It was all very polite, very reasonable, and very deadly. Olly Robbins walked into his interrogation by the Foreign Affairs Committee with the kind of studied anonymity which defines the higher echelons of the Civil Service. He was unassuming, modest, polite and seemingly harmless. And then, predictably, he went on to commit political murder.

Robbins is emblematic of many of the failures of the Civil Service. Some of the things he said – particularly concerning the mercurial, almost ghostly decision-making process in the Foreign Office – raised questions about political authority, professional responsibility and democratic accountability.

But the main takeaway from his evidence session was ultimately quite simple. The processology of the Peter Mandelson story is a mirage. It is a mist which conceals the basic reality. That reality is as follows: No 10 decided it wanted their man for the US ambassador role. Once it made that decision, it pressured the Civil Service to make it happen. It is therefore unsurprising that this was the eventual outcome.

Keir Starmer now claims to be furious about this. But it was precisely in order to avoid his fury that the Civil Service behaved the way that it did. He perpetuated the culture which he now seems so outraged by.

Robbins told MPs on the committee that he was under pressure to hurry up and confirm Mandelson’s appointment from the moment he walked into the Foreign Office job in January 2025. There was “already a very, very strong expectation… coming from No 10 that he needed to be in post and in America as soon as humanly possible”.

There’d been a due diligence report by........

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