Where Olly Robbins relied on recollections, Cabinet Office’s top civil servant was at pains to link her account to paper trail
Seen through the Westminster bubble, the Peter Mandelson vetting affair looks like an age-old conflict pitting ministers against mandarins. Yet the latest top civil servant to testify to parliament over what some are now calling “Mandygate” gave an intriguing account that suggested it has never been as simple as that.
Cat Little, the top civil servant at the Cabinet Office, did not put it in these terms, but what she revealed was an extraordinary dispute between the country’s most senior civil servants.
Little cut a very different figure to Olly Robbins, her recently departed counterpart at the Foreign Office, who gave evidence to the foreign affairs select committee two days earlier.
Whereas Robbins exuded civil service finesse and ease, and was perhaps somewhat freed by no longer being in post, Little at times looked genuinely pained at the situation in which she found herself: divulging the kind of facts that the British national security state would prefer remain under lock and key.
