McSweeney is not just one rotten apple – the whole cart is rancid

An ablative heat shield is a protective system that jettisons material to dissipate heat from the underlying structure.  They’re used on oil rigs and spacecraft.  And in politics.

Boris Johnson used Matt Hancock as one.  After failing to turn up at Cobra meetings, Johnson and his government discharged Covid-infected patients into care homes, causing thousands of early deaths.  His callous “let the bodies pile high” comments and corrupt VIP WhatsApp lanes left him in the firing line.  So he sacked health secretary Matt Hancock.  Not for incompetence, but in a conveniently leaked video where Hancock snogs a woman he was having an affair with in his office.  He’d appointed her to a £15,000 paid non-exec director role, too.  Johnson could then jettison the Hancock liability without drawing attention to the Covid fiascos.

Hancock kept his £91,346 MP’s salary.  And took his £16,000 ministerial resignation payout.  And £320,000 for going on I’m a Celebrity.  If you’d been sacked for corruption, inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, and lethal incompetence, how much would your golden parachute be?

We should ask the same question about Morgan McSweeney.

McSweeney: gone but not forgotten

Those rich donors colonising our public services will see him right.  His media mates are trying to rehabilitate him already – Guardian articles saying he was the genius who “masterminded landslide 2024 election win”.  What rubbish.  Johnson created chaos without any help from McSweeney.  A lettuce beat Liz Truss.  The Tories handed Labour their loveless landslide.  McSweeney’s efforts lowered the Labour vote.

The whole Starmer project, engineered by the likes of Mandelson and McSweeney, is a big gravy train of corruption.  Starmer is right in the middle of it.  They were aided and abetted by client journalists.

Do you remember when Keir Starmer was “forensic”?  That didn’t last long.  Then they were the “grown ups”.  Making “tough decisions”.  Like accepting £100,000 of freebies.  They’re trying to rehabilitate him how.  He is a “decent” man who was “lied to” by that nasty Peter Mandelson.  How could they have known that a man who resigned twice for corruption was corrupt?

After Mandelson’s second ministerial resignation, Tony Blair appointed him as Britain’s EU Commissioner.  In 2008 the story broke about Mandelson meeting billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Natheniel Rothschild on an £80m yacht.  Along with George Osborne. Deripaska owned the world’s largest aluminium business.  Mandelson had lowered EU tariffs on aluminium from 6% to 3%, worth tens of millions of pounds to Deripaska.  I found that in a Google search.

What a genius

In 2023 the McSweeney faction manoeuvred to stop Labour members from being allowed to select me to continue as Mayor.  Starmer said “we want the highest quality of candidates.”  A lobby journalist told me, “It’s amazing – they’re blocking you who’s actually done some good and Peter Mandelson, who’s best mates with Jeffrey Epstein, still has influence.”  That was 18 months before Starmer appointed Mandelson as ambassador to the US.  If journalists knew, the Cabinet Office Security Vetting service knew.  Which meant Starmer knew.

So what they will try next is to say it’s just one rotten apple.  Mandelson was dodgy.  And while McSweeney was ambitious, he was just serving his party.  And Starmer, when he resigns, will be rehabilitated as a decent chap, just too honest and straight laced.  Which is total hogwash.  They are all up to their elbows in it.  And have normalised it.  These are not merely three weak individuals, unable to control their greed.  The system attracts and rewards and promotes these characters.  The Labour right is a machine that transfers our money to very rich people.

The Tony Blair Foundation took £257m from Larry Ellison, whose Oracle firm is hawking AI to governments.  Shortly afterwards, Starmer announced 18,000 NHS England redundancies, which would be filled by AI.  There are legions of other examples.

Governments will struggle

I was on BBC Politics North this weekend.  I was asked about why left behind towns in the North East were struggling.

Low wages, poor transport and a shortage of good jobs persist year after year.  The underlying cause, I said, is the money being taken out of these places.  In the North East alone, Northumbria Water made £291m profit last year.  All disappears off to a Hong Kong billionaire.  Northern PowerGrid North East, £333m profit last year, all disappears off to a North American billionaire.  That money reinvested here would create more work, more jobs, more money circulating in our local economy.  That’s just two privatised utilities.  Add in banks, finance, land ownership, care homes, big tech – and we’re a debt farm built to enrich billionaires.  Our money is going to people on big yachts, not small boats.

No government will be popular until this is fixed.  They only reason Starmer is still in post is Labour MPs are waiting until after May’s local election wipe out to jettison him like an ablative heat shield.  No new leader wants a catastrophic defeat in their inbox.

Public ownership is immensely popular.  It would be simple to do.  It costs effectively nothing – just enforce the regulations, and the share price will plummet to zero.  So the real question is why won’t a struggling Labour government do it?

The only way is Green after McSweeney and Labour

I joined the Green Party because they will.  Over 130,000 people have made the same decision.  In Newcastle we’ll take swathes of seats from Labour.  It’s shaping up to be a straight fight between the Greens and Reform, just like the Gorton and Denton by-election.  The Greens will reverse wealth extraction.  Reform will turbocharge it, like a vacuum hose sucking money from your bank account.

The cracks in the neo-Labour edifice are growing.  So one cheer for the demise of Mandelson and McSweeney.  But I’ll keep the other two back for when we get a government that serves the people.

Featured image via the Canary