Who is Olly Robbins? The senior Foreign Office official sacked over Peter Mandelson vetting scandal
The 50-year-old has served three prime ministers at Number 10
Sir Olly Robbins has been sacked from his role in the Foreign Office following revelations that the department overruled security vetting for Lord Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the US.
It is understood that Sir Keir Starmer and foreign secretary Yvette Cooper have expressed a loss of confidence in the Foreign Office’s most senior civil servant.
Security officials had initially denied clearance for the disgraced Labour peer, but Foreign Office officials took the unusual step of overriding this recommendation.
The prime minister says he was unaware that the Foreign Office had overruled the recommendation of security officials in early 2025 not to give Peter Mandelson the job.
Starmer has also rejected calls for him to resign.
But who is Sir Olly Robbins, the man who was once at the heart of the UK government’s Brexit negotiations?
Who is Sir Olly Robbins?
Sir Olly Robbins first emerged into the spotlight during the tumultuous Brexit years.
The Oxford-educated 50-year-old was a central figure behind former prime minister Theresa May’s troubled Brexit deal and was consistently criticised for his role in negotiations, as well as by Eurosceptics for thwarting the process.
He took charge of negotiations with the EU mid-way through talks, after then Brexit secretary David Davis was sidelined because of a lack of progress, but the deal was rejected repeatedly by the Commons.
Before his Brexit fame, he had worked for every prime minister since Sir Tony Blair and was known as a highly influential but low-profile civil servant.
The public schoolboy went straight from studying politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford to the Treasury in 1996, where he rose steadily through the ranks until he was approached by Sir Tony to become his principal private secretary.
After the 2010 general election, then prime minister David Cameron made Sir Olly deputy national security adviser, where he was responsible for intelligence, security and resilience.
In this role he negotiated with The Guardian on how to limit its reporting of material leaked by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, which included classified documents relating to the CIA and GCHQ.
He left government in 2019, before Boris Johnson took office, and worked for Goldman Sachs as a managing director of the bank’s investment banking division, and for Hakluyt, a global strategic advisory firm.
Sir Keir brought Sir Olly back into Government by appointing him head of the Foreign Office in January 2025.
He had been in the job just three weeks when the decision regarding Lord Mandelson was made.
He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, an honour given for extraordinary services abroad, in Baroness May’s resignation honours.
