Bath Womble

New: Cat Little, cabinet office permanent secretary, disputes Olly Robbins’ evidence to the foreign affairs select committee Little says the Cabinet Office did NOT try to avoid Mandelson getting DV as Robbins claimed Robbins told the committee the Cabinet Office’s position was that Mandelson did not need to undergo vetting Little says she can produce an audit trail showing in fact there was a debate between security officials and the Cabinet Office advised the Foreign Office that Mandelson SHOULD undergo DV vetting And she says the question was brought up by the Foreign Office

Quick take: Back to the no smoking gun. Badenoch sums it up: "I cannot accuse the Prime Minister of deliberately misleading the House, but everyone can see what has happened here. This was not due process. Everyone knows the price of misleading the House. Will the Prime Minister finally take responsibility and go?" The Q on Thursday night was has the PM knowingly misled the House, that he's cleared of... BUT the impression it leaves: pressure to get appointment done, lack of attention to vetting, trying to rush it through, ignoring red flags raised before the appointment announced, putting Mandelson in and giving him case-by-case access to docs despite his background, the sacking & then blaming of Robbins. It looks terrible for a PM that promised to lead a government of integrity, accountability and stability

The key point of process that determines if you believe Keir Starmer or Olly Robbins is right is still unclear this morning. The Cabinet Office - led by Antonia Romeo and Cat Little - say they discovered a UKSV document that clearly recommends against giving Mandelson clearance, with a tick in a red box for ‘clearance denied’. Bloomberg reported on Friday how Cabinet Office officials found this bombshell document on a secure portal while complying with the humble address and everything then developed from there. That document is the basis for Starmer’s claim that Mandelson failed his vetting and that he should have been told about this recommendation by Robbins. On the face of it, it does seem absolutely extraordinary that officials would keep this apparently clear written recommendation on such a high-profile appointment from the PM and cabinet secretary. That is why Robbins was sacked. But Robbins testified yesterday that he never saw this document. Instead he said he only had a verbal briefing with the Foreign Office security team that, in his words, only ‘leaned’ against recommending clearance be granted. He says they were then able to mitigate the concerns and approve Mandelson’s clearance. The Cabinet Office version of events and the document they’ve found, and Robbins’ version, appear to be inconsistent. Robbins’ contention is essentially that this is all a huge misunderstanding, that Mandelson did not fail his vetting, that the problems raised by UKSV were resolvable by him and he resolved them, and that he shouldn’t have been sacked. Robbins says any pressure from No10 did not impact the decision-making of him and his officials. Sources say the missing person in the story is Dr Ian Collard, a former senior FCDO security official. He is the person who had the verbal briefing with Robbins where they agreed they could mitigate the UKSV concerns, they say. Collard has since left the government. It seems Collard might be able to clear up whether UKSV did firmly recommend against Mandelson or only lean that way, and therefore whether Robbins was right to try to fix the problem himself with mitigations, or if he should have rejected Mandelson’s DV on the advice of UKSV and told No10 what had happened. If the UKSV concerns weren’t that grave and were possible to mitigate, Robbins has a good argument that he was right to do that and clear Mandelson’s DV without raising it up the chain, and therefore that he was unfairly sacked for trying to do what the PM wanted. If the UKSV concerns were more clear cut, as the UKSV document produced by the Cabinet Office implies, it’s harder for Robbins to argue he did the right thing. You’d have thought Collard and senior Cabinet Office officials will be called by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to try to clear this up in the coming days…

A difficult watch. Let’s add Pat McFadden to the list of people not humming

“I’m not even sure that when we do get more evidence that there’s going to be some sudden drops off in…support.” Sir John Curtice says the prime minister is so unpopular that the Mandelson vetting scandal is unlikely to make an impact.

“President Trump has issued another …” load of news leading blah …. Why do our broadcasters insist on reporting whatever he tweets when so many previous threats, warnings, promises and predictions have gone precisely nowhere. Context matters.