{"id":902020,"date":"2026-04-18T04:04:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/902020\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T04:04:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:04:20","slug":"who-is-olly-robbins-the-brexit-fixer-who-oversaw-mandelson-fiasco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/902020\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Olly Robbins? The Brexit fixer who oversaw Mandelson fiasco"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sacking of Sir Oliver Robbins brings an abrupt and premature end to the career of one of Britain\u2019s most high-profile and controversial civil servants. Almost from the moment he entered the civil service as a Treasury fast-stream graduate in 1996, he was groomed to rise to the top.<\/p>\n

He did stints in Downing Street as principal private secretary to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, before being sent to gain experience of Britain\u2019s intelligence services and then on to become director-general of civil service reform, a key priority of the coalition government. Whatever the knotty task of the day, Robbins was seen as the man to fix it and he was widely considered to be a future cabinet secretary.<\/p>\n

But it was the fateful decision of Theresa May and Robbins\u2019s mentor \u2014 the late Jeremy Heywood, then cabinet secretary \u2014 to put him in charge of the supremely knotty task of Britain\u2019s Brexit negotiations that really thrust him into the limelight and public controversy.<\/p>\n

\"BrexitRobbins, left, fell out with David Davis, right, the Brexit secretary in Theresa May\u2019s cabinetteve Parsons\/PA<\/p>\n

After Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, Heywood wanted someone he could implicitly trust to take charge of striking a deal with Brussels<\/a>, while May saw Robbins as a wily Whitehall fixer who could negotiate an advantageous Brexit agreement and navigate the bitter domestic politics around it.<\/p>\n

It proved to be an impossible challenge. Robbins fell out with May\u2019s Brexit secretary David Davis \u2014 who was nominally in charge of the negotiations \u2014 and became a lightning rod for Tory Brexiteers who (rightly) suspected that Robbins planned to negotiate a far softer Brexit deal than May\u2019s public statements suggested.<\/p>\n

They gleefully pointed out that at university in the 1990s he ran a pro-federal Europe outfit called the Oxford Reform Club, while one Tory Brexiteer even suggested Robbins \u201cshould go to the Tower<\/a>\u201d for the Brexit deal he struck with the EU. <\/p>\n

In the end, that deal was thrown out by MPs and when May was herself ousted in 2019, Robbins left his Whitehall job on the day she resigned. After a secondment in Oxford, Robbins now entered the private sector, first as managing director at Goldman Sachs and then working for the strategic corporate advisory firm Hakluyt & Co \u2014 well known for its links to the \u201cdeep state\u201d and Britain\u2019s intelligence services.<\/p>\n

Those who know him said he still hankered for a return to Whitehall and had never entirely given up on his dream of becoming the cabinet secretary.<\/p>\n

\"BritishRobbins, left, during a meeting with President Macron in France that May requested to gain support for her Brexit strategySEBASTIEN NOGIER\/epa\/MAXPPP out<\/p>\n

As Brexit soured and the Tories were ejected from office he seemed like a natural candidate to succeed Simon Case when he retired prematurely from the job on health grounds. In the event he made it down to the final four but was still seen as too much of a Brexit \u201clightning rod\u201d to be given the top job by Sir Keir Starmer. Instead he was given a consolation prize as the top civil servant in the Foreign Office.<\/p>\n

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But he did not make himself popular. Determined to modernise the department, he set about cutting the size of it and required all senior staff to reapply for their own jobs. Critics said the \u201cbrutal\u201d process was carried out in an \u201carbitrary manner\u201d that destroyed morale in the department.<\/p>\n

But even they cannot understand how such an astute political operator could have made such a catastrophic error of judgment by taking sole responsibility for clearing Mandelson\u2019s appointment<\/a> without, as one put it, \u201cdipping Downing Street\u2019s hands in the blood\u201d of the decision.<\/p>\n

The question now is whether, in time-honoured civil service tradition, he goes quietly or decides to take his political masters down with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sacking of Sir Oliver Robbins brings an abrupt and premature end to the career of one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":902021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-902020","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116423732010228142","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}