Just as a sequel and a closing note to the discussion held yesterday on wearing the scarves of ‘other’ institutions, the settled view is that nobody cares about such things any more. All universities are merchandising parts of their apparel as part of a wider marketing strategy (popularly known as ‘merch’ in the vernacular) and even Oxford and Harvard are selling their ‘T’ shirts to anybody who wished to buy them with no questions asked. But the question of entitlement is not entirely vacuous because in discussion with my son we reminded ourselves that a man had recently been convicted for wearing a row of medals at a Remembrance Day parade to which he was not entitled. In between the range of items from scarves at one end and medals at the other, there are questions that might be harder to determine such a the ‘old school tie’ \u00a0Turning to contemporary matters, \u00a0the evidence session of Sir ‘Olly’ Robbins is due to start at 9.00am in the morning and as this might be explosive evidence, I want to watch it with a bowl of breakfast cereal in my lap at the same time. The day is a little topsy turvy as I was wide awake at 6.00am and should have got up then but did not, having the luxury of an extra hour in bed and I heard my son moving around downstairs as he was breakfasting here after his early morning swim. So it will be TV first and then a walk into town followed by Pilates in mid-day. So I ensured that I was seated in front of the TV by 9.00am this morning and watched the committee proceedings for a couple of hours. \u00a0 I think it is a fair comment to say that Sir Olly came out as a truly professional civil servant and could see why he had risen to the heights that he had. There was no evasion or ‘double speak’ as it were as though it was an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ Instead there was a lot of careful explanation of the process of vetting and an absolute belief that all procedures had been complied with ‘by the book’ But there were, and several misunderstandings surrounding the whole process which \u00a0are not as straightforward as might be imagined. The first misunderstanding is that in order to avoid ministerial interference, the vetting procedures are conducted in a kind of ‘back box’ as it were in which detailed information about an individual’s background and activities is discussed under conditions of utmost secrecy. The body charged with this task is a specialised agency and does it work for a number of departments although Defence and the Foreign Office are two of its most important ‘customers’. \u00a0It is carried out by United Kingdom Security Vetting (UKSV), a specialist agency within the Cabinet Office, and applies to thousands of relatively junior officials working in government departments and overseas, as well as senior figures like Mandelson. The process is designed to identify whether people applying for government jobs pose a security risk, either because they might seek to abuse their position, or because their personal lives make them a potential blackmail target – for example, if they are in high levels of debt or are having an affair. In practice, it means candidates have to fill out various questionnaires, including being asked to provide detailed information about their finances, internet use and medical conditions. Official records are also checked, including a candidate’s credit history and any criminal offences. Records held by the Security Service are also reviewed. Those being vetted then have to undergo an interview with a specially trained vetting officer, which is designed to be intrusive. Candidates are asked about very personal areas like friendships, family, health and sex life, sometimes over several hours. Now we come to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system \u00a0works, This committee does not work on a simple ‘pass or fail’ binary decision (like a driving test) but will produce a series of recommendations (which might include a ‘severe problem’ category) but it itself does not make the decision. In the case of the Foreign Office, the recommendations are passed to an equally expert team within the Foreign Office who are themselves risk assessors and the decision might be made to appoint a candidate, appoint with mitigations e.g. \u00a0to remove potential conflicts of interest or not to appoint. This is a much more ‘analogue’ rather than a ‘binary’ process that most might expect. In the case of Mandelson, it looked as though the decision was made to ‘appoint with mitigation’ and the permanent secretary such as Ollie Robbins might have been brought in at a final stage after the UKSV (Uk Security Vetting) recommendations had been input into the Foreign Office’s own specialist security team. It might be of some surprise that UKSV subjects thousands of candidates each year to such procedures ad therefore has a massive degree of experience although the Mandelson case is a bit special.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After watching these proceedings, I went into town by car to pick up a copy of ‘The Times<\/em>‘ but had to make a special journey to the garage to pick up my copy. Then it was a case of getting ready for my Pilates class, undertaking the class with only three of us in it this week and then coming home and heating up some frozen risotto for my lunch before resumed watching the debate on the Mandelson affair which was now broadcast live on the Parliament channel. Although a complicated picture, the smoke is now clearing somewhat and various themes have emerged. Firstly,it is clear that No.10 had been desperate for the Mandelson appointment to clear the vetting procedures and to have him in post probably before the inauguration of President Trump. \u00a0Sir Olly denied that any pressure threatened the integrity of the process. Very few high profile cases had been turned down – the last one might have been under Margaret Thatcher about 40 years ago – and this might have led No. 10 to believe that vetting was only a formality. But it also has emerged that Starmer wanted a former chief of communications to be fast-tracked for a ‘Head of Mission’ role and many on the left of the Labour party think that a rightist faction in No 10 was pushing ‘jobs for the boys’ letting Starmer off the hook without Starmer realising that he was being helped. If security vetting was withdrawn when Mandelson was only just in post then this would have dire political consequences for Starmer. One suspects that it is just a case of a few more nails in the coffin and Starmer will be gone after the disastrous election results anticipated on 7th\u00a0May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just as a sequel and a closing note to the discussion held yesterday on wearing the scarves of ‘other’ institutions, the settled view is that nobody cares about such things any more. All universities are merchandising parts of their apparel as part of a wider marketing strategy (popularly known as ‘merch’ in the vernacular) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8216,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions\/8216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}