Keir Starmer assumed full lawyer mode during this week’s PMQs, as the embattled prime minister endured yet another grilling on what he did and did not know about the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal.
The problem is that, in doing so, he looked less like a prime minister and more like a man in the courtroom of public opinion, battling to defend a threadbare case.
His tactic was to cherry-pick the parts of the bombshell evidence Olly Robbins gave yesterday that referred to Robbins’s decision to override security advice on Mandelson’s appointment to the ambassador role – evidence that Starmer put to work in support of his case in the way that only a professional lawyer can.
So he went big on Robbins’s admission that he did not tell Starmer – or his ministers – about the issues that had arisen during the vetting process.
He also leaned heavily on Robbins’s comment that the “constant pressure” placed on the Foreign Office by Downing Street in respect of the appointment had nothing to do with his decision to override security concerns about Mandelson.
But the prime minister was less keen to talk about No 10’s attempts to pressure the Foreign Office into giving his old pal and former director of communications Matthew Doyle a plum ambassadorial job – and claims that Robbins was told to hide this request from the foreign secretary at the time, David Lammy.
Neither did Starmer want to talk about what Labour’s chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Emily Thornberry, has already condemned as “bullying” by No 10 – an allegation the government has denied.
But he did at least admit that a possible diplomatic job was explored on behalf of Doyle, while trying to quickly move on from the topic, insisting that “nothing came of it”.
The uncomfortable thing is that Doyle was at the time being sacked for not being very good at his job. And he was later caught up in his own scandal (not too dissimilar to the one that eventually saw Mandelson sacked as the top man in Washington – being friends with a paedophile), which resulted in his suspension from the Labour Party.
It was also hard for Starmer to get around revelations by the former chief Foreign Office mandarin that exposed how Downing Street piled on the pressure to push through Mandelson’s security clearance as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch saved her fireworks for the last of six questions, doggedly pursuing the PM with precise questions on the scandal.
She clearly decided not to go for the kill this week, but to take a more forensic approach to the whole issue.
She may be playing a longer game, but the damaged prime minister will struggle to survive much more of this.
While Badenoch, who yet again called for him to go, got the biggest cheer from the Commons, it also managed to bring the sullen Labour backbenchers back to life, reminding them to cheer their under-fire leader.
A few toady questions from Labour MPs followed, but there was little in the way of enthusiastic support for the beleaguered PM. His loudest cheer was an ironic one from Tory MPs as he entered the chamber.
While Starmer has got through another confrontation, and survived without a killer blow, he continues to look seriously wounded.
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