“Power resides where men believe it resides,” says Varys the spymaster in Game of Thrones. “It’s a trick, a shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

A big man can also cast a small shadow — and Sir Keir Starmer’s is shrinking fast. I was sitting in the Peers’ Gallery in the House of Commons on Monday watching him make his statement and you could feel his power ebbing away. An index of how little belief the Prime Minister’s colleagues have that power still resides with him was how few were prepared to defend him. He was flanked by Rachel Reeves and David Lammy, who nodded along loyally as he set out the case for his defence, but the rest of the front bench did little to indicate their support. Ed Miliband, sitting on the far Right hand side (the far Left from his perspective), put his head in his hands at one point and seemed similarly despondent when wheeled out to do the media round yesterday morning. Downing Street must have hoped that getting him to do it would have forced him to support the PM, but that didn’t work out as hoped. He was at pains to distance himself from the decision to appoint Lord Mandelson as His Majesty’s Ambassador to Washington, which he told Sky News he had always been “worried about”. As for Labour’s backbenchers, not a single one rose to defend him on Monday afternoon – at least, not for the 90 minutes I sat there before being called away to vote.

Starmer’s performance at the dispatch box was not very Prime Ministerial. Downing Street had briefed the lobby beforehand that he was “incandescent” about not being informed of Mandelson’s failure to get through developed vetting – not once but four times! – and he made a few half-hearted attempts to appear angry, but it wasn’t convincing. Rather, he sounded like a school prefect hauled in front of the whole school for breaking the rules and trying his best to blame his classmates, like the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in Scent of a Woman. His speech had a wheedling, slightly desperate tone – pleading for mercy, knowing he’s in serious trouble.

As you’d expect, he relied heavily on ‘process’ – the process he’d scrupulously followed and which Sir Olly Robbins, whom he sacked last week as Permanent Secretary of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), had scandalously ignored. But that was a poor battleground to pick because, as we found out on Tuesday morning when Robbins gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the senior mandarin knows more about Whitehall process than the PM and he made a pretty convincing case that he’d been following it while Starmer hadn’t.

According to Robbins, the Prince of Darkness didn’t fail the developed vetting process; rather, the UK Security Vetting (UKSV) team was “minded” not to grant him top level clearance. But Robbins decided that risk was manageable so approved Mandelson’s appointment regardless, something he said he was entitled to do without informing No 10 about the security service’s reservations. Given that Mandelson didn’t ‘fail’ – it’s not a pass-or-fail process, according to Robbins – the Perm Sec was under no obligation to tell the PM that he’d ignored UKSV’s advice. The same is true when Starmer assured the Commons that ‘due process’ had been followed. It was, said Robbins.

Having batted away the grenades the PM had thrown at him, the wily mandarin then lobbed a few of his own. No 10 had put the FCDO under “constant pressure” to hurry Mandelson through the process, he told the Committee, making it clear they would have preferred him not to undergo developed vetting at all. At one point, according to Robins, Morgan McSweeney screamed “just fucking approve” him at Sir Philip Barton, Robbins’s predecessor. Apparently, No 10 wanted to get it done before Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2025, only a week after Robbins had taken up the job, and were impatient with the ‘process’ the FCDO was following. By the time he’d got his feet under the desk, Mandelson’s appointment as Britain‘s ambassador to Washington had been announced, his name had been passed to the King and he already had access to the Foreign Office, leaving Sir Olly feeling he had little choice but to push it through.

Robbins then dropped a bombshell: he’d later been asked by No 10 to find an ambassadorship for Matthew Doyle, then Starmer’s Director of Communications. Robbins said he felt “uncomfortable” about that since Doyle didn’t have the “credentials”. In addition, No 10 told the FCDO chief not to tell David Lammy about it, even though Lammy was the Foreign Secretary at the time. The reason this is so shocking, of course, is that it later emerged that Doyle had campaigned for a Labour councillor who was being investigated for child sexual offences, something Doyle knew about at the time. That scandal erupted after Starmer had made Doyle a life peer, having failed to secure him an ambassadorship.

Read More: The Incredible Shrinking Prime Minister