Hello and welcome to Not Another One, the podcast with me, Steve Richards, Tim Montgomery,

Miranda Green and Ian Martin. Thank you very much for tuning in. As we are recording, we've seen Morgan McSweeney.

Some of us, or well, actually, I had a very brief conversation with him once and that's about it.

But most of us will have seen him for the first time in public, this figure who has been much referenced in political commentary

for the last few years.

And yet here he was for the first time.

What we're not going to do is revisit the Mandelson affair, which is driving everyone

crazy.

And driving crazy last week.

And here we are seven days on.

But what we're going to discuss,

because we've all known personally quite a few prime ministers

and their senior advisors going back several years.

What that relationship tells us about the Prime Minister,

the degree to which they are dependent on these unelected figures.

If mythology is correct, McSweeney was probably the most powerful of all of them in that he chose Kirstama

to be Labour leader. In effect, Kirstama didn't go racing after him. And we've read huge amounts

about the power he has wielded, and of course he has accepted. It was his recommendation that

Mandelson went to Washington washington um i just

wonder just from a kind of kind of almost like a psychological thing did any of you learn much

about this character from the two and a half hours he was in front of the foreign affairs committee

miranda well i have to confess that having sat through the entirety of the previous evidence

...