Morgan McSweeney is the architect of Keir Starmer’s Labour and a top-tier dickhead. On 8 February, he finally resigned – namely because he was the man who proposed that the disgraced Peter Mandelson take on the ambassador to the US position.

It seems the Labour party hasn’t changed, however, as politicians are coming out to defend him:

Sorry to see this decision by Morgan, it’s a very dignified statement and reflects the character of someone I know to be thoughtful and dedicated to Labour and the security and prosperity of the country. https://t.co/DIDBCSvHsM

— Luke Akehurst (@lukeakehurst) February 8, 2026

Defending the indefensible

If you’re not too sure of who McSweeney is, let’s just call him the cunt-in-chief behind Starmer. The Canary’s Skwawkbox captured who he is perfectly:

McSweeney is a horror. Undeclared donations from the Israel lobby, spying on journalists, covert campaigns to destroy media that highlight his boss’s crimes, deep connections with genocidal Israel and a coordinated sabotage campaign to prevent Labour winning the 2019 general election. His fingerprints are on all of it.

How the fuck can you defend that? But weirdly, some Labour politicians have decided to die on that hill.

Giant walking baby and Zionist shill Luke Akehurst is one of those who defended him. Weird, that a man who consistently denies a genocide would have other shit opinions…

Akehurst doing his best to ignore his world crumbling around him

One by one, we’re going to pluck these disgusting, paracitical, perverted little creeps out of power

And you’re on the list Luke, you Zionist loving little polyp

Advertisement

Tick tock 😊 https://t.co/8DWp8zmxb5

— 𝔸𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕗𝕒𝔹𝕠𝕥 – AKA The Intolerant Left (@_Wrevolution_) February 9, 2026

Baroness Jacqui Smith also came out swinging on McSweeney’s behalf:

Baroness Jacqui Smith defends what Morgan McSweeney has done to the Labour Party & says shes grateful to him for it.

Yes Labour gives top govt jobs to the best friends of paedophiles, & I’m grateful for it! pic.twitter.com/a4xpipqH2g

Advertisement

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 9, 2026

If you’re unfamiliar Smith, she’s a former home secretary who misused over £116,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses.

It seems like figures from the Labour right are still not ready to let go of McSweeney and his disgusting legacy. I wonder how many more will come out of the woodwork…

The rot

So, it seems like Labour hasn’t really changed at all. Yes, they may have lopped off the worst of the rot, but it definitely runs deeper than McSweeney and Mandelson.

Featured image via Terry Ott (Wikimedia)

A Saudi official has attacked ‘foreign actors’ for fueling the war in Sudan. Their comment came after a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) drone killed 24 in Kordofan province. Fighting has displaced millions and killed up to 150,00 people.

The war is now in its third year. And the UK and others have played their part in letting the carnage run on.

The Sudan Doctors Network said RSF targeted:

a vehicle transporting displaced people fleeing South Kordofan State. The vehicle was traveling from the Dubeiker area in North Kordofan when it was attacked near Al-Rahad city.

Two infants died in the attack:

The attack resulted in the deaths of 24 people, including 8 children—two of whom were infants—and several women.

Sudan Doctors Network: 24 Killed, Including 8 Women and Children, in Rapid Support Forces Attack on Vehicle Transporting Them from the Dubeiker Area to Al-Rahad in North Kordofan

The Rapid Support Forces carried out another massacre in North Kordofan State by targeting a vehicle… pic.twitter.com/jDmZxJaZnr

— Sudan Doctors Network – شبكة أطباء السودان (@SDN154) February 7, 2026

The Sudanese foreign ministry said on 8 February:

This attack does not represent an isolated incident, but rather a continuation of a pattern adopted by the militia to obstruct humanitarian work and use deprivation of food as a means of pressure against civilians.

RSF are an Arab supremacist militia given to carrying out massacres of the indigenous population of Sudan. They have also been used by the UAE as mercenaries in Yemen. Despite the UAE’s denials, Emirati military support is substantial, traceable, and decisive.

RSF and UAE

The Saudi foreign ministry also commented, thought it did not name the offenders. They said:

The Kingdom affirms that these acts are unjustifiable under any circumstances and constitute flagrant violations of all humanitarian norms and relevant international agreements.

In a clear swipe at RSF’s main backer, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), they added:

foreign interference and the continued actions of certain parties in supplying illicit weapons, mercenaries, and foreign fighters—despite their stated support for a political solution.

They said this foreign influence:

constitutes a primary factor in prolonging the conflict and exacerbating the suffering of the Sudanese people.

This is the latest development in the two oil-rich, Western allied Gulf states’ failing relationship.

UAE/Saudi confrontation

The UAE and Saudi relations are are uneasy, to say the least. The two are traditionally allies – and recipients of US and other Western support – but their falling out is being felt throughout the Gulf and the Horn of Africa.

