I have a soft spot for gingers. As a left-winger, I root for the underdog. Morgan McSweeney must be relieved that the rumours that he 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, Labour’s darkest Machiavel confides to the committee: “it has caused me a great deal of stress for a number of months, I don’t know why people do this in politics, put around false rumours. They phone lots of journalists, and those journalists then phone around politicians. That’s how rumours get around. It is very corrosive. It damages people’s reputations; a lot of people in No 10 get that, and it is unfair to staff. I am grateful to the journalists who did not cover that.”
Whole books have been published about how McSweeney did exactly that to his political enemies. Does his newfound lived experience mean he now regrets any role he may or may not have allegedly had in destroying the careers, reputations and mental health of staff members in Jeremy Corbyn’s office when Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, or does having the wrong politics mean you are fair game for rumour-based character assassinations?
In Labour HQ, I’m told, the atmosphere is funereal. Every television is showing McSweeney, a hero to many staffers, being questioned by Emily Thornberry. She is chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee and one of the women who most objectively embodies the character traits the party and country missed in the man McSweeney picked out to lead us. Charm, charisma, joie de vivre. A functioning sense of who she is and what she believes.
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, hers possibly greater. Both were Europhile barristers who remained in Corbyn’s cabinet. But something about Thornberry triggered McSweeney, those allies claim. He couldn’t trust her. She was a star, and he was looking for loyal troopers: future cannon fodder. No matter how much she tried to signal discipline, his opinion never changed.
Even when, in the aftermath of the 7 October massacre, she betrayed her deepest values to carry the muffled No 10 line that “Israel has a right to defend herself.” The spectre of the 2014 “white van man” story was still looming over her, when Ed Miliband, then leader, panicked and fired her on the spot, lest he looked any less flag-loving than his New Labour legacy spinners instructed. And so, in what was likely her last chance to be a minister in a Labour government, Emily Thornberry was once again left without a frontbench brief by men who don’t feel they can control her. She ran for chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee, and here we are now.
McSweeney is wearing the Labour man uniform. Polyester blue suit. Burgundy tie. White shirt. He looks young and small, even though he is 49. Some men grow up slowly. He began his testimony with a land acknowledgement to the women and girls harmed by Jeffrey Epstein, and with that behind him, he proceeded to never mention them again.
“Wasn’t Mandelson an indispensable confidant for you?” says Thornberry. McSweeney says he was 44 by the time he sought his 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 is not a hearing about Mandelson’s security vetting. It is a hearing on whether Peter Mandelson was the man behind Morgan McSweeney, given that Westminster has already long established that Morgan McSweeney was the man behind Keir 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 most fateful political moment. I met the man, a Ukip spin doctor, who framed her by screenshotting her post of the flat with the St George’s flags and sent it to the right-wing tabloids: “Labour frontbencher sneering at the English working class.” It was an incredibly successful hit job. But he told me he now realised the punishment didn’t fit the crime. Almost a decade later, his mother died. Blinded by grief, he went to a tiny 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 x.” This is a man whom a mainstream Labour politician would never want to be seen associating with. But Thornberry treating him like a human made him realise she wasn’t the smug caricature he’d created of her.
McSweeney rejects the claim that Mandelson was given access to a secret, off-the-books 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 document, suspected to be the creation of Grant Shapps?) “We did everything on the books,” McSweeney reassures us. By books, presumably, he refers to the four tomes written with direct testimonials from him and his allies about how Starmer’s entire 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 decision or the discussions that led Mandelson from not even being a suggestion for the American ambassador (it was Mandelson himself who put Mandelson forward, McSweeney claims) to being the preferred appointment. Despite Trump’s people telling McSweeney they were happy with the previous ambassador.
As for Matthew Doyle, his time at No 10 was coming to an end, so the search began for suitable alternative roles – positions he 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 by Starmer’s close personal friend Richard Hermer.
“It’s the opposite of jobs for the boys, he was losing his job!” says McSweeney. “Don’t you think this is a little odd, a little shameful?” she asks him. “Well, we said the same to senior women,” he responds. “Like Sue Gray, what job was she given, for example?” says Thornberry.
McSweeney is 49. Like Mandelson, he has plenty of time to seek redemption. Emily Thornberry showed compassion and grace to a Ukip spin doctor who tried to destroy her. Has McSweeney learned anything from his paranoia and hubris? Can he see that his control-freakery emasculated his colleagues to the point where Starmer now presides over the Labour Party he deserves: defanged, timid and insincere?
Did people love McSweeney, or were they afraid of him? Was he a political genius who made the Labour Party government ready, or was he just allegedly able to connect his political allies with donors and rat his political enemies to the press?
I, for one, believe Morgan McSweeney. Peter Mandelson did not control him. The Irishman has no one to blame but himself.
[Further reading: Inside the Mandelson affair]
The author worked for Emily Thornberry in 2017.
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