UK prime minister Keir Starmer was battling to save his premiership on Sunday night, following the resignation of his closest aide, Corkman Morgan McSweeney.
McSweeney, the backroom mastermind behind Starmer’s rise to the Labour leadership and the party’s return to power, quit over the decision to appoint the Jeffrey Epstein-linked Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington.
McSweeney acknowledged in his resignation statement that he advised Starmer to give his old mentor Mandelson the job. He said this was “wrong” given the extent of Mandelson’s links to US sex offender Epstein, which Starmer has said the former ambassador “lied” about.
“[Mandelson] has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself. In the circumstances, the only honourable course is to step aside,” said McSweeney.
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While the Irishman’s position had been under pressure for days as a furore over Mandelson consumed Westminster, McSweeney’s resignation on Sunday mid-afternoon still took senior members of Starmer’s cabinet by surprise.
Pat McFadden, one of the UK cabinet’s most experienced members, had just hours earlier said it made “no sense” for McSweeney to go to relieve pressure on Starmer, “if the prime minister stays”.
“I don’t think it would make any difference at all,” he told the BBC.
In a further sign the Irishman’s resignation was hastily executed, a permanent replacement was not lined up. Four hours after his exit, it was announced that McSweeney’s two deputies would do his job in an acting capacity to prevent a power vacuum at the heart of Starmer’s Downing Street operation.
Some of Starmer’s critics on Labour’s backbenches remained adamant that McSweeney’s exit would not save the prime minister, whose position is in peril over Mandelson, and also over Labour’s disastrous slide in polls.
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Kim Johnson, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, told Sky News the “buck stops” with Starmer and his position was “untenable”. Brian Leishman, a Scottish MP, said Starmer should “look at his own position and question whether he should follow McSweeney’s lead”.
Starmer did not mention the Mandelson scandal in his reaction to the exit of McSweeney, with whom he said it was an “honour” to work. He said he had “turned around” Labour’s fortunes: “Our party and I owe him a debt of gratitude.”
McSweeney, originally from near Macroom in Cork, worked with Labour in the UK for 25 years. He was a protege of Mandelson during the Tony Blair years.
He later became close to Starmer, whom he helped to rout the left-wing acolytes of former leader Jeremy Corbyn, repositioning the party back towards the political centre.
Allies of McSweeney paid tribute to him on Sunday night. One Labour MP told The Irish Times he would be “sorely missed for his political brilliance”.
Another former colleague said McSweeney had been isolated recently and had wanted to go last September, but was talked into staying: “We are now entering the phase of the process where people realise that advisers are not, in fact, the problem.”
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Yet McSweeney also had a legion of internal enemies, including among Labour’s so-called “soft left” divisions. He was resented for being instrumental in the exit of senior figures such as former cabinet member Louise Haigh, forced out in 2024.
McSweeney also tangled with Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sue Gray, who was also forced out of Downing Street before he took her job.
Westminster observers speculated that the Irishman’s exit may buy Starmer a small amount of breathing space should he choose to fight on, but not much.
If the UK prime minister survives the coming weeks, his next moment of danger could come after a February 26th byelection in greater Manchester, where Labour is under pressure from Reform UK and the Greens. If he survives that, he may come under pressure again following difficult Scottish and Welsh elections in May.
