Downing Street asked the Foreign Office to find a senior diplomatic role for Keir Starmer’s then communications chief, Matthew Doyle, the department’s former lead civil servant revealed on Tuesday.
Testifying to MPs at parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, Olly Robbins said he had had several conversations with No 10 about finding a role for Doyle, who was later suspended as a Labour peer after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children.
Robbins said he had been asked not to mention the idea to David Lammy, who was foreign secretary at the time.
Robbins described the conversations as part of more general pressure from people at the top of government to place senior political figures in senior diplomatic posts. He made the revelation while testifying to the committee about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Washington ambassador.
“There were several discussions initiated by No 10 with me about potentially finding a head of mission opportunity for Matthew Doyle, who was then the prime minister’s director of communications,” he said. “I was under strict instruction not to discuss that with the then foreign secretary.”
He added: “It was, to be honest, hard to find something that I thought might be suitable. But I also felt quite uncomfortable about it and I kept giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the Foreign Office, and hard for me personally, to defend.”
He told the committee it had been part of “a creep of senior diplomatic roles going to non career diplomats”.
He added: “It was difficult for me, personally, honestly, as a leader, to explain why very talented and experienced diplomats were having to leave the organisation, and people who would be widely considered to have rather fewer credentials would be input in these important jobs.”
Robbins said the conversations happened in March 2025, shortly before Doyle quit Downing Street.
He was then given a seat in the House of Lords, but was suspended from the Labour whip this February after it was reported that he campaigned in 2016 in a local election on behalf of Sean Morton.
Morton is a former Labour councillor in Scotland who had been charged with possessing indecent images, and was convicted two years later.
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