Morgan McSweeney faces the music
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s a blockbuster day in parliament today. To kick things off, we had Philip Barton pleading ignorance; to close the proceedings tonight we have a vote on a possible Privileges Committee probe. But in between we have Morgan McSweeney, the longtime bete noire of the Labour party left, giving testimony on the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador. McSweeney pushed hard for Mandy to be given the gig: a decision which he said in his opening statement to the Foreign Affairs Committee was a ‘serious error’. However, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff denied pressuring Foreign Office officials to clear the appointment ‘at all costs’.
It wasn’t as explosive as Olly Robbins last week and there seemed to be a more personal subplot running between McSweeney and chair Emily Thornberry – who was denied her frontbench role by Keir Starmer. Is the Prime Minister more or less secure after this latest testimony?
Noa Hoffman speaks to Tim Shipman.
Produced by Megan McElroy and Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Noah Hoffman, the Spectator's new political correspondent, |
| 0:12.2 | and I'm delighted to be joined today by our political editor, Tim Shipman. Well, the delight is mine. |
| 0:17.9 | Welcome, Noah. Welcome to The Spectator. And everybody out there is going to get to know you very well. |
| 0:23.0 | We're delighted to have you. And yeah, what a time to join. |
| 0:26.1 | What's a time to join? |
| 0:27.5 | So we've just been watching Morgan McSweeney at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. What did you think? |
| 0:32.6 | So look, I think he came across very poised in commands of the points that he wanted to put across to the |
| 0:39.6 | public, which was effectively, look, I made a mistake, I stuffed this up, but I was well-meaning. |
| 0:46.3 | And in the moment, I thought I was doing the right thing. He made the point that Peter |
| 0:51.4 | Mandelson was the right person for the job in the era of Donald Trump. |
| 0:55.9 | He said if Carmelah Harris had won the election, there's no way they would have considered |
| 0:59.9 | Mandelson. This was about doing, in his words, what was best for Britain under very tough circumstances |
| 1:06.5 | and economic uncertainty as well. And I think that he came across genuine when he made that point, |
| 1:13.5 | but that obviously doesn't detract from the fact that he made this colossal mistake |
| 1:18.2 | that has set off such serious repercussions for the Prime Minister |
| 1:22.1 | and for the country in terms of how embarrassing it is on the international stage. |
| 1:26.7 | Yeah, no, I think that's right. |
| 1:27.6 | I mean, I think the interesting thing to me about the explanation, about the appointment, which I've heard a lot of explanations, and the cynical one is, well, he wasn't going to get any trouble with Jeffrey Epstein from Donald Trump, because Trump had been up to his neck with Epstein as well. The point that McSweeney made, I thought it was interesting, was we were really after a trade deal with the state. |
| 1:44.3 | So it wasn't just about cozing up to Trump. |
| 1:46.7 | It was about having someone who knew about trade deals. |
| 1:48.8 | And of course, Mandelson had not only been trade secretary in the previous Labour government, |
| 1:53.2 | he'd also been the commissioner for trade when he was working in Brussels as a commissioner. |
... |
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