Top Foreign Office official takes fall for fiasco and resigns; Starmer promises to deliver \u2018relevant facts\u2019 on Monday.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Published On 17 Apr 2026<\/span>17 Apr 2026<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Keir Starmer says he is \u201cabsolutely furious\u201d that he was not informed that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting before being appointed UK envoy to Washington, as the United Kingdom prime minister faced renewed calls to resign over the affair.<\/p>\n Starmer on Friday maintained that he was kept in the dark about the Foreign Office\u2019s decision to overrule the recommendation of security officials not to give the job to the Labour Party grandee, who was fired in September over his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Starmer, who has asserted he knew nothing about the vetting outcome, said that the Foreign Office\u2019s failure to inform him, as prime minister, was \u201cstaggering\u201d and \u201cunforgivable\u201d, pledging to \u201cset out all the relevant facts in true transparency\u201d to Parliament on Monday.<\/p>\n The beleaguered prime minister said he only found out about the botched process on Tuesday, just before the revelations were published by The Guardian on Thursday, with top Foreign Office civil servant Olly Robbins ousted on the same day.<\/p>\n Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, said Friday that \u201cthe recommendation was to not appoint Peter Mandelson to the role,\u201d and that the Foreign Office ignored it. He said that was \u201castonishing\u201d, but within the rules.<\/p>\n He said no government minister had been told of the security assessment, carried out by a department known as UK Security Vetting. People familiar with the process told The Associated Press that is standard practice because of the sensitive personal information involved, including \u201cfinancial, personal, sexual, religious and other types of background information\u201d.<\/p>\n Opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said claims the prime minister didn\u2019t know were \u201ccompletely preposterous\u201d. \u201cThis story does not stack up. The prime minister is taking us for fools,\u201d she told the BBC. \u201cAll roads lead to a resignation.\u201d<\/p>\n Starmer has repeatedly insisted that \u201cdue process\u201d was followed in the appointment, which was announced in December 2024, with Mandelson taking up the post in February, 2025.<\/p>\n He was sacked just seven months later, after documents released by a US Congressional committee revealed new details about the depth of his ties to Epstein.<\/p>\n Police have opened a probe into allegations of misconduct in office by Mandelson, who was arrested and bailed in February. Investigators are looking at allegations he leaked sensitive documents to Epstein when he was a government minister, including during the 2008 financial crash.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Top Foreign Office official takes fall for fiasco and resigns; Starmer promises to deliver \u2018relevant facts\u2019 on Monday. Published On 17 Apr 202617 Apr 2026 Keir Starmer says he is \u201cabsolutely furious\u201d that he was not informed that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting before being appointed UK envoy to Washington, as the United Kingdom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/2017-06-08T131939Z_1189275883_RC11B0FE7F20_RTRMADP_3_GULF-QATAR-JAZEERA-1714943623.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80)
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