Mandelson, McSweeney and the Labour Civil War

So Morgan McSweeney has resigned (not been sacked), and No 10’s Director of Communications Tim Allan has followed him out the door, saying he is leaving Downing Street ‘to allow a new No 10 team to be built’.

Managing Optics

Clive Lewis’s assessment was brutally honest:

“Morgan McSweeney’s resignation should not be treated as a cleansing moment. He was not an aberration. He was the tip of an iceberg. What he represents is a political culture that has dominated Labour for a generation. A culture forged under Blair and Mandelson that taught the party to be relaxed about extreme wealth, comfortable in the orbit of billionaires, lobbyists and corporate power, and increasingly detached from the lives of the people it was created to represent.”

“The Mandelson scandal matters because it exposes that culture in its rawest form. Proximity to wealth and power was not a by-product. It was the point. Access was normalised. Influence was laundered as ‘serious politics’. Moral judgment was dulled by the belief that being close to money and power was a sign of maturity rather than capture. That mindset hollowed Labour out. It replaced a party rooted in working-class life with a professional political caste fluent in donor networks, private dinners and elite reassurance, while communities were told to accept decline as the price of ‘responsible’ government.”

“Politics became about managing optics and markets, not challenging vested interests or redistributing power. McSweeney’s departure changes none of that on its own. Unless Labour confronts the culture that rewarded closeness to wealth, blurred ethical lines and treated democratic accountability as an inconvenience, this will amount to little more than damage limitation. Remove one operator and the system that produced him remains. And unless that system is dismantled, Labour will continue to lose its moral authority, its social base, and ultimately its right to govern, leaving the ground clear for forces far worse to exploit the wreckage.”

A Lot of Bad Luck

Mandelson’s rehabilitation started as soon as he was sacked (see The Times ‘Supplement of the Year’). As he shuffles off with a tidy five-figure pay-out from the Foreign Office, Labour apparatchiks and party faithfuls are doing the rounds of tv studios and your feeds are being flooded with crudely coordinated declarations of support for Sir Keir Starmer. Follow #IStandWithStarmer for more of the same.

Brian Wilson popped up on the Sunday Show but BBC Scotland couldn’t get a single representative from the Scottish Office or the Scottish Labour Party to speak to them.

That’s no surprise. The Labour government is in disarray, caught between defending the indefensible and trying desperately to create clear blue water between themselves and the disgraced former Ambassador. Labour and their media supporters are in full panic mode, now caught between ditching Starmer and propping him up.

Efforts have been made to try and portray Mandelson as some sort of rogue figure, some sort of aberration from True Labour. But reports have him helping Morgan McSweeney hand-pick candidates for the 2024 election. Mandelson is the architect of the contemporary Labour Party, not some sideshow.

According to John Curtice this morning Anas Sarwar has “virtually zero” chance of becoming the next First Minister of Scotland, which we knew already, but it seems to be dawning on the rest of the media. Curtice said:  “I’m not sure that even the downfall of Starmer would be sufficiently dramatic and effective to turn things around that quickly.”

The Coup That Never Happens

The full-extent of the Labour civil-war has been poured over by The Times, as we’ve covered before. [see Labour’s Civil War – & –Scottish Labour’s Holyrood Disaster].

There’s an update from the papers’ intrepid trio of John Boothman, their Political Correspondent, Daniel Sanderson, their Scottish Political Editor and Aubrey Allegretti, their Chief Political Correspondent, see Anas Sarwar’s fading hopes depend on Starmer going — right now.

In it they claim “The Scottish Labour leader once had the upper hand over John Swinney at Holyrood but his hopes of power have been torpedoed yet again by the PM”. It’s an interesting claim.

They write somewhat abstractly: “If Scottish politics existed in a vacuum, Scottish Labour would be in the ascendancy.”

This is why, when they look across the party and government for someone to replace the beleaguered Prime Minister, they come up with names like ‘Lucy Powell’. Even competent centrists like Andy Burnham are considered as dangerous radicals and a threat to the party leadership. This is why The Coup That Never Happens that The Times has been covering since October never takes place. It’s based on an imagined world in which a) there are competent, charismatic and convincing candidates to replace Keir Starmer. There are not. And b) the Scottish Labour Party has sway and power within Labour. It does not.
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An Empty Hot Dog Roll

It’s Super Bowl night! Let’s bring the NFL to Scotland pic.twitter.com/qaLRK6HrMd

— Scottish Labour (@ScottishLabour) February 8, 2026

The strange thing about figures like Peter Mandelson and his protégé, Morgan McSweeney, is that they were at first embraced because they were thought to be all about slick and efficient politics. They were supposed to be all about winning.

