Rod Liddle: UK Correspondent on Sir Keir Starmer being unaware Peter Mandelson failed security vetting before he was appointed US Ambassador

Britain's Prime Minister is accusing officials of withholding information from him before he appointed Peter Mandelson US ambassador. 

Sir Keir Starmer sacked Mandelson in September last year over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. 

Starmer says officials deliberately didn't tell him Mandelson has failed security vetting, and he wouldn't have cleared Mandelson to the role if he'd known. 

UK Correspondent Rod Liddle told Mike Hosking neither the arguments of the Government nor those of then-Foreign Office boss Sir Olly Robbins make sense.  

He says the situation is catastrophic. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A big question we'll get to Rod in the moment,
is can he survive this? This is Starma in the house.
Kimmy was all over.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
This is a man who once said I will carry
the can for the mistakes of any organization I lead. Instead,
he has.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Sacked his cabinet sectary, he has sacked his director of Communications,
he has sacked his chief of staff, and he.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Has now sat the permanent sectary of.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
The Foreign Office. All of these people fired for a
decision he made its right little morning to you, mate,
Good mate, Give me an insight into the public service
and how it works, because I can quite categorically state
that there is nobody in the public service of New
Zealand who would see off a security investigation into an ambassador,

(00:46):
see that ambassador fail and then go hmm, that doesn't
look very good. But I'll tell you what, I'm going
to keep that to myself. That would not happen. How
does it happen in Britain?

Speaker 2 (00:56):
I have absolutely no idea, and it seems to be
a bizarre is put up by Oli Robbins, the Mandarin
at the center of this, who says that he was
prohibited from telling Sekirs Dharma about the reasons, well, about
the mere fact that Mandelson had raised red flags during

(01:17):
his wedding procedure and had not been passed. The argument
was something he will bet to do with privacy and
so on. But it just beggers belief. Obviously, if if
he had found all these things wrong with Mandalsh and
had decided that for that reason he couldn't be passed,

(01:40):
he would have had to tell the Prime Minister all
the things which he says he could not tell. I mean,
it makes no sense whatsoever, none of that, none of
the government's arguments do and orders Oli robbins, I don't
know what way to look, to be honest, Mike, it's
so catastrophic.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
And its catastrophic no point Starmer goes, hey, Ollie, how
are you? By the way, how's Mandelsh going? We get
the text for that one. I mean, at no point
does he have an inquiring mind enough to ask a
some good question. Are you serious?

Speaker 2 (02:13):
I don't believe that if you subscribe to that point
of view, which is Starbar's point of view, which is
Starvar's defense, then the Prime Minister has to resign because
he's a moron, you know, an incurious moron. So it's
kind of that whole revie. It's one of the two.

(02:34):
But of course there will be no pressing for him
to resign because there is no one anywhere remotely close
to being as other leader of the Labor Party.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Given the time he seems to or the number of
times he seems to have got himself into tremendous amounts
of difficulty, is there no one in the Labor Party going, look,
this is clearly a pattern and this guy is not
for the long haul. So let's get a money us
and you know, drum up some sort of idea as
to what we might do by way of a succession.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Well, I don't think there's a single person in the
Labor Party other than Sakia Starma, but possibly including Sakiir Starmer,
who thinks he's up to the job. I don't think that.
I don't I don't think anyone. You know, I was
I was out canvasing in the northeast of England, were
not canvasing, but actually doing some proper journalism, you know,
finding out what people were thinking with the various Labor

(03:26):
candidates in the Northeast, and they are in no doubt,
you know, the man's an absolute disgrace. It's and he's
going to cost them lots of seats, so no one
is under the illusion that he's doing a good job.
But there is simply no mechanism by which anyone could

(03:48):
be found to replace him at the moment. That's the
real problem.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
What I find interesting is, just as an exercise and observation,
is how he can stand there saying what he says
with a moderately straight and not over rid face.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
That's because neither you nor I were trained as lawyers, Mike,
I don't know, maybe you were. He He cloaks himself
in procedure and legal leese, and it is that which
will probably see him through this particular crisis until the
next crisis, which is in a couple of weeks when
the election results come through.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
To say, by the way, I've got a couple of
polls this morning, Scotland he comes third or they come third,
and Wales he comes third as well. Is that true?
And I note that in a polar rid this morning
they're suggesting reform as the opposition in Wales post the boat.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
No, that's absolutely right, Clivethcomery then followed by reform and
in Scotland Reformer, which which is the last place on
earth you would expect reform to do well, but is
nothing up towards second place because Labor Labor. They can't
see it themselves, but they are losing everything as a

(04:55):
consequence of two things. Partly of the far left of
the party, which you know has left its mark on
them the Corbin years, but largely because the man is
so staggeringly inept. The only thing which saves him is
that cloaking himself in legally is being cautious and loyally

(05:16):
has probably helped in foreign affairs a little bit. He
hasn't been all bad in foreign affairs, but domestically he's
been an utter disaster.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, all right, go well, we'll see Thursday. Rod little
out of Brook and those poles I mentioned, they're doing
one of their big poles where they talked to thousands
of people and they work it through the electorates because
they don't have a proportional system. Therefore you can look
at the poland think they're reasonably accurate. So third in
both Scotland and Wales, this is the Labor Party. Labor

(05:47):
will lose seats in the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Parliament.
This is all coming up May seven, by the way,
so it's a couple of weeks away. Based on polling
of more than five thousand Scottish voters, Labor will slunt
to just seventeen seats in Scotland. Mp will remain the
largest party. They're projected to win fifty six, so fifty
six to seventeen likely to be reliant on the Scottish Greens,

(06:07):
who will get eight. Reform are set to win twenty
two to twenty two, a right wing party in Scotland
with twenty two seats ahead of Labour, Lib Dems on fourteen,
Conservatives on twelve. Wales Plaid Camrie Separate Modeling Complex two
and a half thousand Welsh voters Labor into third place

(06:28):
behind Played and Reform, a played of projected thirty seats,
Reform close to twenty eight thirty to twenty eight, so
the official opposition Labour reduced to just twenty four seats.
It'll be amazing if that comes to pass. For more
from the Mike Asking Breakfast, listen live to news talks.
It'd be from six am weekdays, or follow the podcast

(06:49):
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