As unemployed football managers may attest, the day club chiefs feel the need to declare their confidence in you is the day you should start looking for a new job.
On that basis, Cork man Morgan McSweeney, chief of staff to embattled UK prime minister Keir Starmer, may be worried. Starmer has declared confidence in McSweeney twice this week, as the storm over the Jeffrey Epstein-linked Peter Mandelson’s appointment as the UK’s ambassador in Washington engulfs them all.
On Wednesday during his most torrid prime minister’s question time yet in the House of Commons, Starmer responded to opposition jibes over McSweeney’s central role in Mandelson’s appointment by declaring the Irish man to be “an essential part of my team”.
“He helped me change the Labour Party and win the election. Of course I have confidence in him,” he said. A day later, as faith in Starmer drained from Labour’s benches, Downing Street said the prime minister still had “full confidence” in McSweeney.
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The Law of Football Managers suggests McSweeney might want to brush up his LinkedIn profile, which he hasn’t updated since he entered government with Starmer in 2024.
Meanwhile, the Cork man has pressed the ‘like’ button on the job-seeking site just once since then. A month ago, McSweeney liked a LinkedIn post promoting a new year article by Wales-based businesswoman Lucy Cohen, who had written with searing honesty about a health challenge forcing her out of her comfort zone.
Intriguingly, the only short post that McSweeney has ever liked contained reflections tailor-made for the situation he finds himself in now, with the Mandelson storm raging: “Our identities are meshed with what we do ... So what happens when your world is shaken to its core so much that you have to question everything? What happens when you can’t control something?”
Labour MPs this week broke ranks to call for McSweeney’s sacking for pushing Mandelson for the US job despite his Epstein links. The Irish man is losing control.
The route McSweeney (48) took from rural Cork to Downing Street is well known. The accountant’s son from a family steeped in Fine Gael politics moved to London after his Leaving Certificate. He later studied politics at Middlesex University.
He began working for the Labour Party 25 years ago. Months after joining party headquarters, Labour’s then communications Svengali, Mandelson, gave him a job inputting data to the party’s Excalibur computer system that helped draft attack lines against Tories.
Mandelson was sufficiently impressed with McSweeney’s skills to become his mentor.
After masterminding several local election campaigns for the party, McSweeney took over think tank Labour Together in 2017. He commissioned detailed voter research he would use to try to wrest the party from the clutches of the hard left acolytes of Jeremy Corbyn.
During this time, he also grew close to Starmer, then a rookie MP. The two men plotted a 2020 leadership takeover of Labour, informed by Labour Together’s research. The source of funding for the research remains an issue of controversy in UK politics today.
After having helped to mastermind Labour’s 2024 return to power, McSweeney’s muscular backroom approach to government won him few friends among Labour’s parliamentary party. He became a target of the ire of several backbenchers who resented his involvement in a number of brutal internal political rows.
Labour MPs also say McSweeney’s political advice led Starmer to take decisions that led the party on to rocky ground, most notably with the ambassador appointment of Mandelson, which the Cork man championed.
[ The Irish Times view on Starmer and Mandelson: prime minister under pressureOpens in new window ]
What has long been said privately by Labour MPs in Westminster is now being said publicly. Several have called for McSweeney’s sacking this week.
Simon Opher, the MP for the Gloucestershire town of Stroud, said on Friday that backbench anger over Mandelson was focused on McSweeney. Asked on BBC Radio if he should be sacked, he said: “Yes ... Keir Starmer needs to change his advisers ... If my chief of staff had done this I think he would be looking for another job, to be honest.”
Kim Johnson, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, tweeted on Thursday “McSweeney’s operation is rotten to the core ... If this is their idea of leadership, No 10 needs gutting from top to bottom.”
Karl Turner, the MP for Kingston upon Hull East, said: “If the prime minister decides that he has to be surrounded by advisers who give him shoddy advice, I think that will end in the prime minister having to be making a decision about his future at some point soon.”
“When we look at the historic missteps and misjudgments we’ve made, Morgan McSweeney is at the heart of that and it’s time he was removed from power,” Brian Leishman, MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, told Radio Scotland. McSweeney’s wife, Imogen Walker, is the MP in a nearby Scottish constituency.
Pressure on McSweeney may increase further in coming days and weeks as the UK government releases the so-called “Mandelson Files”, including all government communications with the disgraced former ambassador in the lead-up to his appointment. That may include texts and WhatsApps he exchanged with McSweeney.
The Irish man has 126 formal endorsements on LinkedIn for his skills in politics, including from cabinet member Steve Reed, one of the last remaining staunch Starmer loyalists, as well as four other Labour MPs.
He seems unlikely to rack up many more anytime soon.
