Morgan McSweeney: Mandelson revelations were a knife to my soul

The prime minister’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney has distanced himself from disgraced Peter Mandelson, saying the “mythos” around their relationship is untrue.

McSweeney helped Labour win power in 2024 and was Keir Starmer’s chief-of-staff when Mandelson was appointed as UK ambassador to the USA. He resigned in February over the appointment after the full extent of Mandelson’s ties to late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein were revealed.

Giving evidence to a panel of MPs, McSweeney said those revelations were “like a knife to my soul”.

He denied exerting undue influence on the prime minister or Foreign Office officials over the appointment and rejected claims of being involved in a ‘jobs for the boys’ culture within government.

And, on the question of who first suggested Mandelson for the role, McSweeney said: “The first person who put Mandelson forward was Mandelson.”

The Metropolitan Police is currently investigating whether or not Mandelson passed on market-sensitive information while serving as business secretary under Gordon Brown.

The EU’s anti-fraud office has also started a formal investigation into allegations of misconduct by Mandelson while he was European trade commissioner in the early 2000s.

Today McSweeney told the Foreign Affairs Committee that he had thought Mandelson’s experience in that role would help the UK secure a trade deal with the US under Donald Trump.

And he said that the appointment had come down to Mandelson or former Conservative chancellor George Osborne and would likely not have gone the way it did if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election.

McSweeney, who is married to Scottish Labour MP Imogen Walker, told the panel it had been a “serious mistake” to give the job to Mandelson, who it has transpired was flagged during vetting as a potential national security risk. He stated: “The prime minister relied on my advice, and I got it wrong.”

However, he said he did not “oversee national security vetting, ask officials to ignore procedures, request that steps should be skipped or communicate explicitly or implicitly that checks should be cleared at all costs”.

McSweeney denied that a personal relationship with Mandelson had clouded his judgement and said he had not regarded him as a “mentor” or a “hero”, and had reached out to him ahead of the 2024 election because he “wanted to know what a winning campaign would look like”.

Rejecting reports that Mandelson was granted input on candidate vetting and other internal party matters, McSweeney said: “This sort of mythos that he had some sort of guiding hand behind me, or my strategies, or my life is not the case.”

However, he admitted going to Mandelson’s home for a meal twice in 2024, and said he had also gone to a restaurant with him.

The ex-staffer said Starmer had consulted widely around the appointment, adding: “I can't recall anyone saying that Mandelson was not appointable.”

On what was known about Mandelson’s ties with Epstein, he told MPs: “The nature of the relationship that I understood he had with Epstein was not a close friendship.

“How I understood it at the time was a passing acquaintance that he regretted having and that he apologised for.

“What has emerged since then was way, way, way worse than I had expected at the time.”

McSweeney was appearing after Philip Barton, former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office.

Barton said he had concerns that Mandelson’s association with Epstein was a “toxic hot potato” in the US and that Downing Street was “uninterested” in concerns.

The Cabinet Office had suggested that Mandelson, whose appointment was announced before vetting, did not need to undergo the normal security clearance process due to being a member of the House of Lords – a position Barton said was “odd and insufficient”.

McSweeney was asked about the loss of his government phone, which he told police had been stolen from him in the street.

The device has not been recovered and Conservative John Whittingdale asked why McSweeney had given police the wrong location for the incident, with the call handler believing it to be in Stepney rather than Westminster.

McSweeney said he was “quite adrenalised” and “exhausted” at the time, having initially tried to chase the thief.

He said he had not initially told police it was a government phone because he was not explicitly advised to do so by Downing Street.

His WhatsApp messages with Mandelson may have been set on disappearing mode, he said.