The ongoing row over the sacking by the Prime Minister of Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Sir Oliver Robbins, following Robbins’ role in the vetting of Lord Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, is the most serious threat yet to Keir Starmer’s premiership. Labour MPs could well spark a leadership challenge after upcoming local and devolved assembly elections on 7th May.
The spat between Robbins and Downing Street certainly casts the UK Prime Minister in an extremely unfavourable light – with Robbins telling a committee of MPs this week that Downing Street had a “dismissive attitude” to the in-depth “developed vetting” process that Mandelson was subjected to, viewing it as a mere procedural formality rather than a necessary check.
The Prime Minister’s office, says Robbins, created an “atmosphere of constant pressure” to get Mandelson in post, prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration in early 2025. Starmer is also alleged to have pressured the Foreign Office to find an overseas diplomatic role for Matthew Doyle, one of his former political advisors, himself suspended from the Labour party due to his association with a convicted sex offender.
But this episode isn’t entirely positive for the UK’s civil service either. While Robbins’ evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee was effective in weakening Starmer politically, the previously most senior Foreign Office mandarin also admitted his department overruled a recommendation from the specialist security vetting agency (UKSV) to deny Peter Mandelson clearance to become Britain’s US Ambassador, with Starmer claiming that he wasn’t told these details.
This points to a “bloated” system where senior civil servants override professional security advice, with the upper echelons of the Foreign Office and Cabinet Office focused on procedural “processology”, rather than the substance of security risks.
And for some time, in fact, ahead of this latest Westminster-Whitehall scandal, there has been a growing sense that the British civil service – once the envy of the world – has become overly-bureaucratic, unaccountable and highly inefficient.
Aside from this Robbins-Starmer saga, many have argued that Whitehall has become a “political problem” rather than a neutral, professional service. Some say publicly – including senior politicians, not least former ministers – that far too many civil servants operate like activists, frustrating policies they don’t like, which often means those put forward by centre-right governments.
Insider-outsider
Oxford-educated Ameer Kotecha – on the civil service “fast-track”, and clearly destined for the top – recently resigned from the Foreign Office. He joined the civil service in 2015, working across Whitehall, before going on to serve as a diplomat in Israel and then as one of the UK’s youngest ever “head of mission”, leading the British consulate in Russia from 2023 to 2025.
But earlier this year, Kotecha gave up on his dream of a lifelong diplomatic career, choosing to resign because he felt the Foreign Office, and the civil service more broadly, didn’t serve Britain’s national interests.
Since 2016, the number of civil servants has increased by a third, with the service becoming bloated and hugely expensive, not least due to the pulverising cost of extremely generous, index-linked pensions – which currently amount to an ongoing liability on the UK’s balance sheet approach £1,500 billion, more than 50pc of annual GDP.
Britain’s deeply inefficient civil service is one reason why broad-based public sector productivity, while tough to measure, has flatlined for years according to the official numbers – in contrast to private sector productivity.
On top of gross over-manning and chronic inefficiency, many at the top of the opposition Conservative party and Reform UK think that an overwhelmingly left-wing civil service needs not only stripping back, but root and branch reform. If not, they say, Britain will be unable to tackle some of the country’s most pressing problems - including immigration and the spiralling welfare bill.
Kotecha may be young, but he was a genuine Whitehall insider, of considerable ability, who was rapidly promoted and clearly destined for the very top of the civil service.
His decision to leave and the strong personal testimony he provides in this exclusive When The Facts Change interview – available at the top of this post – adds weight to that case that the UK civil service needs to be seriously re-thought and restructured, as a prerequisite of economic reform and renewal.
