PM’s right-hand man Morgan McSweeney is ‘a dead man walking’ after skipping No 10 meeting

Sir Keir Starmer’s closest political aide was last night described as ‘a dead man walking’ after relinquishing control of key Downing Street meetings.

A senior source told The Mail on Sunday that No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – who engineered Sir Keir Starmer’s political rise – was effectively ‘done’ after a bruising period in which both former Deputy PM Angela Rayner and Mr McSweeney’s political mentor Peter Mandelson lost their jobs in a swirl of scandal.

The source said: ‘Most of us believe that he’s done – a dead man walking. He’s increasingly less engaged. 

‘If he joins No 10 Zoom calls, he often does so with his camera turned off and lets his [recently appointed] deputy Vidhya Alakeson lead many of the meetings.’

Lord Mandelson’s dismissal as US Ambassador, following revelations about his links to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was a particularly savage blow for Mr McSweeney as he had lobbied for the peer to land the job. 

A source said that Mr McSweeney had told friends that the Mandelson sacking was ‘the most brutal thing he has endured in politics’.

Mr McSweeney also faces new accusations that he was behind a covert Twitter campaign to interfere in the 2019 EU elections against a Brexit Party candidate.

The claims, contained in a new book, come after other damaging allegations that £700,000 of donations to Labour Together – a pro-Starmer think tank – had been ‘hidden’ from the elections watchdog when Mr McSweeney was in charge of it.

A senior source told The Mail on Sunday that No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – who engineered Sir Keir Starmer’s political rise – was effectively ‘done’

Lord Mandelson’s dismissal as US Ambassador, following revelations about his links to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein , was a particularly savage blow for Mr McSweeney as he had lobbied for the peer to land the job

And The Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges today raises questions over why the Movement For Another Future firm, set up to promote Sir Keir’s Labour leadership drive in 2020, is still in existence.

Party insiders noted that Mr McSweeney was noticeably less ‘joined at the hip’ with the PM at the Labour conference in Liverpool last month. 

Mr McSweeney and Lord Mandelson have long been close, and the peer once said that although he didn’t know ‘who and how and when [McSweeney] was invented… they will find their place in heaven’. 

But the extraordinary revelation of Lord Mandelson’s links with Epstein appeared to put huge strain on the aide’s relationship with Sir Keir.

This newspaper revealed that after the PM endured a Commons mauling over the affair, Sir Keir

is said to have yelled at Mr McSweeney, ‘You are supposed to protect me from things like this’, and the aide shouted back: ‘That’s exactly what I was trying to do!’

Last night, No 10 denied that the chief of staff was being cut out of key meetings and dismissed the suggestion as ‘rubbish’. 

The new book on Sir Keir and Mr McSweeney’s relationship will claim that Mr McSweeney was director of an organisation called the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), when it was behind an anonymous Stop Funding Fake News Twitter campaign against Brexit Party candidate Michael Heaver during the 2019 European Parliament elections.

The book, The Fraud, by investigative journalist Paul Holden, alleges CCDH was funded by money from the £700,000 of undeclared donations to Labour Together. 

Last night, Labour MP Alex Barros-Curtis – director of Movement For Another Future – did not respond when asked why the company was still operating.

But the CCDH said that Mr McSweeney had ‘never had any operational involvement with CCDH or Stop Funding Fake News’. 

A spokesman added: ‘CCDH’s work is non-partisan.

‘The campaign did not target individuals. It focused on both Right-wing and Left-wing disinformation and hate outlets.’