A good leader never asks their people to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. Hold others to the highest standards, by all means, but only if you have equally high expectations of yourself: otherwise you may command obedience in politics but never respect, and over time even that grudging compliance may come laced with contempt. And so it is, less than two years into power, for Keir Starmer.

Nobody in government emerges well from the story of Peter Mandelson’s journey to Washington, and that includes Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office mandarin sacked for not telling Downing Street that its chosen ambassador had set off fire alarms inside the vetting process. Robbins could arguably have saved himself by kicking this intensely political decision upstairs, albeit to a prime minister famous for not really doing politics: he could have just let Starmer choose between the public humiliation of telling the Americans that the man he wanted to send into their highly classified midst was a potential security risk, or the gamble of sending Mandelson anyway but with added guardrails.

Admittedly, even that wouldn’t have been as simple as some of Robbins’s critics make out. It might look ridiculous from the outside, but the vetting process relies on people being able to confess the most excruciating things in confidence, and the taboo within Whitehall on sharing any aspect of it is real. Even Cat Little, the senior civil servant who finally uncovered the failed vetting in March, says it took her three weeks of conferring within the system to establish that she was allowed to tell the prime minister about it.

But with the benefit of hindsight, choosing to keep everything within the Foreign Office’s jealously guarded fiefdom nonetheless looks like a rare misjudgment, for which........

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