Britain’s revered and once discreet civil service turns on Starmer

LONDON – The UK’s Labour government roared to power promising to improve morale in a civil service degraded by budget cuts under 14 years of Conservative rule.

Instead, a public spat with some of its most senior officials is hurting its ability to navigate war with its enemies and disagreements with its friends. 

“This is trouble,” Ms Emily Thornberry, a senior Labour figure and chair of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee, told the News Agents podcast.

“We have never needed to have a Foreign Office more at the top of its game than we do now and I think that the world needs that too.”

She had spent the morning of April 21 grilling Mr Olly Robbins, the top Foreign Office official who was fired last week by Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a days-long argument over which of them was to blame for pushing through the ill-fated appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington.

The disgraced former envoy to the US was fired in September 2025 over his ties to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but the question of why he got the job in the first place has become a major political scandal that Mr Starmer has been unable to shake off.

Playing out live on television, the dispute pitted the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office against his own master.

It turned arcane matters of process and disclosure into a debate that cost Mr Robbins his job and now threatens Mr Starmer’s own grip on power. 

The hostilities are symptomatic of malaise at the institution responsible for securing Britain from foreign threats.

Yet when Mr Robbins told the committee his was the “most attacked” government department, he seemed to be alluding to attacks coming from closer to home. 

Several key diplomats, already demoralised from steep job cuts at the Foreign Office, spoke on condition of anonymity to say they’re distracted from their duties at a time when the UK is grappling with fraying transatlantic relations, rising Russian aggression, and a war in Iran that it opposes.

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper this week had to condense her shuttle diplomacy tour spanning Europe, the Middle East and Asia in order to deal with a domestic crisis that just won’t go away.

After weathering the disruptive zeal of Mr Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings and Ms Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership – in which she fired the head of the Treasury – the civil service hasn’t caught a break from Labour taking over.

Soon after winning election in 2024, Mr Starmer had vowed to turn the page on those years, explicitly pledging his confidence, support and respect.

Instead, the former director of public prosecutions took to criticising the organs of the British state early on in his premiership, complaining that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.”

His team briefed the British media that Mr Cummings had been right in his elaborate critiques of what he termed “the deep state,” a reference to the principal government departments.

Mr Dave Penman, General Secretary of one of the main trade unions for government employees, warned at the time that Mr Starmer had “undermined the leadership of the civil service”.

Mr Robbins rose to prominence as one of the chief negotiators of the UK’s Brexit, the model of a loyal technocrat seeing through the nitty-gritty of a stretched out divorce from the European Union.

In a telling visual detail, Mr Penman sat just behind him as the once low-profile official said he’d been pressured to cut corners with Mr Mandelson’s security vetting.

“People want their leaders to come in to bat for them when unfairly criticised,” the union boss had said in December 2024.

Since then, Mr Starmer has cycled through a number of department heads and lost two civil service chiefs.

Ironically, before his sacking, Mr Robbins had been responsible for pushing through a near-25 per cent reduction in Foreign Office headcount, to address criticisms that it had become over-inflated.

Senior officials and diplomats say the combination of these job cuts, a promotion freeze, and fears they too may be forced to take the fall for future scandals has prompted what one called a confidence crisis. 

Mr Robbins’ restructuring plan is expected to still go ahead. Ambassadors returning from senior postings abroad are already arriving back in London to learn they haven’t got a new role.

Every official, including those responsible for the most pressing global issues in Iran and Ukraine, has been made to reapply for their own jobs in recent months. 

One official said the cuts amounted to salami slicing, while another spoke of a condescending and demoralising process in which senior diplomats are having to point to sections of a so-called capability wheel to argue why they ought to remain in post.

The cost-cutting drive dented morale long ago, with Bloomberg reporting in January that diplomats were comparing the fight over a dwindling number of roles to The Hunger Games – the dystopian franchise in which teenagers compete in a battle to the death.

Some say it’s been compounded by Labour’s decision to constrain the Foreign Secretary’s remit.

Cabinet minister Nick Thomas-Symonds has been made responsible for the UK-EU reset, while the Ukraine brief has been largely led by Mr Starmer’s own office and the Ministry of Defence.

National security adviser Jonathan Powell is sometimes referred to as the UK’s true foreign secretary, and is the person Starmer turns to most on foreign policy issues. 

Ms Cooper and her predecessor David Lammy have mostly been left to front-up the most intractable of issues.

Those are the conflict in the Middle East and plans to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius that were suspended after the US President Donald Trump called it an act of “great stupidity”.

Though Ms Cooper has worked hard to highlight a number of global humanitarian crises, the Foreign Office in 2025 was forced to cut its aid budget to raise money for defense and suffered the largest overall cuts, in percentage terms, of any department. 

Despite the cuts, Mr Starmer’s office pushed the Foreign Office to find a top diplomatic job for his former communications director Matthew Doyle, Robbins said on April 21.

“It was difficult for me personally, obviously, as a leader, to explain why very talented and experienced diplomats were having to leave the organization, and people who would be widely considered to have rather fewer credentials were being put in these important jobs,” Ms Robbins said.

Ms Cooper also told the Commons it “would also not have been an appropriate appointment”.

Former cabinet secretaries Gus O’Donnell and Robin Butler have warned in print in recent days that the relationship between politicians and the state desperately needs to be re-set. 

Mr Starmer “now faces one of the worst crises in relations between ministers and mandarins of modern times,” Mr O’Donnell wrote in the Times. BLOOMBERG