manage the risks associated with Mandelson’s appointment. Was it there decision, or was it ultimately his decision?

Robbins said this was a recommendation to him, but he said he would not read too much into that. He went on:

They are entirely professional people. They care deeply about national security. They run one of the toughest security functions in government given the attack we’re under. I trusted their judgment and I backed it.

Paul Lewis is the Guardian’s head of investigations.

Olly Robbins’ testimony raises the extraordinary possibility that the permanent secretary was misled about Mandelson’s UK Security Vetting (UKSV) outcome.

Robbins told the committee he did not see the UKSV document personally.

Instead, he said he was given a briefing about Mandelson’s vetting file by security officials in his department. He said Mandelson’s case was described to him as “borderline” and that UKSV was “leaning toward” clearance being “denied”.

But said he was also told that the Foreign Office “might wish to grant” Mandelson clearance, and risks could be managed with “mitigations”.

That account is at odds with the Guardian’s understanding. The Cabinet Office last week released a template of the UKSV file on Mandelson. (See 9.56am.) It lists three rankings for possible “overall concern”: low, medium and high. In the next box, there is a space for a vetting officer to list the outcome of the assessment with their “overall decision or recommendation”.

Again, there are three options: clearance approved, clearance approved “with risk management” or clearance denied. According to multiple sources, the UKSV process in Mandelson’s case concluded there was a “high” overall concern and concluded “clearance denied”. In the committee hearing, Robbins said those were terms he did not recognise.

Another committee member, John Wittingdale, specifically raised the Cabinet Office template document, and said the committee’s understanding was also that Mandelson got ticks in the two red boxes. Robbins said he did not recall the briefing being given to him being “that definitive”.