Sir Keir Starmer has been skewered this morning by two polite assassins. Even before the box office appearance by Sir Oliver Robbins, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband took a blowtorch to the Prime Minister’s judgment by making it clear he would never have touched Peter Mandelson with a barge pole.

“I steered well clear of Peter Mandelson when I became Labour leader in 2010,” Miliband told Sky News on Tuesday, deadpan. Asked what he thought when Mandelson’s appointment was announced, he said: “That it could blow up, that it could go wrong.”

And boy, has it blown up.

When just an hour later Robbins, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary who was sacked by Starmer last week, took his place in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he didn’t waste any time in dropping some more bombshells, albeit in a controlled, mandarin way.

The Cabinet Office, Robbins said, suggested........

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