The Mandelson scandal has exploded the myth of McSweeney

When pressed at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Keir Starmer declared he had full confidence in Morgan McSweeney, his embattled Downing Street chief of staff and head of political strategy. If recent precedent is anything to go by, then poor old Morgan will be clearing his desk as we speak.

The knives are out for McSweeney following the latest dump of the Epstein Files, which appear to show then business secretary Mandelson leaking market-sensitive information to the convicted paedophile. McSweeney is implicated because it was he who pushed most forcefully for Mandy, his one-time mentor, to be appointed as Britain’s ambassador to the US last year. This was despite Petey’s connections to the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein being known at the time. It was also despite warnings about his appointment from the security services. And it was despite his long, grubby history of scandals.

You need only have a cursory knowledge of politics to know that the man literally nicknamed the Prince of Darkness might not be the ideal representative of the British government in Washington. And yet this was an appointment that was ‘masterminded’, insisted on, and fought tooth-and-nail for by a man who is hailed as a once-in-a-generation genius in political strategy.

Surely, in the wake of the Mandelson scandal, we can all stop pretending that there is anything especially impressive or interesting about Morgan McSweeney. For years now, lobby journalists and Starmerite insiders have purred over the PM’s ‘Svengali’, this ruthless and cunning ‘kingmaker’. In their telling, McSweeney was the ‘hard man’, the ‘bruiser’, who wielded the Labour Party machinery to oust the Corbynites from their party. He was the master of the dark arts, who used cutting-edge polling, a new think-tank and other Starmer-aligned front groups to engineer his boss’s rise to the top of the party. And then, in 2024, this General Election ‘guru’ worked his magic on the public. He identified the ‘hero voters’ he needed to hypnotise and win back to Labour, and then handed his boss the keys to No10.

Countless columns, and multiple books, have been devoted to expounding this narrative of Morgan the mastermind. But did any of these commentators ever consider that he might actually not be so all-knowing and all-powerful? Even as Starmer’s government has twisted, turned and flailed, uniting the nation in contempt of its leader, there is still an undue reverence in the media for the man in charge of its strategy.

While McSweeney clearly has some skills in waging factional warfare within the Labour Party, we should at least stop pretending that ‘the Irishman’ – as he is so often and tediously dubbed – has any kind of special insights about what the general public wants. It does not take a political guru to notice that voters aren’t keen on mass immigration, are irritated by woke and are not especially eager to reverse the vote for Brexit. Perhaps McSweeney deserves credit for keeping Labour MPs relatively quiet on these issues in the run-up to the last General Election, but you shouldn’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on polling to tell you any of this.

Far from ‘engineering’ a landslide election for Starmer, McSweeney and his boss just happened to be in the right place at the right time to profit from the Tories’ collapse. The Conservatives lost seven million voters between 2019 and their worst result since universal suffrage. In July 2024 under Starmer, Labour actually won fewer votes than in 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn led his party to a resounding defeat. The best you can say of McSweeney is that he didn’t fumble the election when it was handed to him on a platter.

Of course, much of the media interest in McSweeney’s strategising is down to the void at the top of the operation. It is the hollowness of Keir Starmer, a man who has no principles, policy preferences or political beliefs, that leads the SW1 bubble to look for something more within McSweeney. It is the sheer nothingness of the man who occupies the throne that makes the man whispering his ear seem like a person of great intrigue.

After the Mandelson scandal, it is time to bury the myth of Morgan McSweeney. There really is nothing much going on in and around Keir Starmer – no plan, no strategy, no vision. Downing Street is empty from top to bottom.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.