Scandal surrounding political appointment of disgraced Labour Grandee to U.S. ambassador post that threatens to bring down Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer sees more top insiders testify to Parliamentary committee.
Censorious anti-Breitbart figure who was until recently the “most powerful man in politics you’ve probably never heard of” at the top of the British government, Morgan McSweeney, has attempted to put clear blue water between himself and the man long said to be his mentor and sponsor in British left-wing politics, Peter Mandelson, in a committee appearance in Parliament on Tuesday. Insisting the widely-held belief that Mandelson is his particular friend is simply a “mythos”, political operator McSweeney also played down Mandelson’s long-discussed influence within the broader Labour Party itself.
McSweeney dramatically left government earlier this year over the Mandelson scandal, as it became apparent the Labour grandee was much closer to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein than he claimed. It has since become apparent the way in which Mandelson was vetted — or not — for the ambassador post bears further scrutiny, and these foreign affairs committee meetings have been held to try and drill down on these issues. McSweeney said on Tuesday that he’d made a “serious error of judgement” to support Mandelson’s appointment, but argued that ultimately it was Mandelson himself who had first put himself forward for the top diplomatic posting.
In this bid to distance himself from the whole process, McSweeney at first appeared to take that responsibility for Mandelson’s appointment before stating an absolving kitchen-sink-list of other factors to make clear it wasn’t really truly his fault at all. Reflecting a glare of implicit blame on the British people for voting for Brexit and the American people for not voting for Kamala Harris, McSweeney topped it off by noting Prime Minister Sir Keir is a man of his own mind anyway, consults widely, and at the end of the day made his own decision.
Trying to play down just how close he is widely reckoned to be to the now ever-more unfashionable Mandelson, and give the Labour Party itself some distance, McSweeney said:
Mandelson had nothing to do with the selection or vetting of any of our parliamentary candidates. I was in a senior role in the party at the time. We did everything on the books…. I don’t think he backed Keir Starmer to be leader of the Labour Party, I don’t recall him doing so. He certainly wasn’t working on the campaign, wasn’t donating the party… So this sort of mythos that’s been built that he’s some sort of guiding hand behind me and my strategies and my life is not the case.
McSweeney also kicked back at claims from senior civil servants already heard by the committee, that the political team around Prime Minister Sir Keir had been pushing hard to get Mandelson in post quickly. There was “no pressure”, in fact, he claimed. And far from it: McSweeney claimed it wouldn’t even be “the end of the world” if Ambassador Mandelson wasn’t in post in time for Trump’s inauguration.
This was very much contra- what had even been said earlier the same day. Speaking before McSweeney Sir Philip Barton — the former permanent under-secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, one of the most senior civil service roles — corroborated earlier claims when he made clear his view that pressure was put on the civil service to make the Mandelson appointment happen, and fast.
He told the committee that he’d been “presented with a decision and told to get on with it”, and that it was to be done “at pace”. The civil servant remarked “was there pressure? Absolutely… there was pressure to get everything done as quickly as possible” and said:
I was told of a decision so I wasn’t asked for advice… The Cabinet Office initially said that as Mandelson was, to use the technical phrase from the guidance, a ‘fit and proper person’ as a member of the House of Lords, he did not require developed vetting.
To be honest with you, I thought that was odd and insufficient.
Perhaps the most remarkable comments emerging from Tuesday’s sessions was a glimpse into the secret world of the senior civil servant, when Sir Philip admitted that sometimes the elected servants of the people running government — the ministers theoretically controlling government departments — are sometimes deliberately kept in the dark by their civil servants. He said: “it is not unheard of for a permanent secretary to be privy to something that they don’t pass on or are asked not to pass on to their Secretary of State.”
Asked to clarify and confirm that he’d personally been in this situation of being “told ‘don’t told your boss about this’”, the top civil servant confirmed he had.
A bid to topple Prime Minister Starmer in Parliament on Tuesday stumbled after Labour whipped its MPs into backing Sir Keir. Yet feeling ran so high Labour was forced to suspend 15 of its own Parliamentarians from the party for refusing to back the leader in the vote, and a further 53 abstained.
Labour accused the Conservatives of a “desperate political stunt” in calling the vote against Starmer, even though the Labour leader had used precisely the same mechanism against Prime Minister Boris Johnson in years gone by. The leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir Ed Davey said of the vote: “Starmer has ducked the scrutiny he should have faced by forcing Labour MPs to defend him. What a cowardly way to govern.”
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