The former top civil servant at the Foreign Office says Downing Street considered making Sir Keir Starmer’s former director of communications, Lord Matthew Doyle, an ambassador.
Appearing before MPs at the Foreign Affairs Committee, Sir Olly Robbins said he “felt quite uncomfortable” about the suggestion and “kept giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the office and was hard for me personally to defend”.
The proposal came shortly after he took over leading the Foreign Office in January last year, at a time when top diplomats were at risk of losing their jobs as part of departmental restructuring discussions, he said.
Sir Olly said there were “several discussions initiated by No 10 with me” about potentially “finding a head of mission opportunity for Matthew Doyle”.
“I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then foreign secretary, which was uncomfortable,” he said.
The former senior civil servant said he was unsure “who exactly was behind” the suggestion or “how serious it was”.
“I found it very hard to think how I would explain to the office what the credentials of Matthew were to be in an important head of mission role when I was in danger of making very senior, very experienced diplomats leave the office,” he said.
Lord Mandelson was also asked about the prospect of a role in Washington for Lord Doyle, Sir Olly suggested.
“I think subsequently, or maybe simultaneously, Mandelson was asked about whether there was a job that could be made available in the US network,” he told MPs.
“And so I think the fact that No 10 was interested in potential diplomatic options for Doyle was probably a bit more broadly known than I realised at the time.”
Lord Doyle had the Labour whip withdrawn earlier this year after it emerged he had campaigned on behalf of a friend who had been charged with possessing indecent images of children.
The peer apologised for backing then councillor Sean Morton before the case against him had concluded, saying he believed the paedophile’s assertions of innocence before Morton later admitted the offending. He had stepped down as the Prime Minister’s communications chief last March.
The row over Lord Doyle in February heightened pressure on No 10 following the Lord Mandelson scandal, which saw the former US ambassador quit Labour in the wake of new revelations about his association with Jeffrey Epstein.
It led critics to raise fresh questions about the Prime Minister’s judgment over his decision to nominate his former communications chief for a peerage last December.
Sir Keir said the former top aide “did not give a full account” of his ties to the paedophile councillor when he was elevated to the House of Lords.
Campaign group Mainstream said Tuesday’s revelations showed a “culture of centralisation and patronage” at the top of Labour was enabling “catastrophic mis-steps and undermining our relationship with the public.”
The group’s interim council said in a statement: “An already difficult set of elections may now become even harder for the hardworking Labour members and candidates out canvassing tirelessly before May.”
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