It was no ordinary phone that Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s 48-year-old chief of staff, was clutching to his ear as he walked down Belgrave Road, Pimlico, at 10.30pm on October 20 last year.
In the electronic innards of that phone was stored information that, in all probability, was absolutely crucial to the future of the Government and the fate of the PM.
Within the amazingly capacious memory of that iPhone are likely to have been traces or records of the entire process – if you can call it a process – by which Peter Mandelson was appointed to the post of ambassador to Washington.
That phone was almost certainly the means by which McSweeney carried out the function allegedly entrusted to him – of vetting the suitability of Mandelson for that £161,000-a- year appointment.
If, as his job required, McSweeney posed written questions to Mandelson on that phone, those questions would be there. If Mandelson responded, the answers would be there.
In so far as the proper vetting process was followed – as Starmer has repeatedly claimed – it may well be that the only evidence is on that phone. Because from what we have learned to date, it seems that no other records were kept and no other notes were made of the decision.
The electronic data on that phone is, therefore, likely to be – or to have been – one of the very few ways in which the public can assess this crucial question: was the Prime Minister really deceived – as he has so repeatedly and so strenuously claimed – by Peter Mandelson? Was his chief of staff really bamboozled by the feline old Machiavelli?
We need to have Morgan McSweeney’s, former chief of staff, phone, or we need to know in exactly what way Mandelson lied to the PM
Is it true – as Starmer has tearfully claimed – that Mandelson lied and lied and lied again about his relationship with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein? That is what the PM told the Commons and the world.
Or is it really that Starmer was shocked by the growing inferno of public outrage in the wake of Mandelson’s sacking on September 11?
Is it perhaps more likely that he panicked, and then found it convenient to claim that he had been deceived – or rather that his chief of staff had been deceived – because he did not see how he could otherwise justify the appointment of a man who had remained friends with a systematic and serial paedophile, a man who had incorrigibly groomed, trafficked and abused under-age girls?
He knew the Labour Party’s vulnerability on this point. He was all too aware of the accusations he had himself faced, as director of public prosecutions, over the failure to prosecute the appalling Jimmy Savile.
Is the reality that Starmer was and is lying – about his very claim that he was himself deceived?
Starmer knew the essential facts: they were there in his briefing. He knew that Mandelson had remained friends with Epstein after Epstein had been convicted. He knew that the man he wanted to be US ambassador had been to stay with a convicted paedophile, and he knew that his senior officials – such as Jonathan Powell, the national security advisor, and the whole Civil Service – were extremely worried about the appointment. All that was in the briefing.
The Epstein Files have indeed produced more damning and extraordinary information about the Mandelson-Epstein relationship. We know that Mandelson and his husband Reinaldo Avila da Silva actually took money from Epstein, and we know that Mandelson passed sensitive government emails and information to Epstein – such as the timing of the euro bailouts in 2010 – almost as soon as they dropped in his inbox.
That strikes me as a killer fact: that he secretly passed market-sensitive information to a foreign banker – a man who had secretly given him money – while occupying high public office. It is an offence for which, if found guilty, Mandelson may yet do time.
But I think it highly unlikely that he concealed those facts from Morgan McSweeney, and therefore from Starmer, because I think it highly unlikely that he was asked, and certainly not in those terms.
I doubt very much if Mandelson was asked if he had taken money from Epstein, or passed him information, because I don’t think it would have occurred to McSweeney that a man of Mandelson’s experience could do something so extraordinarily foolish and ostensibly corrupt.
In any case, that was not the objective of the vetting process. McSweeney wasn’t trying to get at the truth; he was trying to get Mandelson appointed, and I therefore think it highly unlikely that Mandelson actually lied to No 10.
Starmer’s problem is not that he was the victim of Mandelson’s lies, but that he failed to recognise the moral impossibility of appointing Mandelson with the information he already had about his friendship with the paedophile.
That is the toxic point. That is why the public is so angry, and that is why Starmer thought it necessary to lie himself – to pretend that he had been deceived.
There are only two ways to clear this up. Either Peter Mandelson can come forward and confess that, yes, he lied to McSweeney and Starmer about his relationship with Epstein, and he can produce the damning evidence from his own phone – about how he was explicitly asked certain questions and how he gave false answers to McSweeney.
Is it true – as Prime Minister Sir Keir has tearfully claimed – that Mandelson lied and lied and lied again?
I suppose that might happen… when hell freezes over.
Or else we might magically recover McSweeney’s iPhone – which was providentially snatched from his hand, and which has joined Shergar and Lord Lucan in the great disappearing acts of modern British history.
There are many very fishy aspects about this theft: the fact that McSweeney inadvertently gave the wrong address for the mugging – Belgrave Street in Tower Hamlets, rather than Belgrave Road in Pimlico; the brainless way with which he agreed with the police call handler’s suggestion that the mugger had turned into ‘Stepney Green Park’, when Stepney is nowhere near Pimlico; the apathy with which he followed up the theft, not picking up when the police called him back twice; his failure to identify himself as the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, and holder of a crucial public office, with a phone that therefore contained information that might be of great value to the enemies of this country.
The whole thing is bizarrely lackadaisical – precisely as if he didn’t really want too much of a hue and cry.
Then there is the peculiar way the phone’s data was wiped by the security services without even trying to locate or recover the phone.
Let us suppose for a second that it is true that a young black man on a bike had snatched his phone – only weeks after McSweeney had realised that its contents were potentially lethal for the Government – and cycled ‘north’.
If that phone were really in the hands of the thief, surely it would have triggered mobile phone masts on the way.
If McSweeney had really run down the street after him, for a few blocks, then the evidence of that chase would be on CCTV. There are dozens of cameras in that area. They can’t all have been wiped.
This is too important to let go. We need to have that phone, or we need to know in exactly what way Mandelson lied to the PM; because, otherwise, I am afraid it looks as though the PM has been lying to the country.
