In terms of style, they could not have been more different. Sir Phillip Barton, the calm and careful career civil servant. And Morgan McSweeney, the softly spoken – yet surprisingly hesitant and evasive – political apparatchik.
But the result of their testimony was the same. They buried Keir Starmer.
Over the past week, as claim and counter-claim have swirled around him, the Prime Minister has sought to construct a final line of defence around two contentious arguments. The first was his pledge to the House of Commons last September that full due process had been followed in relation to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. The second, his indignant assertion at last Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions that no pressure ‘whatsoever’ had been applied to civil servants struggling to confirm Mandelson in post before Donald Trump’s February 2025 inauguration.
Barton, with studied precision, and McSweeney – through a tortured process of self-justification and remorse – destroyed both claims. Sir Phillip began by completely dismantling Starmer’s claim the normal regulations and processes had been fully adhered to.
The truth, he revealed, was he had basically been presented with the decision and ‘told to get on with it’. Developed vetting – vital to protecting the nation’s most sensitive secrets – had almost been discarded by the Cabinet Office. No10 was completely ‘uninterested’ in Mandelson’s vetting. The normal procedure would be for a candidate to obtain their security clearances, then be appointed to the role. For Mandelson, the sequencing had been inverted.
When Barton was finally asked point-blank if the Prime Minister had been truthful when he said due process had been followed, he initially responded with silence. A silence that spoke volumes.
Sir Philip Barton, the former head of the Foreign Office, before the Foreign Affairs Committee
Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s former chief of staff, before the committee
McSweeney was equally damning. When the Prime Minister had been presented with a due diligence report detailing the numerous risks associated with Mandelson’s appointment, he had been despatched to quiz the problematic peer. Despite being in possession of a photo of Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein blowing the candles of a giant birthday cake, McSweeney had taken at face value Mandelson’s insistence the two men barely knew each other and were just passing acquaintances.
This, he conceded, had been a mistake. As had the fact he had been tasked by Sir Keir with grilling the man whom he admitted was a ‘confidant’ and whom he had dined with on several occasions. It would have been ‘much better’ for ‘public appearances’ if the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team had done all this, he conceded.
A similar coach and horses was driven through the Prime Minister’s insistence that no political pressure of any kind had been applied throughout the process. Or in McSweeney’s case, a mini-cab.
Pressure had been applied, he admitted. But it was the benign sort of pressure one applies to a cabbie when you tell them you’re running late for your train.
Sir Philip drew a sharper distinction. Pressure had not been applied through directing civil servants to change their decisions, he explained. But it ‘absolutely’ had been applied in terms of the pace with which they were expected to drive through the appointment.
Over the past week, four separate witnesses have been brought before Emily Thornberry and her committee. Two former foreign office permanent secretaries, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, and – via correspondence – the head of UK Vetting. And the picture they have painted has been broadly the same.
Due process was not followed. Pressure was applied. And Keir Starmer’s claims to the contrary were an outright lie.
What’s more, it’s a lie that can now be recognised by everyone in the country. Including, most significantly, Starmer’s MPs.
This evening, beneath the cold stare of their party whips, they will troop dutifully through the lobbies to reject calls for an investigation by Parliament’s Privileges Committee into the way Sir Keir repeatedly misled the House over Mandelson’s appointment. And in that moment they will completely recast this whole sordid saga.
Until today, the Mandelson affair was Keir Starmer’s scandal. From this day forth it will be Labour’s scandal.
Every Cabinet minister, junior minister and backbencher who votes with the Prime Minister is complicit in Mandelson’s appointment. Complicit in the attempt to defend it. And – in so doing – complicit in an attempt to defend the indefensible.
The case against Starmer had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. His own words, delivered at the despatch box, damned him. And yet his MPs are opting to cast aside the facts – and their own basic sense of right and wrong – and rally round his tainted flag.
And they will now pay a political price. It’s true the British people have not followed every twist and turn of which Foreign Office mandarin told which Cabinet Office panjandrum which coloured box of Mandelson’s vetting form had been ticked.
But they have long memories. And they remember Keir Starmer’s shrill calls for Boris Johnson to be hauled before Parliament for his own misdemeanours. They recall the self-righteous demands for him to be driven from office for the falsehoods he deliberately and inadvertently delivered. And, crucially, they have not forgotten the pledge from Starmer and his colleagues that if they were elected, things would all be so, so different.
Sir Keir will survive tonight’s vote. But it will come at a price. From now on there can be no more lectures from either the Downing Street podium or the Labour benches about the need for decisive action against powerful men who prey on vulnerable women and girls.
Nor any more platitudes about the need for honesty and transparency to be reinstated into the heart of the body politic. Or – after the shambolic dysfunctionality that saw Peter Mandelson waved out to Washington without a single face-to-face conversation with the Prime Minister or any of his senior political advisers – assurances the grown ups are back in charge.
Starmer’s victory will also prove a pyrrhic one. Next week, the voters get to deliver their own verdict on the Prime Minister. And it will be damning.