As the Times of India has it:

For more than a decade, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi appeared virtually inseparable. They crushed Islamist movements, dictated oil markets, blockaded Qatar and presented themselves as the ultimate power brokers in the Arabian Peninsula. The two kingdoms were often described as strategic siblings, bound by shared vision, capital and a mutual obsession with stability on their terms.

But that alliance has ruptured. Yemen is one point of contention:

Riyadh seeks a unified Yemen under its influence: manageable, stable and friendly to Saudi security interests. Abu Dhabi, however, is pursuing a different vision through its backing of the Southern Transitional Council.

But that disagreement has also played out in Sudan – with deadly consequences.

Proxy war in Sudan

The Sudan war “amplified the stakes” offering:

both Gulf states an opportunity to project influence in Africa.

For the UAE:

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, controlling gold mines, smuggling routes and borderlands, became a direct conduit to resources. Gold, logistics and influence could be secured without the bureaucracy of formal state structures.

The Canary discussed the role of Sudan’s gold mines here. The Saudi regime “backed the Sudanese Armed Forces”:

not out of friendship, but fear. Saudi Arabia recognised that paramilitary backed fragmentation could set a dangerous precedent, threatening its own southern flank and regional ambition

Three years in, the war in Sudan has undoubtedly been exacerbated by Gulf interference. But other regional and global powers bear responsibility too.

Israel and Britain

Israel has backed both RSF and the Sudanese government at different times. Turkey, Egypt, and Russia have a role too. And British-sourced equipment has been seen in RSF hands, presumably a result of UK arms sales to UAE.

On October 2025, Labour foreign office minister Stephen Doughty admitted:

We are aware of reports of a small number of U.K.-made items having been found in Sudan, but there is no evidence in the recent reporting of U.K. weapons or ammunition being used in Sudan.

However he resisted calls for an embargo on UAE and said the UK would use its UN security council role:

to call for an immediate end to this violence [and] ensure that international humanitarian law is respected and upheld.

This mealy-mouthed response is typical. Not least because Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT) have reported:

The third largest recipient of arms export licences was the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with £172m of military equipment.

CAAT added:

Of particular concern is the £1,966,582 of exports in the military vehicles and components category, given that UK-made engines have been found in armoured personnel carriers used by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in its genocide in Sudan.

The British Labour government is deeply implicated in the killing in Sudan. And it is aligned with both sides in the Saudi/UAE proxy war. The British will likely continue to prevaricate while people die. But as long as UK arms firm CEOs and shareholders get their new yacht or third home, that seems to be fine by Keir Starmer’s Labour.

Featured image via the Canary

RBO’s Boris Godunov | Image by: Mihaela Bodlovic

4 min read59 min

Power – how to get it and to hold on to it – is the stuff of opera. Richard Jones’ Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) production of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (here revived by Ben Mills) exposes, unflinchingly, how power deludes and destroys. It is a triumphant partnership with conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who returns in the title role for a third time since 2016.

Boris Godunov is one of the definitive operas of the 19th century, as innovative musically as it was in its mission – to bring the voice and the vexed history of the Russian people into Western European view. Its influence, particularly on the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, was profound.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s drama of 1825, Richard Jones uses Mussorgsky’s 1869 version (later revised in 1875) to compress the tragedy into a graphic novel of seven stylised scenes, in the course of which the tsar Boris Godunov is destroyed by external enemies and internal demons.

But it is not quite as simple as that. It’s the 1590s and as the curtain rises we witness the assassination of Dmitry, the youngest son of the late tsar Ivan the Terrible. The child is clutching his spinning top. Boris Godunov, a boyar (an aristocrat), is a reluctant and troubled successor who is “heavy in his heart” even as he is crowned. (Ukrainian baritone Andrii Kymach is superb as the clerk to the boyar’s council, as is British tenor John Daszak as the traitorous Shuisky.)

Dmitry’s suspicious death opens the way to every sort of superstition. Boris is undone by two devious monks, both wonderfully sung. The elder, Pimen (the Polish bass, Adam Palka), is inventing a new history of Russia, which casts Boris as the murderer and invests the dead Dmitry with miraculous powers. Grigory (American tenor, Jamez McCorkle) assumes Dmitry’s identity in a bid to claim the throne.

The gorgeous orchestration and playing fuse brilliantly with the drama unfolding on stage

Advertisement

What sets Mussorgsky and this thrilling production apart is how the composer’s passionate conviction – that music should reveal an interior world – takes actual voice and shape. As Boris descends into paranoia and hallucination the gorgeous orchestration and playing fuse brilliantly with the drama unfolding on stage.

Equally, we hear and see Mussorgsky’s ambition that music should represent ‘life as it is lived’ in the vitality, depth and sweetness of the huge chorus. The orthodox choral tradition, voiced first by a sullen mass in monochrome grey gives way to Russian folksong as, transformed by technicolour robes and amplified by the coronation bells, the chorus of ‘Slava’ nearly takes the roof off.

