Breaking news.........
Morgan McSweeney has resigned as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff in the wake of the Mandelson scandal.
The Prime Minister’s right-hand man quit after a backlash to him pushing for Lord Mandelson to be appointed ambassador to the US.
Mr McSweeney insisted Lord Mandelson was the best man for the job in Washington despite being warned twice by civil servants about the peer’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
The resignation will be seen as a final chance for Sir Keir to reverse his political fortunes after more than a year and a half of his political authority draining away.
Lord Mandelson was appointed despite Downing Street knowing about his ongoing friendship with the paedophile even after Epstein was convicted of child sex crimes.
Fresh revelations about the connections between the two men have plunged Sir Keir into the worst crisis of his premiership.
Mutinous Labour MPs had threatened to back a leadership challenge against the Prime Minister if he refused to get rid of Mr McSweeney.
Allister Heath - Daily Telegraph 07/02/26
His house is burning down, his career is ending in disaster, and yet Sir Keir Starmer, always the fanatic, is devoting time and energy he doesn’t have to his Chagos sell-out. It almost beggars belief given the tsunami engulfing his Government and party, but he seems to have allocated precious hours to successfully begging Donald Trump to relent on Chagos, rather than calling MPs or strategising with his allies to cling a little longer to power.
This warped, almost incomprehensible sense of priorities tells you all you need to know about Starmer: he is terrible at politics, is programmed to make only the most severe of misjudgments, not least the catastrophe of Peter Mandelson’s appointment, but he is a true human rights believer. He may be going down, but not before he deliberately damages Britain by handing over the Chagos to an ally of China. To those of us who cannot grasp why anybody would want to do this, it sounds like a form of advanced ideological derangement.
Of course, Starmer’s rush and desperation over Chagos might partly have been designed to pre-empt the looming publication of tens of thousands of messages, including WhatsApps, sent to the US embassy during Mandelson’s tenure. Some of these will doubtless be toxic to US-UK relations, and infuriate Trump. Yes, the Intelligence and Security Committee will be able to prevent the release of documents if they imperil diplomacy or national security, but there is bound to be plenty of material left over where officials and politicians share their true views of the Trump administration.
The release will also blow up Starmer in yet another way: the documents will surely reveal the scale of Mandelson’s influence over the Starmer Government, in ways that doubtless didn’t only amount to his US posting. Mandelson will have had views about staffing, reshuffles and policy. Labour MPs will be apoplectic when more of this becomes public. The PM’s final fig leaf – that he thought only Mandy would be able to suck up sufficiently to Trump, but now realises this was a mistake – would be torn away if it were to emerge that he was being used as a secret eminence grise.
The truth is that Starmer is finished. He needs to go, for everybody’s sake. The PM’s strategy, if it deserves to be described as such, is a combination of confected fury and self-pity. He is blaming everybody but himself, including the security services, the civil service and his advisers. It won’t wash: this was a calamity of Starmer’s making. He is the one who brought back and appointed Mandelson, a close friend of the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to whom he passed state secrets in the form of confidential emails at the height of the financial crisis.
But even before these latest revelations, it was obvious that Mandelson should be persona non grata in any civilised setting. Remember: Epstein was convicted in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution. He only got off relatively lightly for such a heinous crime as a result of various plea deals, and was eventually arrested again for a raft of other horrible offences (he died in prison before the trial).
Starmer should have known that “Petey” and Epstein remained on very good terms after 2008 – the critical date after which nobody could possibly claim that they didn’t realise Epstein’s true character. The continued connection had been described in some detail in a raft of stories (in newspapers and TV) prior to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador, and were readily available. You cannot be PM and plead total ignorance of the news, especially relating to a critical appointment. You can’t simply blame others for your unforgivable stupidity, for failing to do even basic online research, for your refusal to see what was evident.
How could Starmer have brought Mandelson back under such circumstances? Does he have no morality, despite his obsession with human rights? Did he assume the story would just go away, that the Epstein files would never be released by the Department of Justice? Does he have no sense of the trade off between risk and reward that any competent politician must engage in?
The only question now is what triggers Starmer’s final implosion. Will it require Angela Rayner’s tax affairs to be sorted? Do we need a Cabinet minister with some residual sense of ethics to resign? Do we need another revelation, perhaps as part of the cache of documents being overseen by the Intelligence and Security Committee?
Starmer has accelerated the ruination of Britain during his short time in office, wrecking, taxing and breaking everything he could. The paradox is that he probably will leave No 10 believing that his greatest achievement was betraying the Chagossians. We live in dark, absurd times.
These are the humiliating death throes of Starmer’s sordid regime ➤
Matt cartoon
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