Britain's Downing Street has rejected testimony from a sacked senior diplomat that Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office applied relentless pressure on civil servants to fast-track the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington, despite security concerns. Olly Robbins, until last week the Foreign Office's most senior official, told a parliamentary oversight committee that there had been a "constant" atmosphere of chasing from Number 10 to get Mandelson to the United States "as quickly as humanly possible," and that the government showed a "dismissive attitude" toward standard security vetting — vetting that independent officials had ultimately recommended Mandelson fail, partly over his lobbying firm's links to Chinese companies. The row has left Starmer politically beleaguered: opposition leader Kemi Badenoch used an emergency parliamentary debate to call for his resignation, Trump publicly called Mandelson a "really bad pick," and the prime minister — who sacked Mandelson in September 2025 following revelations about the depth of his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — now faces accusations from former civil servants that he is scapegoating Robbins for a political decision made at the highest levels of his office.