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 him, and that decision tells you the pressure is coming from inside as well as outside. So the question isn’t just why he’s gone, or even why he was allowed to resign rather than being sacked. The question is what he was protecting Starmer from, what he was involved in, and what happens to Starmer now the enforcer has been removed, now Starmer’s strings have been cut and he’s been cast adrift and frankly how much longer he has himself, now the guy who has always shielded him has walked. Right, so Keir Starmer has lost Morgan McSweeney as his Downing Street chief of staff, and the timing is the whole point, because on 4 February, in the House of Commons, Starmer put confidence in McSweeney on the record when he was challenged directly, and now McSweeney has gone anyway. Starmer made the defence as Prime Minister, McSweeney has left as the person who ran the engine room, and the government is left carrying a contradiction that does not go away just because somebody has been pushed out of the door.