Politics
The House Article | Sacking Morgan McSweeney won’t be enough to ease this sense of decline
Keir Starmer and then UK ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson in Washington, DC, February 2025 (PA Images / Alamy)
4 min read
It was never meant to end this way!
He was the third architect of New Labour. He was the first architect of New, New Labour. Arrogant and imperious, feared by colleagues more than he was liked, a man who, had he been born in 1450, would have outshone Niccolo Machiavelli in the dark arts of political diplomacy.
In 1997 he was lionised as the brains behind Excalibur, Labour’s rapid rebuttal computer. Today the protégéhe once got to feed data into Excalibur, and whom he tutored to become the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, is struggling to distance his new boss from his old.
No amount of waffle about “the process” was ever going to rescue him
But whoever rehearsed PMQs with Keir Starmer on Wednesday morning of 4 February was not as politically astute as the Dark Lord. Labour backbenchers squirmed as the PM wriggled to avoid the single most obvious question. It took three goes before Kemi Badenoch got the answer we all knew Keir had to give: “Yes.” Yes, he did know at the time he appointed Mandelson to the job that he had maintained relations with paedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
No amount of waffle about “the process” was ever going to rescue him. Those morning PMQ prep sessions should have told him: blunt her attack by admitting straight up that you knew. At least that way the public won’t be thinking, “Typical politician – always dodging the question!”. If he’d done that, he could have switched from the prevarications about his own judgement to the substantive issues about Mandelson’s alleged sharing of confidential and market-sensitive information.
Had he conceded straight away that the Intelligence and Security Committee would decide on which documents to make public, rather than putting it in the hands of those who had appointed Mandelson in the first place (the Cabinet Secretary and his own chief of staff), the humiliation of the amendment to his own amendment could have been avoided.
The problem for the Prime Minister now is that there is no way to get the focus back on Mandelson and away from himself. All roads around him lead back to Mandelson. And that is simply a function of recent Labour history.
Back in 2017, Mandelson boasted that he worked every day to undermine the elected leadership of the party. What he did not reveal then was who he was working with.
The truth is that Starmer himself was meeting regularly with Mandelson’s protégé, Morgan McSweeney, in their project to discredit and, as they believed, rescue the Labour Party from the left. In an ironic inversion of the days of Militant’s entryism to the party in the 1980s, they kept their project secret and set up a structure to deliver the takeover. Transparency did not matter. Party democracy did not matter. And where Militant failed thanks to the guts of Neil Kinnock, they succeeded.
But at what price? Labour today is a narrower party, a less democratic party. It’s one where MPs are told they are merely the leadership’s ‘license to operate’, and open debate no longer leads to compromise and solidarity but to accusation and recrimination.
Too many of those who formed part of that revolutionary coterie now sit around the Cabinet table. They felt secure, in the precarious way that all barons do who owe their fealty to an unstable and irascible king. Were it not pathetic, it would be cause for mirth to see how some have rushed onto the airwaves to disavow friendship or spring clean their social media to erase all photos of themselves with their arms round “he who must not now be named”.
Starmer has been counselled to sack his chief of staff. But no single scalp will assuage this sense of decay. He and so many of the current ministerial crop are knitted together – once you begin to pull at what seems a loose thread, the whole begins to unravel.
All of those people no doubt persuaded themselves that their pursuit of power was in the service of The Good. But they became a gilded elite who considered themselves untouchable. They may do well to reflect on Robert Bolt’s classic drama about political intrigue, A Man for All Seasons. In it, Thomas More asks Roper: “And when you have cut down all the laws in pursuit of the devil, and the devil turns round on you, where will you hide?”
Barry Gardiner is Labour MP for Brent West
