Morgan McSweeney was clear at the outset of his evidence that he advised in favour of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to Washington, and apologised for that. But crucially Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff stopped short of taking full responsibility. He put that at the feet of the Prime Minister.
McSweeney argued other senior advisors and ministers were consulted and if it had just been him arguing for Mandelson’s appointment, it would not have happened. “It wasn’t my decision. It was the Prime Minister’s decision,” he said. McSweeney, the quietly spoken Irishman, was appearing before the Foreign Affairs Committee as part of its evidence-taking into the what-the-hell-happened-about-Mandy inquiry.
If Starmer had hoped his former aide would exonerate him, he was to be disappointed. It was only a partial mea culpa; McSweeney said his enthusiasm for Mandelson’s appointment was “a serious mistake”. At the heart of his misjudgement, he said, was his understanding at the time that Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was as “a passing acquaintance” – and when he later discovered he was much closer to the convicted paedophile it was like “a knife through my soul”.
McSweeney denied he had “railroaded” Mandelson’s appointment despite concerns and rejected committee chair Dame Emily Thornberry’s suggestion that the appointment of his former mentor had become an “obsession,” and that Mandelson was his “hero”.
“I don’t think that’s true,” McSweeney insisted. “This is not some hero I was trying to get a job for. I thought he had the skills to get the trade deal. My motives were always in the national interest.” McSweeney said the person who had suggested Mandelson for the Washington job was “Mandelson himself”.
McSweeney was clearly irritated that he had been presented as a protégé of the Prince of Darkness. “He was a confidante for me. I didn’t regard him as my mentor,” he said. “I first had a conversation with Peter Mandelson in 2017. I don’t think I really started to go to him for advice until about 2021, and I was 44 years of age then, so I didn’t regard him at all as a mentor.”
Nonetheless, in grim testimony McSweeney revealed that he was concerned that Mandelson wasn’t telling “the full truth” about his links to Epstein but the appointment went ahead anyway. A trade deal with the US was a “top priority,” he argued.
McSweeney said Starmer “had all the knowledge I had” in appointing Mandelson, but that the Labour veteran should have been more open about his past: “The Prime Minister did not have all the information if Peter Mandelson had been honest. That’s where he was let down.”
This morning’s events matter – not because of the widespread public fascination with the Mandelson affair, but because Starmer seems unable to shake it off, impeding Labour’s ability to concentrate on its other priorities just over a week before the local elections. The question is whether Starmer was more sinned against than sinning.
As McSweeney’s warm-up act, the committee had heard from Sir Philip Barton. He was head of the diplomatic service as permanent secretary in the Foreign Office and in charge of all ambassadors around the world. Barton did Starmer and McSweeney a favour by saying he had no recollection at all of McSweeney swearing at him or more generally during any meeting about Mandelson. It was significant, as it is one of the key claims being used by the Conservatives to claim Starmer misled the Commons when he said no pressure was placed to push the appointment through.
Barton partially backed up the claim made by Sir Olly Robbins, his successor, last week that the Foreign Office was under pressure over the appointment of Lord Mandelson. He drew a distinction between pressure to ensure Mandelson was in Washington as ambassador as soon as possible – time pressure – and pressure on the substance of the vetting process. Barton says there was pressure over time. On the substance he said that he did not experience any such pressure when he was in the Foreign Office.
This was helpful for the Prime Minister because it is similar to the distinction he had drawn in an interview with the Sunday Times at the weekend. Starmer said in that interview that when he said in the House of Commons that there was “no pressure whatsoever” exerted by No 10, that did not include “the everyday pressure of government” to get it done quickly.
What was less helpful for the Prime Minister is – on the day he is facing a Commons vote on whether to examine whether he misled the House of Commons – that he did not specify that distinction when he was last in the House of Commons. Starmer’s language in Parliament that there was no pressure “whatsoever” seems unwise at best.
A picture has emerged of a No 10 trying to wargame Trump winning the election and then deciding they needed to get a political appointment in place by the self-imposed deadline of the presidential inauguration before then putting pressure on timeframes to get it all done. Government loyalists point out that it’s normal: moving at pace is hardly a surprise.
It’s the difference between a Karcher washer on the patio or the ongoing trickle of a leaky tap. But it all flows from Starmer’s original decision to appoint Mandelson in the first place. That seems to be what Robbins and Barton mean by “pressure”.
Downing Street argues officials should have shown greater transparency in such a critical and prominent case, asserting that the catastrophe might have been preventable had they done so. Robbins contended that he was acting in accordance with the wishes of Number 10, that the process was observed by the books, and that this constituted a major misunderstanding.
Starmer clearly feels he was hard done by when officials didn’t act with transparency. He feels let down by Mandelson who wasn’t truthful.
It’s a sorry picture but, however upset they are, many Labour MPs don’t feel it’s enough to persuade them to vote to refer Starmer to a sleaze inquiry later on Tuesday.
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