If I were Morgan McSweeney, I’d fear being knifed by Starmer

The PM’s chief of staff has his fingerprints all over this crisis, says Paul Holden – but his destruction would surely seal the fate of his boss

Wherever he turns, Keir Starmer can hear the clock ticking. Labour MPs are in uproar. Briefings are flying, and speculation mounts as to when – not if – Starmer might be forced out.

More than one person has commented that it feels like the last days of Boris Johnson and Partygate. Then, the public were repulsed by images of Johnson partying while everyone else was in Covid lockdown or burying their loved ones, which encapsulated a widespread sense that our political class lives in a different world to ordinary people. Now, the public is scandalised by the failure of No 10 to appreciate what was obvious to everyone at the time: giving the most senior ambassadorial job to a long-time associate of the world’s most notorious paedophile was an appalling and inexplicable decision.

Now, as Starmer runs out of scapegoats to throw to the feverish Westminster commentariat, the one they call “the Irishman” – Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff – is rumoured to be next in the firing line.

People outside the Westminster bubble rarely understand the extent to which McSweeney’s fingerprints are all over the Starmer administration. The PM joined forces with the man from Macroom in 2019 to plot his rise to the leadership of the Labour Party, and then the government.

Crucially, McSweeney is no stranger to Mandelsonian dark arts – McSweeney and Mandelson’s relationship goes back to 2001. Indeed, Mandelson himself was soon injected into the very heart of the Starmer project.

One of McSweeney’s first jobs in the Labour Party was to input information into the famous Excalibur system, the Labour supercomputer that collected “intelligence” on opponents of New Labour – including Labour MPs – pioneered and run by Mandelson. According to McSweeney’s sympathetic biographer, Rachel Wearmouth, it was during this experience that “the two grew to know and trust each other, and Mandelson remained a key influence on McSweeney’s thinking”.

McSweeney, like Mandelson, “despised” the Corbynite left. After his meet cute with Mandelson, McSweeney moved to work with Steve Reed, now the minister of housing whose meteoric rise in the Party is inextricably tied to McSweeney. Following the Labour Party’s unexpectedly good showing in the 2017 general election, McSweeney moved to the anodyne-seeming think tank Labour Together.

It was here that McSweeney’s own mastery of the dark arts was given its first full expression. He cultivated Labour Together’s image as a think tank uniting the party’s factions as a protective carapace hiding his real project: to destroy the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (even if it meant Labour losing the 2019 general election) so he and his allies could choose a successor of their liking. McSweeney hatched a range of secret projects to do so, including a deeply disturbing astroturf campaign designed to undermine media outlets and journalists who reported critically on McSweeney’s factional allies.

Starmer’s election as leader of the Labour Party meant that McSweeney wielded unparalleled power in the party. His allies were placed throughout the party bureaucracy. Together, they recoded its DNA, blocking left-wing MPs and councillors and elevating factional allies. According to reporting yesterday, Mandelson was intimately involved in this process, working with McSweeney on a spreadsheet identifying who could and couldn’t be allowed to become a Labour candidate (the Labour Party has denied this).

Starmer’s outriders have long said that this transformation of the Labour Party was designed to make it electable again and cull the undesirables. Perhaps, but who can deny that it also made the Labour Party more amenable to the politics and profits of the Epstein class?

Furthermore, Mandelson is reported to have advised No 10 on the September 2025 cabinet reshuffle, which elevated McSweeney’s closest allies – like Reed and Shabana Mahmood. McSweeney and Mandelson, it appears, were not just responsible for populating parliament with their friends and allies but deciding on the makeup of the cabinet too. Of course, it was McSweeney who is said to have pushed hardest for Mandelson to be appointed as the US ambassador.

But this was no aberration or lapse of judgment. It was not an unforced error. Instead, it is a distillation of how McSweeney’s reckless project has tipped an already febrile democracy into crisis – and of how McSweeney and Starmer’s Faustian pact will tarnish the reputation of Starmer and the Labour Party forever. And it shows how the Mandelson rot is not just a historical outlier – it runs right to this government’s core.

MPs now demand that Starmer fire McSweeney. They say that the advice the prime minister has received to date has been, to put it mildly, dismal. They may as well demand he cut out his heart. Could the PM make a desperate move? Yes. And Starmer’s body politic may persist for a few minutes more, but it would eventually die without McSweeney’s propulsion. Or, perhaps, Starmer would fear the retribution of a man who had ruthlessly destroyed the careers and reputations of people who stand in his way. In these last gasps, there is only the cold logic of mutually assured destruction.