PM rejects ‘far-fetched’ scepticism about Morgan McSweeney phone theft

Keir Starmer has said it is “far-fetched” to suggest that the theft of his former chief of staff’s mobile phone is somehow connected to a subsequent push for the release of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador.Downing Street has come under pressure to say whether key messages between Morgan McSweeney and the former ambassador were lost after it emerged that the government-issue phone was stolen last year.Kemi Badenoch had “raised an eyebrow” in relation to accounts about the theft, a spokesperson for the Conservative leader said on Wednesday. The Labour MP Karl Turner, who has clashed with the government over jury trial legislation and was a critic of McSweeney’s role, said on X on Wednesday night that he did not believe the phone was stolen.The prime minister responded to the claims on Thursday morning, saying: “The phone was stolen. It was reported to the police. There’s a transcript of the call in which Morgan McSweeney gives his name, his date of birth, the details of the phone, and the police confirm that it was reported.“Unfortunately, there are thefts like this. It was stolen. It was reported at the time, the police have acknowledged and confirmed that. That is what happened.”Starmer added: “The idea that somehow everybody could have seen that sometime in the future there’d be a request over the phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched.”Later on Thursday the shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith, also questioned the circumstances surrounding the loss of the phone.“The whole thing is as smelly as a fish market on a hot summer’s afternoon,” he told GB News. “I worked in No 10. Briefly, I had a No 10 phone. There was a paranoia about devices like that falling into other people’s hands.”MPs moved in February to force the publication of tens of thousands of documents amid questions over what was known about Mandelson’s links to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before he was handed the Washington job.McSweeney quit Downing Street last month, with many having blamed him for pushing the appointment. Concerns have been raised over the fact that the phone of the prime minister’s then top aide was not backed up, leading to the loss of the correspondence.Police have taken the unusual step of releasing a transcript of McSweeney’s 999 call reporting the phone theft.According to McSweeney, in an account backed up by the transcript of his call to the Metropolitan Police at the time, he was using his government-issued phone on a street in Pimlico, central London, just before 10.30pm on 20 October last year when a young man on a bike snatched the iPhone and pedalled off.McSweeney also had a personal phone with him, which he used to dial 999. He told the Met police handler that he had called his “office” to get the phone tracked before phoning them. He said it was a “government phone”, but did not set out his job or where he worked, and the call handler did not appear to recognise his name.Helen MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary in the Cabinet Office, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that McSweeney had done the right thing in terms of the steps he took, which included calling the government first to ask for the phone to be wiped.But she said it was surprising that Downing Street had not got in touch with the police to flag the significance of the phone, adding that paranoia and scepticism about the theft had been fuelled by the reluctance of the government to release documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador more swiftly.“It is allowing for a lot of speculation about ‘what are they hiding?’ … ‘what are they not hiding?’,” she said. “The surprising thing to me about the documents that were released was what was not there. There is not an enormous amount of paperwork or correspondence or the sort of paperwork that you would expect.”Meanwhile, Starmer has said “I beat myself up” over his decision to make Mandelson US ambassador.The prime minister acknowledged he “dwells” on the appointment in 2024, after government documents showed he had been warned of a “general reputational risk” over the peer’s association with Epstein before approving the former Labour grandee for the role.The Labour leader told Sky News’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast: “Nobody has been harder on me in relation to the mistake I made there than me. And I’ll tell you why, I’ve spent years trying to deal with violence against women and girls.“And as I look back at it now and the mistake I made, I’ve been really hard on myself. In the immediate days after this all came out, I was particularly hard on myself. So yeah, everybody else was criticising, I get all that.“But nobody was criticising me more than myself. I’m not trying to, you know, make that a mitigation or an excuse, but, I know I made a mistake.”