Starmer says ministers were in the dark, but friends of former top civil servant suggest it was a case of them looking the other way
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Fiddling with his reading glasses, the then cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald – sitting alongside the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins – suddenly appeared a little tense.
The bonhomie evident in earlier answers had quite disappeared.
It was 3 November 2025, and Peter Mandelson had been removed from his post as ambassador to the US two months earlier, after the disclosure of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.