But even Boris’ best intentions are overwhelmed by famine (“divine revenge”) and a hungry and ungrateful crowd are more likely to believe the Holy Fool (Chinese tenor, Mingjie Lei) when he accuses Boris of murdering Dmitry. Reason is defeated by superstition.

Bryn Terfel’s bass baritone (in tone from light to dark) lends itself uniquely to the interpretation of Boris – as an empathetic, conflicted figure, consoling and desperately trying to protect his own children – while maintaining its visceral power.

One final image: Dmitry’s spinning top becomes the motif for a world out of control. As Boris sits alone beneath a vast map of Russia the parallels are inescapable: the chimera of power, the historic geopolitics of Europe, frailty of truth and human nature – as evident now, chillingly, as then.

Baroness Andrews is a Labour peer

Boris Godunov

Conducted by: Mark Wigglesworth

Directed by: Richard Jones

Venue: Royal Opera House until 18 February

Joe Egerton is a former Parliamentary candidate for Leigh who once worked for the Macmillan family.

The commentariat is drawing a comparison between the Profumo affair of 1963 and the Mandelson affair. It is important to start by recognising that the Profumo affair, although very damaging, did not bring about the fall of Macmillan. As it is often suggested that it did, the brief facts are as follows.

On 8^th July 1961, Profumo, Secretary of State for War, was introduced to Christine Keeler “a very pretty girl and sweet” who had been swimming naked in the pool at Cliveden and was trying to cover herself with a skimpy towel. The next day there was “a light-hearted and frolicsome bathing party, where everyone was in bathing costumes and nothing indecent took place at all”. One of the party was Yevgeny Ivanov, nominally a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy but actually GRU.Profumo arranged to meet up with Christine Keeler. The two had a brief affair which ended before the New Year.

In 1963 the affair became fairly widely known. On 21 March 1963, George Wigg MP, Harold Wilson’s witch finder general, many years later to be convicted of kerb crawling, hinted at it in the Commons. That night Profumo was got out of bed and questioned by colleagues. On one account, Iain Macleod, the Leader of the House, asked Profumo outright:  “John, did you fuck her?” The next day Profumo made a statement in the House denying “any impropriety”.

Rumours continued and on 4^th June, during a short Commons recess, Profumo confessed to Macmillan’s Principal Private Secretary Tim Bligh who telephoned Macmillan who was in Scotland. Profumo resigned from the government and resigned his seat. The press had a field day. Family newspapers could safely recount a story of fun-loving attractive girls, a cabinet minister, the Russian Naval attaché, a leading member of the House of Lords (Lord Astor) and other rather shady individuals frolicking round the swimming pool at a great house. I was at prep school at the time and we had great fun piecing together a story parents judged not suitable for our innocent ears…

We can take up the story from Macmillan’s Diary and an entry written on 7 July recorded that on 17^th June 1963 seventeen Conservative MPs abstained – a very large rebellion for those days. During the week there was a flood of rumours of widespread discreditable sexual behaviour involving numerous ministers. The Diary recorded that on 24^th June “I had announced the appointment of Lord Denning to hold a judicial enquiry” and added “I hope that this will clear the ministers and make people a little ashamed of their behaviour” (Diaries, Page 572)

On 3^rd August, Macmillan noted rumours that Denning would condemn (“or rather fail to clear…of scandalous conduct”) one important and one unimportant minister. Macmillan then commented:

However all this is pure rumour. Naturally I have been careful not to see or get anything out of Lord D. I think he will, in fact, seek the unofficial help of the Ld. Chancellor (Reginald Manningham-Buller, Lord Dilhorne) before he actually sends in his report.

(Emphasis in original)

Macmillan was not disappointed. On 19^th September, he recorded:

At 2.45, Wilson came with his Chief Whip. He had read the report on Tuesday and commented rather sadly to Bligh that there wasn’t much in it. I suppose he meant ‘not much for me’.

During the summer of 1963, Macmillan had reflected on whether he should step down as  leader. But for the Profumo scandal, he might have done so in June, but he was determined not to look as if he had been driven from office. By the time the cabinet met on Tuesday 8^th October he had decided to stay on to fight the next election. He told the cabinet, left the room and the cabinet, with only one dissenting voice (Enoch Powell), endorsed his decision to remain and fight the forthcoming election.

At this point fate – in the form of his prostrate – intervened and he was told he needed an emergency operation. Although both de Gaulle and Pope St Paul VI were to have similar operations and continued to work, neither faced the constant pressure Parliament imposes on a British Prime Minister. Also Macmillan knew he  needed to use the rally at the end of the Conference to give impetus to the party as it prepared for an election in 1964. So he resigned. Profumo did not cause his resignation.