As Gerry Hassan has pointed out: “The myth of Morgan McSweeney as a political genius who won 2024 for Labour is just that. Labour had a 1.6% rise in their vote & fall of 561,928 votes. They won big because the Tories lost seven million votes. The only region/nation Lab saw a big rise was Scotland: 16.7%.”

That is the context in which Scottish Labour’s car-crash of a campaign is important.

But if Sarwar’s comedy campaign is just one sign of the level of crisis in party and government. McSweeney’s departure is a desperate attempt to stop the haemorrhaging of support and credibility in the aftermath of the Mandelson debacle. But few are certain it will work.

Dark Shit

The infighting is intense. The right-wing of the party is already trying to frame McSweeney’s departure as a left-wing coup, rather than the inevitable consequences of his actions and poor judgement.

Alex Wickham of Bloomberg suggests: “The only way Starmer survives until May is as a lame duck with his rivals using that time to prepare their challenges, one Labour official said. Some expect he’ll try to cling on by inviting left-wing figures like Angela Rayner back into the cabinet and promoting the likes of Ed Miliband. But others in Labour doubt Rayner would accept a job because she is now a step away from taking Starmer’s. — The extraordinary thing is Labour has decided to bury Starmer without any plan for a replacement or any credible successor. Rayner is seen as the frontrunner but Labour figures predict a free-for-all, tipping at least six others to go for the job, from Miliband to Shabana Mahmood and Yvette Cooper. It says it all that Al Carns is on runners and riders lists.”

Al Carns? Anyone?

Wickham concludes: “After 14 years in the wilderness, Labour has imploded just 18 months into power.” Remember, this Labour government was to save the Union. It was to allow a return to the default settings, the way they are supposed to be.

Added to this, and preventing the idea of this being a ‘cleansing moment’ to quote Clive Lewis, there is the matter of Josh Simons. As Peter Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife write in Democracy for Sale: “Morgan McSweeney is gone. His resignation cited his role in the disastrous decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US. His departure follows revelations by Democracy for Sale that Labour Together – the think tank he built to propel Starmer to power – hired a PR firm to investigate journalists from the Sunday Times, and other outlets.”

“Sources close to the Irishman admitted he was aware that Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide in November to identify the sources of journalists digging into its undeclared funding. Former Labour Together director Jon Cruddas called it “dark shit”. But the scandal does not end with McSweeney. Indeed, it now goes right to the heart of Starmer’s government.”

Read the full story here: McSweeney goes – but ​​Josh Simons in the frame over targeting journalists.

The problems for Starmer and the wider party stack up and up as no-one takes seriously the essence of their problems. Labour Together and McSweeney failed to declare £730,000 in political donations, then paid a controversial PR firm at least £30,000 to investigate journalists that were digging into how its undeclared funding. They’re not very good at ‘managing the optics’ are they? 

The problems of Labour Together’s dark money relates directly to Scotland, and no bringing the NFL to Scotland won’t distract anyone from this. Here are the 23 Labour MPs in Scotland funded by Labour Together:

If Labour sleaze and corruption looks bad, it’s worth putting it in the wider context of policy failure. Labour’s abandonment of its core supporters, and with it its sense of any real purpose or direction, is the real reason for its collapse into chaos. Party members, supporters and its own members have been left bewildered by the regime. As Neil Findlay wrote in his resignation last year:

“A party that gave assurances to voters that “change” was coming but failed to tell them that the “change” they meant was to impoverish pensioners through cuts to their winter fuel allowance, betray WASPI women by refusing to compensate them for the states’ failure, punish defenceless children by maintaining the horrific two-child cap, abandon the Grangemouth workers and now attack the long term sick and disabled by slashing social security payments”.

He added: “At a time when more people are going hungry, fuel bills are soaring and the cost of living is leaving working class families unable to afford the basics, a Labour Government should be going after the billions lost in corporate tax fraud and avoidance, it should be making those companies that pollute our environment pay and it should be introducing a wealth tax on the super rich.

“But instead you choose to punish and stigmatise the weak, poor and the vulnerable.”

It was announced yesterday that Sir Keir Starmer would ‘speak to the nation’ today. Then, a short time ago it was announced that he probably wouldn’t. I mean, what would he say?