Keir Starmer was kept in the dark about sensitive information relating to Peter Mandelson’s security vetting by two other top civil servants, including the head of the civil service, the Guardian can reveal.

The prime minister said on Friday that it was “unforgivable” and “staggering” that senior officials did not tell him that Mandelson failed a security vetting process weeks before he took up his role as ambassador to Washington.

Olly Robbins was forced out of his job as permanent secretary of the Foreign Office on Thursday after it was revealed his department granted Mandelson developed vetting clearance against the advice of the relevant agency.

Now the Guardian can reveal that two other top civil servants, including the cabinet secretary, Antonia Romeo, failed to immediately notify him when they discovered that UK Security Vetting (UKSV) had advised that Mandelson should be denied clearance.

Downing Street has said Starmer did not find out about the vetting failure, which occurred in January 2025, until Tuesday this week. However, the Guardian has established that both Romeo, the government’s most senior civil servant, and Catherine Little, the Cabinet Office’s permanent secretary, have been aware since March.

Their delay in informing the prime minister will fuel concern about whether his government is being run by mandarins rather than ministers.

Romeo, who was appointed by Starmer in February, was told about the failure by Little in March. Little is the top civil servant at the Cabinet Office, which UKSV is part of. Her department has also been overseeing the process of complying with a “humble address”, parliamentary motion that ordered the government to release “all papers” relevant to Mandelson’s appointment.

The motion made an exception for papers prejudicial to national security or international relations, which it said should be released to the intelligence and security committee (ISC).

A government source insisted Little “did not sit on the information” but was involved in a complex process and was trying to establish the risks in sharing highly sensitive information, including with the prime minister. The source added that Little informed Romeo of her plan to establish those risks. Romeo, the government source said, was supportive of the plan.

That process appears to have taken weeks, with as many as a dozen officials and lawyers aware of Mandelson’s vetting failure. Starmer’s statement would suggest he was not formally notified by any of them until a few days ago.

At the centre of the controversy was an extraordinary summary document produced by UKSV on 28 January last year, weeks after Starmer had announced Mandelson would be his ambassador to Washington.

The document identified highly sensitive concerns UKSV had about Mandelson and recommended, in conclusion, that he should not be given security clearance. It was that recommendation that was overruled by the Foreign Office.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said that, after receiving the UKSV document after the humble address, Little “immediately undertook a series of expedited checks in order to be in a sound position to share the document, or the fact of it”.

The spokesperson said this included receipt of legal advice about what could be shared in the context of the humble address and consideration of whether the information would prejudice criminal proceedings.

Little also sought information from the Foreign Office about “the process they had followed” when deciding to give Mandelson security clearance against the advice of UKSV, the spokesperson said. They added: “As soon as these checks were conducted, the prime minister was informed.”

According to a government source, Little had always been of the view that the outcome of the UKSV process should be made public, and the relevant document disclosed in unredacted form to the ISC. However, officials in her department have in recent weeks been divided over how to proceed and whether to release the document to the committee at all.

Prior to the publication of the Guardian’s story on Thursday, there was said to have been “no consensus” among officials. Some flagged national security concerns and argued it would be “unprecedented” to disclose the UKSV file, even to the ISC, a committee comprising nine MPs and peers, including Jeremy Wright, a former attorney general, and Alan West, a retired Royal Navy admiral.

Its members are sworn to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act and are given access to highly classified material. According to one source familiar with debates swirling in Little’s department, there were fears among at least some officials that there might be an attempted “cover-up” and the document would never see the light of day.

Some officials noted that the UKSV document appeared to contradict statements made by the prime minister and his former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, that implied vetting failures could partly be blamed for Mandelson’s appointment.

Amid an impasse among officials, some in government are said to have argued that precedent should be set aside to disclose the UKSV documents to the committee, and tjat anything short of that would risk breaching the wishes of parliament.

The discussion about whether or not to release the documents to the parliamentary committee appears to have lasted for weeks. If Downing Street’s chronology is to be believed, the prime minister was completely oblivious that it was even happening.

By Wednesday this week, one compromise option being considered involved providing unredacted versions of the document only to two ISC members, such as the chair and one other member. Another was only showing the documents to those members of the committee who are also members of the privy council, a historical body that advises the monarch.

One source said Little is now expected to be asked to appear before the ISC in a closed hearing to answer questions about the affair. Lord Beamish, who chairs the ISC, has said that his committee and parliament would take a “very dim view” if documents were withheld from its members.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said Little and officials working on the humble address “have always worked on the basis of being transparent about the UK Security Vetting recommendation”.

Neither the Cabinet Office nor No 10 have disputed, however, that there has been an internal debate over whether the materials could be withheld. That raises questions about the accuracy of public remarks on Friday by the chief secretary to the prime minister, Darren Jones.