The real lesson from the Profumo affair is that Macmillan survived it because he kept his nerve and set up an enquiry headed by Britain’s best-known judge. With this assurance, there was no question of handing the files over to Parliament. Nobody could object to Denning and nobody did at the time.

The contrast with Starmer’s announcement that he would entrust Sir Humphrey Appleby with providing those papers on Mandelson which did not impinge on national security or international relations to Parliament is marked. Starmer has done what Macmillan avoided – provoked the House of Commons and his own backbenchers into setting up a process bound to lead either to a flood of damaging papers or a steady stream of embarrassing disclosures.

Macmillan of course knew exactly what he was doing in appointing Denning. In 1980, Denning was to preside over a claim for damages from the Birmingham Six, men convicted of bombing a pub in 1974 who alleged that they had been forced into giving false confessions. This was how Denning dismissed their claim:

Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.

In time it turned out that the allegations against the police were well-founded, the convictions quashed and substantial compensation paid for the many years imprisonment the men had suffered. In his 1991 book The Conscience of the Jury Lord Devlin – the distinguished judge Parick Devlin – wrote that together the miscarriages in the cases of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six were “the greatest disasters that have shaken British justice in my time”.

But as Macmillan knew Devlin was a judge of a very different character from Denning. Four years before Macmillan had appointed Denning, Mr Justice (later Lord Justice) Devlin had produced a damning report on the killing of 11 detainees at the Hola Camp in Kenya on 3 March 1959. This provoked one of the most famous passages in the Macmillan Diaries:

Incidentally, I was away in Russia when the Devlin Commission was chosen.Why Devlin? The poor Lord Chancellor (Lord Kilmuir, David Maxwell-Fyfe, who had prosecuted at Nuremburg so knew what a concentration camp looked like) – the sweetest and most naïve of men – chose him. He was able; a Conservative runner-up or nearly so for Lord Chief Justice. I have since discovered that he is:

1. Irish – no doubt with that Fenian blood that makes Irishmen anti-Govt on principle
2. A lapsed R.C. His brother is a Jesuit priest; his sister a nun.   He married a Jewess who was converted and has remained a Catholic
3. A hunchback
4. Bitterly disappointed at my not having made him Lord Chief Justice.

I am not at all surprised that his report is dynamite. It may well blow the Govt out of office. (Diaries  13 July 1959 Pages 234-5)

Macmillan would have enjoyed Devlin’s later humiliation by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse which published evidence from his daughter on the abuse she had suffered from her long-deceased father.

One can understand why Macmillan took care to appoint a Denning rather than a Devlin when the future of his government was at stake.

He may well have given Mrs Thatcher some helpful advice on the inquiry into the Falklands War. When Galtieri seized the Falklands in 1982, Mrs Thatcher was given invaluable support by Harold Macmillan in the days immediately after the invasion. His son Maurice who had served in the Heath cabinet played an important role in calming colleagues in the Parliamentary Party and had encouraged Macmillan to give public support to a beleaguered PM.

Forced to agree to an inquiry into how the Galtieri was allowed to grab the islands, in due course Mrs Thatcher appointed as chairman a distinguished 77-year-old civil servant, diplomat and provost of an Oxford college – Lord Franks – an old colleague of Macmillan’s whom he had defeated for Chancellor of Oxford.   Macmillan dropped her this note when the Franks report was published:

I am glad to observe that the time-honoured judgment in the famous case of Albert and the Lion has been respected by these distinguished Privy Councillors.“The magistrate gave the opinion that no one was really to blame.”

We can learn indeed something from how Macmillan survived the Profumo affair by setting up a process that was pretty certain to clear him. No doubt is left that Sir Keir Starmer lacks the political skills of a Macmillan or a Thatcher.

There is one other point worth noting. In 1963 shameful allegations were made by male MPs against the fun-loving attractive girls who had been caught up in the scandal – one MP even called them prostitutes. When the affair Mandelson is discussed in the Commons, there are repeated reminders that the victims of Epstein have suffered appalling mistreatment. The large number of women MPs who all too clearly empathise with the victims guarantees that these reminders are sincerely and deeply meant.

Keir Starmer has vowed to fight on as prime minister following the resignations of two top aides. 

Morgan McSweeney, one of the prime minister’s longest-serving and closest lieutenants, resigned as Downing Street chief of staff on Sunday. In a statement, McSweeney said he took “full responsibility” after personally advising Starmer to appoint Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the United States.

The outgoing No 10 chief of staff said the decision to appoint Mandelson was “wrong” and had “damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself.”

McSweeney stated: “When asked, I advised the prime minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice. In public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient. 

Featured

MDU warns Chancellor clinical negligence system ‘not fit for purpose’

Featured

Northern Ireland RE curriculum is ‘indoctrination’ – Supreme Court