{"id":208034,"date":"2026-04-18T01:58:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/british-pm-starmer-under-new-pressure-to-resign-over-u-s-ambassador-appointment-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T01:58:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T01:58:32","slug":"british-pm-starmer-under-new-pressure-to-resign-over-u-s-ambassador-appointment-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/british-pm-starmer-under-new-pressure-to-resign-over-u-s-ambassador-appointment-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"British PM Starmer under new pressure to resign over U.S. ambassador appointment – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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LONDON \u2014 British Prime Minister Keir Starmer<\/a> on Friday resisted demands he resign over revelations that his scandal-tainted pick for U.K. ambassador to Washington<\/a> was appointed despite failing security checks.
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Starmer 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. Many considered Mandelson a risky appointment because of his past friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The top Foreign Office civil servant, Olly Robbins, took the fall for the decision and resigned late Thursday.
Starmer said he was \u201cabsolutely furious\u201d that he had been kept in the dark, calling it staggering\u201d and \u201cunforgivable.\u201d He said he would \u201cset out all the relevant facts in true transparency\u201d to Parliament on Monday.
That\u2019s unlikely to end the danger to the prime minister over his fateful decision to appoint Mandelson, a trade expert and elder statesman of the governing Labour Party, as envoy to the Trump administration. It was a calculated risk that backfired spectacularly, and could bring down the prime minister.
Opposition politicians expressed disbelief that Starmer could have been unaware Mandelson had failed security vetting. Starmer\u2019s office said he only found out this week.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, said Friday that \u201cthe recommendation was to not appoint Peter Mandelson to the role,\u201d and that the Foreign Office ignored it. He said that was \u201castonishing,\u201d but within the rules.
He said no government minister had been told of the security assessment.
Jones said the checks, carried out by a department known as U.K. Security Vetting, \u201cgo through financial, personal, sexual, religious and other types of background information, and that is why it is kept extremely private on a portal that only a few people have access to.\u201d
Opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said claims the prime minister didn\u2019t know were \u201ccompletely preposterous.\u201d
\u201cThis story does not stack up. The prime minister is taking us for fools,\u201d she told the BBC. \u201cAll roads lead to a resignation.\u201d
Ed Davey, the leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, said Starmer \u201cmust go\u201d if he misled Parliament and lied to the British public.
Starmer has repeatedly insisted that \u201cdue process\u201d was followed in the appointment, which was announced in December 2024. Mandelson took up the Washington post in February 2025, after undergoing security vetting.
Mandelson\u2019s expertise as a former European Union trade chief was considered a major asset in trying to persuade the Trump administration not to slap heavy tariffs on British goods, and seemed to pay off when the countries struck a trade deal in May 2025.
But documents released by the government in March, after being forced to by Parliament, showed Starmer ignored red flags raised by his staff about the appointment. He was warned that Mandelson\u2019s friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, exposed the government to \u201creputational risk.\u201d
Starmer fired Mandelson in September 2025 after evidence emerged that he had lied about the extent of his links to Epstein.
The prime minister has apologized to the British public and to Epstein\u2019s victims for believing what he has termed \u201cMandelson\u2019s lies.\u201d
Starmer\u2019s premiership faced its biggest crisis in February after the release of millions of pages of Epstein-related documents by the U.S. Department of Justice showed the closeness of Mandelson\u2019s relationship with the financier, even after Epstein\u2019s conviction in 2008 for sexual offenses involving a minor.
Emails between the men suggested Mandelson had passed on sensitive \u2014 and potentially market-moving \u2014 government information to Epstein in 2009, when he was a member of Prime Minister Gordon Brown\u2019s government.
British police subsequently launched a criminal probe and searched Mandelson\u2019s houses in London and western England. Mandelson was arrested on Feb. 23 on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
He has been released without bail conditions as the police investigation continues. Mandelson has previously denied wrongdoing and hasn\u2019t been charged. He does not face allegations of sexual misconduct.
King Charles III\u2019s brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, is also under police investigation over his friendship with Epstein. He, too, has been arrested but not charged.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeLONDON \u2014 British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday resisted demands he resign over revelations that his scandal-tainted pick for U.K. ambassador to Washington was appointed despite failing security checks.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Starmer says he was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":208035,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-208034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}