Why don't you give us your insight into what happened?
Do I need to?
It's transparently obvious. Starmer wanted Mandelson in the role, made it known to the FCDO that they should make it happen and pressure was applied intentionally or unintentionally to make it happen such that it got approved.
Honestly other than demonstrating that Starmer has an appalling lack of judgement, I have no issue with this. Also when it all went tits up later and Mandleson has to be sacked, had Starmer owned it, he may have got away with it. "As PM I have to a make a myriad of decisions and I always make them in the best interests of the country, but inevitably whilst I hope to her most things right, from time to time I may make a judgement I later regret" etc etc, then he may have been forgiven.
But he didn't do that. He said he regretted appointing Mandy but accepted no responsibility for it, instead blaming anyone but himself.
Worse still, he's been caught repeatedly lying about it. It is beyond inconceivable that after all this shit storm, Starmer only found out in Tuesday that Mandy had failed the security vetting. That a man, a former lawyer, should never have thought to have found out the details of this potentially carreer-ending blunder, is just not credible.
And were there any doubt about that, then any last ounce of possibility is eliminated when it transpires that the Guardian in September asked the government specifically "we hear Mandelson failed security vetting, is this true?". Can you imagine Starmer hearing this and not himself asking if it was true? But no we're being asked to believe he did not.
And finally, Yvette Cooper wrote to Emily Thornbury in September saying, "The UK government’s national security vetting charter includes an undertaking to protect personal data and other information in the strictest confidence … The process is also independent of ministers who are not informed of any findings
other than the final outcome. This remained the case in this instance.”
So we have it in writing from our Foreign Secretary that ministers were told of the outcome of the vetting process.
It's the lies, not the deeds, that get them in the end.