I have a soft spot for gingers. As a someone who is politically left-wing, I root for the underdog. Morgan McSweeney must be relieved that the rumours that he allegedly used the “f” word to rush Foreign Office officials into vetting Peter Mandelson have been refuted this morning by Philip Barton.
Without a hint of irony, McSweeney said at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee: “It has caused me a great deal of stress for a number of months. I do not know why people do this in politics, put around untrue rumours. They phone lots of journalists. Those journalists then phone lots of politicians. That’s how rumours get around. It is very, very corrosive, it’s damaging for people’s reputation, and a lot of people in No10 get that. And I think it’s unfair for staff who can’t speak for themselves. I’m grateful as well to the journalists, the vast majority of whom never covered that story, because it wasn’t true.”
In Labour HQ, I’m told, the atmosphere is funereal. McSweeney, a hero to many staffers, being questioned by Emily Thornberry, the chair of the Committee, was broadcast by most TV news channels. Allies of Thornberry say McSweeney met with her during the 2020 leadership election. Her political profile was similar to Keir Starmer’s at the time, possibly greater. Both Thornberry and Starmer were Europhile barristers who remained in Jeremy Corbyn’s cabinet. But, those allies claim, something about Thornberry triggered McSweeney. He couldn’t trust her. She was a star and he was looking for loyal troopers (or possibly future cannon fodder). No matter how much she tried to signal discipline, his opinion did not changed.
Even when, in the aftermath of 7 October, Thornberry carried the No 10 line that “Israel has a right to defend herself”. The spectre of the 2014 “white van man” story, in which she was accused of snobbery after tweeting a picture of house with three England flags and a white van parked outside, was still looming over her. Ed Miliband, who was the leader of Labour at the time, effectively fired her, lest he looked any less flag-loving than his New Labour legacy spinners instructed. And so, in what she may have understood to be one of her last chances to be a minister in a Labour government, Thornberry was left without a front bench brief by men who may have felt as though they couldn’t control her. So she ran for chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and here we are.
McSweeney is wearing the Labour man uniform: polyester blue suit; burgundy tie; white shirt. He looks young, even though he is 49. Some men grow up slowly. Thornberry asked McSweeney if Mandelson became an “indispensable and venerated confidant” to him; McSweeney said he was 44 when he sought Mandelson’s advice. In no need of mentors, thank you very much. They brought in some extremely experienced people, such as Liz Lloyd and Jonathan Powell. He politely rejects the New Statesman reported quote from February about him “not even breathing without asking Mandelson first”. This was less a hearing about Mandelson’s failed security vetting, and more on whether Mandelson was the man behind McSweeney. Key, given that it is a well-established belief in Westminster that McSweeney was the man behind Starmer.
Thornberry casts McSweeney’s mind back to happier times. The beginning of the millennium, 2001, when he was an intern on Excalibur, the New Labour attack unit. “One of its functions was to keep an eye on MPs seen as disloyal.” What she means is, who taught you to be ruthless with people in your own party? When did the cancer of Labour factionalism and obsession with staying on message first take root?
A few months ago, outside a pub in Westminster, I found out the backstory to Thornberry’s fateful 2014 political moment. I met the man, a Ukip spin doctor, who screenshotted her tweet and sent it to the right-wing tabloid. He told me he had realised the punishment didn’t fit the crime. Almost a decade on from the scandal, his mother died. While grieving, he went to a chapel inside Westminster Abbey, lit a candle, and posted a photo of the moment. Thornberry, who had never met him, messaged: “A year ago, my mum died, and I went to the same chapel. I hope you are alright.” Thornberry treating him kindly made him realise she wasn’t the smug caricature he’d created.
McSweeney rejects the claim that Mandelson was given access to a secret Google spreadsheet listing potential parliamentary candidates. Any Labour insider worth their salt will tell you spreadsheets are a tried-and-tested method for Labour puppet masters. (And who can forget the Tory equivalent, suspected to be the creation of Grant Shapps?) “We did everything on the books,” McSweeney reassures us. By books, presumably, he refers to the tomes written with testimonials from him and his allies about how Starmer’s leadership project was a secret off-the-books operation.
Of course, it was Starmer who decided to appoint Mandelson. There is no record of the discussions that took Mandelson from not even being considered to be US ambassador to being the preferred appointment. (McSweeney claims Mandelson put himself forward.)
As for Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s former director of communications, his time at No 10 was coming to an end. So the search began for suitable alternative roles – positions Doyle would, claims McSweeney, need to apply for like everyone else. This is not what Olly Robbins told the Committee a week ago, when he said that Doyle would have been a political appointment and therefore would have expected to be appointed without pushback, just like Mandelson. Doyle wasn’t interested anyway, so nothing progressed. Except for his peerage.
McSweeney frames it as “a duty of care to someone leaving”. “Have you heard of the phrase, ‘Jobs for the boys’?”, asks Thornberry, who presumably received no such care package when she was replaced as attorney general by Starmer’s friend Richard Hermer. “It was the opposite, though, of jobs for boys. He was losing his job,” says McSweeney. “don’t you think this is a little odd or shameful?” she asks. “Well, the same was true if we had to exit women, senior women, from the team as well,” he responds. “Like Sue Gray, what job was she given, for example?” says Thornberry.
McSweeney, like Mandelson, has plenty of time to seek redemption. Thornberry showed compassion and grace to a Ukip spin doctor who tried to undermine her. Has McSweeney learned anything from his hubris? Can he see that his iron fist has damaged his party to the point where Starmer now presides over a Labour that is defanged, timid and insincere?
Did people love McSweeney, or were they afraid of him? Was he a political genius who made the Labour Party ready to govern, or something more sinister? I, for one, believe Morgan McSweeney. Peter Mandelson did not control him. The Irishman has no one to blame but himself.
The author worked for Emily Thornberry in 2017.
[Further reading: Inside the Mandelson affair]
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