This is John Batchler, conversation with Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal editorial page in London about the Lord

Mandelson scandal in Parliament. The apologies or not by the Prime Minister that he appointed a man to be

ambassador to the United States who was not suited, not fit, not vetted positively by the civil service.

And what that means in Britain quite different than what it means in the U.S.

Here's Joe to explain the civil servants of the British government and their power and their

authority to make decisions without consulting the bosses, which is the elected politicians.

More of this later.

Yes, I mean, that's one of the wrinkles here because Britain's civil service operates differently from the U.S.

Because you have a large contingent of people

who rise pretty senior in the ranks of the government who are permanent civil servants

instead of elected politicians or political appointees. And so I think that this raises a bunch

of issues about whether those people have too

much authority to act on their own when they are reviewing things like the Mandelson

appointment.

And Starmer's defense to all of this has been that the civil servants didn't tell him

that there were any red flags surrounding the

Mandelson vetting process, that the civil servants decided on their own that they

were going to waive Mandelson through anyway. Now, there is some dispute about the

precise circumstances under which that would have happened and some suggestion

that maybe political, elected politicians did know more about the situation.

But it's not entirely implausible that might have happened, even if it is inexcusable,

that civil servants would assume for themselves that kind of power and the system would allow them to.

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