McSweeney quits after Starmer’s “full confidence” as Mandelson scandal deepens and No 10 scrambles to contain the fallout Right, so Keir Starmer stood up in the Commons on 4 February and told everyone Morgan McSweeney was essential, full confidence, the man who helped him remake Labour and win power. Four days later, McSweeney is out. Starmer’s words as worthless as ever it seems. That isn’t a tidy reshuffle, that’s the Prime Minister admitting, without saying the words, that his own operation has now become the story. Because McSweeney isn’t a minister you swap out for a quieter headline. He’s the guy who controls access, message discipline, internal briefings, the whole machinery of who gets heard and who gets frozen out. If that person is suddenly “allowed to resign”, it means someone has decided keeping him is now more dangerous than losing h ...