A close ally of Starmer, Jones was asked on the BBC’s Today programme to comment on the Guardian’s report that “officials have toyed with the idea at least of not revealing all of this to parliament”.

He replied: “That’s not true. All of these documents are going through what’s called the humble address process, which my department is responsible for.”

Asked if he had misled the public, a source close to Jones insisted that his answer was “clearly focused on the official government response to the humble address, which he makes clear later in his answer.”

A man who evaded justice for more than two decades has been found guilty of the “horrific” 2003 rape for which Andrew Malkinson was wrongfully jailed for 17 years.

Paul Quinn, 52, was convicted by a jury on Friday after a fresh forensic analysis found traces of his DNA on the victim.

The father-of-six was convicted of two counts of rape, attempted strangulation and grievous bodily harm. He was found not guilty of two counts of indecent assault, which were alternative counts to the rapes.

Quinn sat with his head bowed and removed his glasses as the verdicts were returned. He will be sentenced on 5 June.

It can now be revealed that Quinn is being investigated as a potential suspect in other serious sexual assaults, including three rapes that took place while he was at large.

Greater Manchester police are now facing questions about why he was not investigated at the time despite being a convicted sex offender who lived near the scene of the attack.

Instead, detectives focused on Malkinson, who was jailed in 2004 and went on to spend 17 years in prison while protesting his innocence.

His conviction was eventually quashed in 2023, becoming one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in modern British history.

In a statement read by a police officer after the verdicts, the victim of the rape said she was very pleased with the result but added: “It does not change the fact that two lives have been impacted in such a way.”

The mother-of-two, who was 33 at the time of the attack, said the investigation had “robbed Mr Malkinson of 17 years” and “robbed me of the life I wanted to have”. She added: “The impact of what happened that day has stayed with me and will stay for life.”

Malkinson said he was content that the right result had been reached but that Quinn “could have been caught a long time ago”.

He added: “Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime. All those responsible for allowing this dangerous man to wander free whilst I was locked up must now be held to account.”

A jury at Manchester crown court was told that Quinn’s DNA was identified on samples of the victim’s clothing in October 2022 after a fresh forensic review.

Police and prosecutors knew as long ago as 2007 that an unidentified man’s DNA was found on the victim but decided not to carry out further tests at the time.

The organisation responsible for investigating potential miscarriages of justice, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, also declined to commission further forensic work and refused twice to refer Malkinson’s case to the court of appeal.

An investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is investigating five former Greater Manchester police officers on suspicion of gross misconduct, including one who is under criminal investigation. A sixth officer, still serving at GMP, is being investigated on suspicion of misconduct.

The police watchdog is examining GMP’s destruction of evidence in the Malkinson case, its failure to disclose the criminal histories of two key witnesses in the 2004 trial, and whether those witnesses were offered incentives to testify against the innocent man.

Steph Parker, an assistant chief constable at GMP, said the verdicts had come “two decades too late for all involved in this horrendous case”.

Parker paid tribute to the victim and Malkinson, offering both an unreserved apology on behalf of the force, which she said would continue to support the IOPC and the public inquiry.

She added: “Paul Quinn is a dangerous man. He is the one responsible for this horrific attack, and he has known it all along for more than 20 years. The harm he has done to the victim and the cowardice of watching the wrong man go to prison for his crime is unforgivable.”

Quinn admitted in court that it was his DNA on items of the victim’s clothing, including a vest top above her left nipple that had been partly severed in the attack.

He suggested the woman may have been one of “hundreds” of local women he claimed to have “copped off with” in Little Hulton, Greater Manchester.

Quinn had lived in the area all of his life until he moved to Exeter in 2017 over what police said they believed was a drug debt he owed.

Jurors at Manchester crown court were not told about the drug dispute or that Quinn had been convicted of twice raping a 12-year-old girl in 1990 and 1991, when he was 16.

Four years earlier, when he was 12, he received a criminal caution for the indecent assault of a woman.

By the end of his teens, Quinn had convictions for burglary, actual bodily harm, possessing an air gun, and arson with intent after setting fire to a wheelie bin outside the home of an ex-girlfriend while she was inside with her children.

It emerged during the trial that he had repeatedly searched online for details about the case.

In 2019, before Malkinson’s case was widely known as a miscarriage of justice, he looked up an article from the original trial before Googling “wrongly convicted cases UK”. He claimed this was because he was fascinated by true crime documentaries.

Quinn had given his DNA to police in 2012 as part of a nationwide operation to get samples from serious offenders whose crimes were carried out before the national DNA database was established in 1995. It was this sample that eventually led the police to his door in 2022.

He appears to have known the day would come, however. The trial heard he had searched repeatedly “how long is DNA kept in database” in the weeks after the Guardian revealed in 2022 that a fresh analysis linked another man to the 2003 attack.