He looked nervous. That was the first thing you noticed about him.
When Morgan McSweeney sat down to give his testimony about the Peter Mandelson affair to a committee of MPs, you instantly detected a great yawning gap between his reputation and his presentation. He was halting, hesitant, apologetic, diminutive and seemingly eager to please. He spent much of the evidence session almost hugging himself, as if wishing he could be anywhere but here.
It was hard to shake the memory of Dominic Cummings, when he gave his press conference over the Barnard Castle scandal. Of course, nothing McSweeney said was remotely as absurd as that. He hadn’t claimed that he packed his own family into a car to test his eyesight, for instance. But the moment felt eerily familiar. Here he was at last – the great backstage strategist, the Rasputin figure, usually cloaked in shadow but now revealed in front of the cameras. And then that secondary realisation that they are so much smaller than you expected – in terms of their presence, their manner and their intellect.
McSweeney’s approach was fundamentally a game of reputational mathematics. Yes sure, he admitted, he had supported Mandelson’s appointment. But then so had many others. Yes sure, other people had opposed it. But then apparently so had he. His own errors were not made alone, but other people’s successes were certainly shared with him.
“I thought [Mandelson] was the right choice after the US election,” McSweeney conceded. But then, “quite a lot of views were coming back in support of Mandelson as a candidate”. Should he really have appointed Mandelson before he’d been security vetted? “At the time nobody said to me: ‘hang on before you announce anything at all, let’s make sure we do this [vetting] first.'” Wherever there was blame, it was to be spread as broadly as possible.
Things changed when it came to the people who had warned against Mandelson’s appointment. Here, the direction of culpability moved towards McSweeney rather than away from him. Asked if foreign secretary David Lammy was comfortable with the appointment he suddenly turned into a Mandelson sceptic. “Nobody was fine about it, everyone could see there were risks and like everybody else he would have flagged that there were risks,” he said. “I had reservations too.”
McSweeney had a long history working with Mandelson, but he worked diligently in the evidence session to diminish its importance. “He was a confidant to me,” he said, “but I didn’t regard him as my mentor”.
In fact, he was at pains to show just how disillusioned he was with the former US ambassador. The revelation that he had maintained his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, seems to have shocked him. “When I saw the pictures,” he said, “when I saw the Bloomberg questions in September 2025, I have to say it was like a knife through my soul.”
In fact, the due diligence report sent to the Prime Minister and seen by McSweeney at the time of his appointment warned of “general reputational risk” because Mandelson’s relationship with the financier continued “after Epstein was first convicted of procuring an underage girl in 2008”.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister was assured that this friendship would not be a PR problem. Who convinced him? Well, it involved McSweeney and then-director of communication Matthew Doyle, who also just happens to be a Mandelson connection.
That imagery led foreign affairs committee chair Emily Thornberry to raise her eyebrows up to the ceiling. “Do you think it’s appropriate,” she said, “when doing due diligence for you, as a friend of Peter Mandelson, to speak to the Prime Minister, and for his responses to be measured by another friend of Peter Mandelson, Matthew Doyle? And for that information to be put before the Prime Minister as a basis upon which they can make a decision?” McSweeney seemed to shiver slightly. He breathed in, lent back in his chair and admitted defeat. “I agree,” he said, reluctantly.
As ever with this story, the most damning details are not about the process. The technical ins-and-outs of the appointments have used up all the oxygen in Westminster and suffocated the core issue, which is the colossal failure of judgement in even considering Mandelson in the first place.
How did the Prime Minister come to exercise such poor judgement? The answer to that question lies in the window we got today into the culture in Downing Street.
There was – we mustn’t forget this – a highly competent female ambassador already in place in the form of Karen Pierce. She was admired in the Foreign Office, domestically and internationally. Even the incoming Trump administration liked her. But instead No.10 wanted a political appointee. McSweeney narrowed down the field for the Prime Minister. “We procured two strong candidates for him,” he told the committee. “One was Mandelson and the other was George Osborne.”
God above, you thought. If they were the strong candidates, what did the weak ones look like?
You could see the thought process instantly. Mandelson was a senior contact and a grandee in the Labour Right circles McSweeney operates in. Osborne would have been considered a clever party political move for a domestic audience, nabbing a Conservative figure and hurting Kemi Badenoch. All very ingenious and attention-grabbing, if all you care about is the next news cycle. But neither of those calculations had anything to do with whether someone was likely to constitute an effective diplomat.
It’s just a fundamentally unserious way to proceed. It is the same old Westminster game-playing nonsense, where tactical gambits and the interplay of tribal forces secures advancement far more effectively than competence or expertise.
And that, really, is why those old memories of Cummings keep resurfacing. Starmer is a much better man than Boris Johnson, but he seems just as muddled and nearly as shallow in his approach to policy and long-term national thinking. That’s what you get when you surround yourself with people who think the best two choices for US ambassador are Mandelson and Osborne: just empty, lazy, hapless buffoonery of the type we have become so used to.
When you get past all the technical details, the real crime here is that Starmer promised serious, grown-up government. This is what we got instead. A trip down memory lane, back to Barnard Castle.
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