Morgan McSweeney resigns as Downing Street chief of staff

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Morgan McSweeney has resigned as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, as the UK prime minister seeks to appease angry Labour MPs and save his job in the fallout of the Lord Peter Mandelson scandal. 

The exit of McSweeney, a political protégé of Mandelson, had been demanded by many backbenchers, but the departure of the prime minister’s closest aide leaves Starmer looking isolated and vulnerable.

McSweeney was instrumental in advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US and was blamed by many Labour MPs for the brutal ministerial reshuffle last September.

McSweeney’s decision to quit was confirmed in a phone call with Starmer at lunchtime on Sunday, amid fears that the chief of staff could be further damaged by the future release of emails between him and Mandelson.

In a statement McSweeney said: “The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself. When asked, I advised the prime minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice.”

But McSweeney’s decision to take responsibility for Mandelson’s appointment left opponents of Starmer saying it was time the prime minister stopped blaming his officials for mistakes. One minister said: “It leaves Keir exposed.”

Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, said: “Keir Starmer has to take responsibility for his own terrible decisions. But he never does.”

McSweeney, architect of Labour’s 2024 election victory and widely credited for driving hard-left elements out of the ruling party, added in his resignation statement: “In public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient.”

In a sign of the deep malaise in Number 10, a McSweeney ally said: “It’s honourable of him to take responsibility, but no one is going to buy the idea that responsibility is actually his to bear. It’s now a pattern of loyal staff and MPs being disposed of whenever the government gets in trouble.”

McSweeney’s resignation came after Starmer admitted last week that he had selected Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US despite knowing of his ongoing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after the disgraced financier was jailed in 2008 for child prostitution offences. Mandelson was sacked last September.

Labour officials said both Starmer and McSweeney decided it was “time to move on” but that the government would not change policy as a result of the latter’s departure.

They said the prime minister wanted to “address issues highlighted by the Mandelson revelations”, with McSweeney calling for the vetting process for senior officials to be “fundamentally overhauled”.

The Metropolitan Police this week said Mandelson was under criminal investigation over possible misconduct in public office, after emails showed he passed confidential government information to Epstein while he was business secretary and de facto UK deputy prime minister in 2009 and 2010. 

Downing Street announced a separate official inquiry into Mandelson’s conduct “during his time as a government minister” after a tranche of emails was published by the US Department of Justice.

In recent months, McSweeney has become a lightning rod for criticism among Labour MPs, who blame him for strategic mis-steps on policy and communications.

While Labour MPs had publicly and privately been calling for McSweeney to go, some said his departure would not resolve questions about Starmer’s judgment and could even add to pressure on the prime minister.

Starmer — who has apologised to Epstein’s victims for giving the peer the role of UK envoy to the US — is braced for the Mandelson scandal to intensify after he agreed to allow parliament’s intelligence and security committee to release a trove of documents relating to the appointment.

Mandelson’s communications with ministers and officials while he was in Washington will also be published, with government officials estimating that up to 100,000 documents may have to be released.

Starmer believes some of the exchanges relating to Mandelson’s vetting for the US job will support his claim that the former ambassador “lied” about his relationship with Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

But other messages sent between Mandelson and Starmer’s team, including McSweeney, could be much more problematic. Some of Mandelson’s private exchanges could particularly strain the UK’s relations with Donald Trump if they cast the US president in a bad light.

Starmer said of his departing chief of staff: “He turned our party around after one of its worst-ever defeats and played a central role running our election campaign.

“It is largely thanks to his dedication, loyalty and leadership that we won a landslide majority and have the chance to change the country.”

Starmer on Sunday appointed Downing Street’s two deputy chiefs of staff, Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson, as acting chiefs of staff.

Labour figures said other candidates to take the role, which is at the centre of the Number 10 operation, on a permanent basis included Varun Chandra, now Downing Street chief business adviser and former boss of advisory firm Hakluyt, and Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer and former Labour director of communications.

Mandelson once said of McSweeney, a former director of the influential think-tank Labour Together: “I don’t know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was . . . they will find their place in heaven.”