Starmer and McSweeney battled to keep sleazebags out of power. Then they hired Mandelson 

LONDON — Sometimes in politics, it seems like the gods deal only in irony. 

For Morgan McSweeney, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, that is bitterly true now. 

McSweeney worked harder than anyone to secure the Labour Party leadership for Starmer, and then to overhaul the way the party operated to get it into shape to fight an election, including the key task of vetting candidates to make sure they were credible and clean.

His efforts succeeded — spectacularly — delivering a landslide victory for the ages in July 2024. But 19 months later, the Irish-born adviser is facing angry demands to resign from the very same politicians who won seats in parliament thanks to his dazzlingly effective campaign. 

Those Labour MPs are sickened by the spiraling crisis engulfing Starmer and his adviser over their decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, despite knowing of his friendship with the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. That toxic association is now threatening to end Starmer’s premiership.

Newly disclosed documents suggest Mandelson leaked information to help Epstein while he was a senior minister in the Labour government during the financial crisis more than 15 years ago. Starmer is fighting back, alleging Mandelson betrayed his country and apologizing to Epstein’s victims, but the pressure on the prime minister and his most senior aide remains intense. McSweeney, following convention for senior backroom staff, has not commented in public.

Their fate now rests on two questions: How much did Starmer and McSweeney really know about Mandelson’s close relationship with Epstein before appointing him ambassador? And, crucially, how hard did they try to find out? 

The vetting of candidates, for government jobs and for elections to parliament is a vital process. In an era of relentless scrutiny and snap judgments, leading politicians are routinely brought down by slips and weaknesses that they or their teams have failed to spot. 

Both Starmer and McSweeney knew this well, according to Labour insiders who worked on the election campaign. They spent their years in opposition from 2020 to 2024 watching — and working to exploit — the catastrophic failures in vetting and ethics that dogged former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration. 

Partygate

There was the scandal over lockdown-breaking parties held in Downing Street during the pandemic, which fatally damaged Johnson’s reputation. 

Then came the decisive final chapter of Johnson-era sleaze, when it emerged that he knew about allegations of sexual misconduct against his ally Chris Pincher, but appointed him to a top job anyway. When Pincher later resigned after allegedly sexually assaulting two men at a private member’s club, despairing Tory MPs pushed Johnson out soon after.

McSweeney believed that the Pincher affair showed exactly why it was necessary to tighten Labour’s rules for selecting candidates for parliament. In making his case, McSweeney would cite another example closer to home. In 2021 Mike Hill quit as a Labour MP after he was found to have breached parliament’s sexual misconduct policy. Allegations against him were already public two years previously, but he was still put forward as a candidate for Labour at the 2019 election and won. 

Morgan McSweeney worked harder than anyone to secure the Labour Party leadership for Starmer, and then to overhaul the way the party operated to get it into shape to fight an election, including the key task of vetting candidates to make sure they were credible and clean. | Leon Neal/Getty Images

The special by-election that followed Hill’s resignation was a disaster for Starmer: Labour lost what had once been a safe seat, plunging him into a deep crisis of confidence, and he came close to resigning.

In another intervention from the irony gods, Hill’s seat — Hartlepool in northeast England — was for many years held by the man at the center of the storm today: Mandelson.

After that defeat in 2021, McSweeney concluded that it was vital to stop individuals like Hill being put on Labour’s slate of candidates for the 2024 general election. Amid fierce internal opposition, he launched a drive to bring more central control to the process of candidate selection, taking power away from local Labour branches to stop them putting unreliable people forward for election. 

Fit and proper

It was essential, McSweeney would tell his audiences, that the first criterion for choosing a candidate should be that they are a “fit and proper” person for the job. 

In a cynical age when most voters have no automatic loyalty to parties in the way they used to, fielding credible candidates is even more critical, he argued. Trust is personified in the individual standing on the doorstep, according to McSweeney. Voters must see the Labour rosette pinned to a candidate’s lapel as a mark of quality, in his view. 

McSweeney believed the Labour party Starmer inherited when he became leader in 2020 was, in places, “corrupt.” By that, he meant Labour officials behaved as if the party were a sort of “private club,” designed to serve its members and their interests, rather than the country. 

Mandelson’s membership of Epstein’s club of the super rich and powerful now threatens to wreck Starmer and McSweeney’s careers, alongside their mission to restore voters’ trust in politics. For outraged Labour MPs, the suspicion now is that McSweeney’s own closeness to Mandelson blinded him to the risks.

In the end, it may all come back to trust, how it’s built. Starmer trusted his long-standing friend and ally McSweeney, who is reported to have pushed for Mandelson to be appointed. McSweeney trusted Mandelson, who had been his friend and mentor for decades. And Mandelson, as the past quarter-century shows, had a weakness for rich men that would prove toxic to the party he served. 

In politics, governments are only as strong as their weakest link, which is why trust alone is rarely enough. McSweeney knew that once. 

“Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election,” by Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth, is published by Biteback.