“Oh hello. Someone just robbed my phone.”
With those words to a London Metropolitan Police calls handler one evening last October, Morgan McSweeney, then chief of staff to UK prime minister Keir Starmer, kicked off the latest twist in the meandering saga of scrutiny over Peter Mandelson’s ill-fated appointment as ambassador to Washington.
The second tranche of the so-called Mandelson Files – internal UK government messages relating to the appointment that Starmer’s Downing Street operation is mandated to release – is due in the next week or so.
Most keenly awaited among those files are text messages between Mandelson, who was sacked as ambassador last September over his links to UK sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and McSweeney, the Cork-born former political guru who was once Mandelson’s protege before he joined forces with Starmer.
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McSweeney quit last month as pressure mounted over the appointment of Mandelson to Washington, which he had championed despite knowing of Mandelson’s Epstein links.
Now, however, there is uncertainty over whether all of McSweeney’s crucial message exchanges with the former ambassador can be retrieved. This has reignited the Mandelson issue in recent days, giving Starmer yet another headache as he limps into a Westminster parliamentary recess for the coming fortnight.
Mandelson was sacked last September after the private files of Epstein were released in the US, giving insight into the depth and closeness of their relationship. It also put Starmer and McSweeney under pressure for appointing Mandelson in the first place.
A few weeks later, on October 20th, McSweeney was at a dinner in a restaurant in Pimlico, near Westminster, and was heading home at about 10.20pm. A young man on a bicycle mounted the pavement, he told police, and snatched his mobile phone from his hand. This is notoriously common in London, especially near the UK parliament.
Police released a transcript of McSweeney’s call on Thursday, after the force faced scrutiny from Westminster journalists over whether it had done enough to retrieve the Irishman’s phone and its precious cargo of Mandelson messages.
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“I’ve got two phones. I’m using my personal one. That was my work one,” McSweeney told the calls handler, minutes after he said it was robbed.
He said it was a “government phone” but he did not tell the handler that he was the UK prime minister’s chief of staff, or that the phone could contain highly sensitive material.
There was also a mix-up over the exact location of the theft. In the end, the police investigation got nowhere.
Did McSweeney not just back up the material?
A Downing Street spokesman refused to directly answer this question today. He said UK government officials (as McSweeney was at the time) were meant to back up sensitive messages by screenshotting them or otherwise sending them to the UK’s cabinet office.
“The guidance is in place. Individuals are expected to follow it,” he said.
Did McSweeney follow the guidance? The Downing Street official chose not to say.
The incident has set the most conspiracy-driven hares running in the Westminster press pack. The opposition Tories say McSweeney has “questions to answer” over the alleged theft, while UK cabinet members such as health secretary Wes Streeting have mocked the notion of a conspiracy or cover-up.
Starmer, meanwhile, heads into the recess with a war in the Gulf to deal with abroad, and inflation and cost-of-living worries at home. The second tranche of Mandelson files – with or without McSweeney’s texts – will be dumped on top of this.
When he returns after the Easter break, his Labour Party will be in the throes of election campaigns in Scotland and Wales and at a local level in England, in which his party is expected to take a historic beating.
The problems keep mounting for Starmer.
