Starmer rejects calls to quit as pressure mounts over Mandelson vetting

Top Foreign Office official takes fall for fiasco and resigns; Starmer promises to deliver ‘relevant facts’ on Monday.Keir Starmer says he is “absolutely furious” that he was not informed that Peter Mandelson failed his security vetting before being appointed UK envoy to Washington, as the United Kingdom prime minister faced renewed calls to resign over the affair.Starmer on Friday maintained that he was kept in the dark about the Foreign Office’s decision to overrule the recommendation of security officials not to give the job to the Labour Party grandee, who was fired in September over his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3Macron and Starmer host allies for summit on Hormuz maritime securitylist 2 of 3UK’s Starmer under fire over report Mandelson failed security vettinglist 3 of 3UK’s Mandelson tried to get Epstein’s ‘goddaughter’ into 10 Downing Streetend of listStarmer, who has asserted he knew nothing about the vetting outcome, said that the Foreign Office’s failure to inform him, as prime minister, was “staggering” and “unforgivable”, pledging to “set out all the relevant facts in true transparency” to Parliament on Monday.The beleaguered prime minister said he only found out about the botched process on Tuesday, just before the revelations were published by The Guardian on Thursday, with top Foreign Office civil servant Olly Robbins ousted on the same day.Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, said Friday that “the recommendation was to not appoint Peter Mandelson to the role,” and that the Foreign Office ignored it. He said that was “astonishing”, but within the rules.He said no government minister had been told of the security assessment, carried out by a department known as UK Security Vetting. People familiar with the process told The Associated Press that is standard practice because of the sensitive personal information involved, including “financial, personal, sexual, religious and other types of background information”.