The latest tranche of files about Lord Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to Washington contains some big surprises.
Who would have predicted, for instance, that it would be Pat McFadden who would end up being the Liam Byrne of this Labour Government, writing in a private message to Mandelson that “every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions”. The “there’s no money!” jokey note that Byrne left to his successor in the Treasury in 2010 ended up tarring Labour all the way to the next election. This “who can we tax” message will have the same effect.
But another surprise is that any of these messages were retrievable at all. In the past five years or so, most politicians have become very aware that even private WhatsApp messages between friends can end up in the public. In fact, most MPs now tend to use WhatsApp groups to get more public attention: a leaked message has far more cachet than a simple post on X.
It used to be the case that journalists felt quite excited when an MP passed them screenshots of a group chat; now their heart tends to sink, as the messages will all have been written rather cynically, with a wider audience in mind. They are less an insight into what MPs really think than they are just part of a comms strategy.
That’s what’s so surprising about McFadden and other ministers privately criticising the Government in their chats with Mandelson. These chats really were the kinds of ones that don’t get leaked to journalists, rather than the performative messages written to be shared.
Everyone expresses frustration with colleagues and even their higher-ups with friends, but most also have the sense to turn disappearing messages on so that a grumpy venting session on a dull Monday doesn’t end up being headline news a couple of years later. Mandelson himself refused to hand over messages on his personal phone – and that probably has very little to do with how many ministers were in his inbox moaning about Sir Keir Starmer and a lot more to do with more serious matters.
These files may well see the end of anyone being candid in messages at all, and the end of the brief era where WhatsApp downloads were an insight into how governments work – or, more accurately, how they don’t – and just how many politicians really don’t like their close colleagues. The window was already closing after the Covid inquiry used thousands of messages between ministers to provide an insight not just into decision-making during the pandemic, but also into how annoyed everyone was with the way Boris Johnson ran things. Useful insights, but again not something that anyone intended to share with a national audience.
As enjoyable as it is for most of us to read through messages where politicians lay into one another, it’s not really a good thing that they cannot be blunt with one another in any setting other than face-to-face. The messages between McFadden and Mandelson tell us so much about this government, and will be joyfully seized on by the Conservatives, just as they waved Byrne’s note around for five years. But they don’t really enlighten us a great deal on the process behind appointing Mandelson as ambassador, nor on the level of influence he had formally or informally over wider government decision-making. There is no smoking gun in these files, just political fodder.
Byrne was daft to have left his note on his desk as he left the Treasury: he naively assumed that whoever came into it after the 2010 election would take it as a joke and bin it, rather than weaponise it. But private discussions between people who have worked together for years about whether they think the Government is working are not the same as the Byrne note.
Indeed, they are probably remarkably similar to the kinds of messages of frustration and criticism that many co-workers across the country have on their phones right now, even those in organisations that actually work pretty well, unlike the Starmer administration. At least ministers were aware of the problems and discussing them with colleagues, rather than blithely telling themselves that everything was working perfectly well. There is, for instance, some important analysis in Torsten Bell’s message to Mandelson that “everyone seems to think it’s someone else’s job to get the policy right”.
The Government will continue to run its affairs by WhatsApp, but with disappearing messages for everyone. And what that means is that, unlike the scrawled government memos of years gone by that end up in the National Archives, we will never know how ministers worked at all. Or indeed, how they didn’t.
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