If there were ever an event to describe our present moment, it would surely be the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s iPhone. The government device was snatched from his hand no more than a mile from the Houses of Parliament last October, though the incident has only recently come to light.
Putting aside, for a moment, any controversy over the probable (and from McSweeney’s perspective potentially rather fortunate) loss of important messages to and from his disgraced mentor Peter Mandelson, the episode presents some symptoms typical of modern life. On McSweeney’s part there is the seeming resignation to having one’s phone ripped from your grasp, now an accepted inconvenience like bad traffic on a bank holiday. There is the expectation that the proper conclusion of a police investigation is merely the issuing of a crime reference number, an outcome now depressingly familiar to so many.
McSweeney, then Keir Starmer’s omnipotent chief of staff and said to have been the second-most powerful man in the country at the time, sounded unperturbed by his loss. Indeed, his first words to the police call handler – ‘Oh, hello, someone just robbed my phone’ – border on the breezy.
The comparison to the Wagatha Christie case is irresistible
The episode also demonstrates a certain incompetence on the part of the authorities. On Wednesday, the Metropolitan police took the unusual step of releasing a full transcript of McSweeney’s 999 call after it had been suggested they had not investigated properly.
There is incompetence from McSweeney as well, enough to raise eyebrows. He managed to give the police the wrong street name when describing where the theft had taken place, then failed to correct the error. First, he said ‘Belgrave Street in Westminster’ (that address is, in fact, in east London) rather than Belgrave Road (which is near Westminster). This was misrecorded by the call handler as Belgrave Street, E1. Then he seemed to ignore two subsequent references made to Stepney, also in east London.
McSweeney omitted to mention that he was the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, or that information contained on his phone was likely to be of national significance. He was also non-committal about whether there were CCTV cameras on Belgrave Road.
Even his manner of speaking is of the moment. Despite never having given an interview, McSweeney employs the ubiquitous ‘so’ with which politicians now preface their answers, managing to sound at once both patronising and ignorant. How did the thief get away, he is asked, and replies: ‘So he’s on a bike.’
McSweeney had been instrumental in the controversial appointment of Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. Communications between the two are expected to be released by the government in the second tranche of the ‘Mandelson files’ after Easter. The messages on McSweeney’s phone are likely lost for good, since senior government officials are not allowed to back up their devices on the cloud.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has insisted the loss was a ‘cock-up rather than conspiracy’, while shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith declared the whole thing ‘smells as fishy as a Somali trawler’. Why the Somalis should find themselves dragged into this is anyone’s guess. Happily, Griffith subsequently tweaked his formulation to: ‘as smelly as a fish market on a hot summer’s afternoon’.
Maverick Labour MP Karl Turner does not believe the phone was stolen at all and said McSweeney is taking the public for fools. He has put forward no evidence to substantiate this claim. Yesterday, Starmer said that any suggestion of a connection between the loss of the phone and the subsequent investigations into Mandelson is ‘far-fetched’.
But the timing is fortunate, to say the least. The phone was taken at around 10.30 p.m. on 20 October – roughly a month after Starmer sacked Mandelson because of his links to Jeffrey Epstein. As Tim Shipman revealed, Labour was then already panicking that the Conservatives would employ a humble address to force the release of any emails and WhatsApp messages concerning Mandelson. One of those involved told colleagues at the time: ‘If the Tories pass a humble address motion, Morgan is fucked.’
While the latest figures show that roughly 100 phones are snatched out of unsuspecting hands every day in Westminster, getting your phone stolen deliberately isn’t as easy as you might think (there is, to be clear, no suggestion this is what McSweeney did). The Daily Mail last year dispatched a reporter to Soho with the express purpose of waving his phone around and having it stolen. Despite bearing more than a passing resemblance to McSweeney, the young man failed in his attempts.
There is also a certain note of the absurd about McSweeney’s fortuitous phone theft. The comparison to the Wagatha Christie case is irresistible. In 2022, two footballers’ wives faced off in the High Court, with Colleen Rooney accusing Rebekah Vardy of leaking stories about her to the press.
Vardy’s agent, Caroline Watt, claimed to have lost an iPhone containing vital messages when it slipped from her hand into the North Sea on a family boating trip, while she was trying to take a video of a seal. Though Watt demonstrated the two crucial elements of a great excuse – being both conceivable and specific – the judge was unconvinced.
Rooney’s barrister, the immaculately coiffed and supremely self-regarding David Sherborne, said it was ‘far from an accident’ and claimed Watt had wanted to ‘cover up incriminating evidence’. Watt maintained she did not deliberately drop the phone. Sherborne lamented that potentially vital messages were ‘lying at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’s locker’, leading Vardy to give the delightful response: ‘Who is Davy Jones?’
McSweeney’s device was apparently disabled remotely by No. 10’s security team when he informed them it had been stolen. Where is it now, one wonders? Has it already been stripped for parts in Shenzhen? Or is it somewhere else entirely? Even Davy Jones would struggle to tell you that.
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