One of Keir Starmer’s key advisers has resigned over a historic WhatsApp conversation. It’s the latest bizarre twist in a torrid fortnight for the Prime Minister, as he loses another important ally to scandal.
Paul Ovenden, the No 10 Director of Strategy, quit today following a leak of private messages from 2017 in which he relayed sexually explicit jokes about Diane Abbott. While he did not actually make the comments, his decision to relay them to a colleague over WhatsApp eight years ago has been judged sufficiently damaging for him to resign.
A former journalist, Ovenden worked as a press officer under Jeremy Corbyn before returning as an adviser to Starmer. He took a senior strategy job in No 10 after last year’s election. He is close to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and is also a key member of the “Blue Labour” movement, a class-based, culturally conservative tendency within the Labour Party.
Ovenden provided intellectual ballast within No 10, and was seen as an important thinker who was prepared to challenge what some see as a soggy consensus on key issues within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Ovenden grew up outside London and didn’t attend an Oxbridge university, in contrast to many civil servants and special advisors. He had a different sensibility to others inside Labour, which on occasion led to conflict.
The prospect of another key advisor being forced out of No 10 is deeply unhelpful for the prime minister, who has already lost his deputy prime minister and his ambassador to the US in two successive scandals over the past fortnight. Ovenden was valued by Starmer and wrote speeches for him.
The New Statesman understands that Ovenden was already planning to stand down from his position. Starmer never wanted to lose him.
But the leaked messages have turned what might have been a quiet exit from public life into a messy scandal. It adds to the general atmosphere of chaos around an embattled Prime Minister who promised stability and high standards in public life. He has now faced three resignation-cum-dismissals over impropriety on the trot.
It’s disappointing news too for McSweeney. Only last year he was praised in many quarters as the election-winning saviour of the Labour Party. Now he is a lightning rod for criticism, and he has lost yet another friend at the top, just after the sacking of his mentor Peter Mandelson.
While Ovenden’s sudden removal heaps more misery on the Prime Minister and his top advisor, his demise might not be mourned by everyone in Labour. His Blue Labour instincts made him a divisive figure on the left the PLP.
This was not helped by persistent rumours (and rumours they remain) that he was a source of negative briefings about Cabinet ministers and MPs from the soft-left wing of the party. Such briefings were held up as evidence of a “boy’s club” at the top of No 10.
The Abbott messages date from 2017, when Ovenden was a Labour press officer under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. At the time Abbott was shadow home secretary. Ovenden has described them as “a silly conversation”.
None of the other people involved in the messages are understood to be working in government now.
[See also: How Peter Mandelson became a monster]
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