Cork man Morgan McSweeney’s appearance on Tuesday before MPs to answer questions about Peter Mandelson’s disastrous appointment to Washington was box office, but it was not a blockbuster.
It may have been a revelation for the British public, and most of Westminster, just to hear his voice. But as this quietly spoken back room political operator bobbed and weaved, his inquisitors on the foreign affairs committee didn’t land a knockout blow.
Unlike last week’s effort by Olly Robbins, the sacked former head of the UK’s foreign service, McSweeney also didn’t come to throw many blows himself.
The former chief of staff to Keir Starmer stayed loyal to his old boss, as he buttressed the UK prime minister’s claim not to have known of a reason why Mandelson should not have been UK ambassador to the US.
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McSweeney, as Starmer has done repeatedly, also apologised to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein for recommending that the late former sex offender’s close friend Mandelson’s get the Washington job.
Like Starmer, he said Mandelson had lied about his Epstein links. McSweeney also claimed that the appointment process had been followed correctly by Downing Street, as Starmer had also done in parliament and elsewhere.
Yet there he was, an out-of-work political wonk who was still forced out of his job for following a process that he claims was kosher. Like Starmer? That is yet to be decided.
Only Starmer’s rivals in the Labour parliamentary party, followed by party members, can make that happen. Nothing occurred or was said during McSweeney’s committee appearance, or at the earlier appearance of another foreign office chief, Philip Barton, that would hasten that outcome.
Starmer, and his former adviser Svengali McSweeney, will probably take that as a win.
McSweeney, his gentlest of Cork lilts occasionally garnished with a British twang after more than 30 years living there, admitted he made a “serious mistake” in advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson despite his colourful political past – twice sacked from UK government – and his known links to Epstein.
Along with his genuflection to Epstein’s victims, that was about as far as the mea culpas went. McSweeney denied the widely-held belief that Mandelson had ever been his mentor. He denied putting undue pressure on the UK’s foreign office to wave the appointment through, as Robbins and Barton both claimed had happened.
He also denied ever swearing down the phone at any official to speed up Mandelson’s approval. That accusation had “kept him awake at night”, he said.
And yet he still seemed on the defensive. He sat for much of his 2½ hour hearing in a Portcullis House committee room with his arms folded in front of him, a physical sign of self-protection. He got mildly flustered occasionally. There were a lot of “I don’t recall” and “I don’t agree” statements, as MPs, led by committee chair, prodded and probed.
He said Starmer made the decision to appointment Mandelson at a gathering of officials in mid-December. Yet he shrugged his shoulders when it was pointed out that no official records of this meeting exist.
McSweeney said he “wasn’t a minute taker”. But you were the chief of staff to the prime minister, the MPs said. Keeping records was part of your job. McSweeney didn’t agree.
He said the appointment would not have been made at all if Kamala Harris had beaten Donald Trump to the US presidency.
He also rejected any suggestion that his mugging last year for his phone was anything other than what it appeared. The incident meant that some of his messages with Mandelson may not make the official UK government record.
Perhaps the stickiest patch for McSweeney was as he hummed and hawed over whether his and Starmer’s Downing Street operation had tried to rig another ambassador’s post for Matthew Doyle, another friend of Mandelson’s who had been Starmer’s director of communications.
That particular grenade, lobbed by Robbins at the committee last week, stuck most in the craw of fed-up backbench Labour MPs, as they debated an opposition motion in the Commons in the afternoon to refer Starmer to an official sleaze inquiry.
Starmer’s whipping of Labour votes meant that that motion was doomed to fail. He would win that battle. The war over his leadership, however, goes on.
