Morgan McSweeney is not your Mate

And there is no “Old Labour”

It said by many a Winston that the Irish and Jamaicans are ‘like brothers’, but I’ve always thought there exists a greater international fraternity between the Paddy and the Nigerian. For as the Ghanian saying goes: “They [Nigerians] are so sly that they could steal the milk from your tea”. I feel a similar indulgent admiration to the person of Morgan McSweeney as he bewitches the right-wing press in Britain with the promise that he belongs to something called “Blue Labour”, which allegedly has very little truck with either Human Rights Lawyers OR crusted Putin toadies.

Much like his co-ethnic Kemi Badenoch there is very little appetite on behalf of the ‘centre-right’ to do any serious digging into the biographies of the individuals before blind faith is put in. So it falls again, to J’accuse, to scratch at the scabs of old wounds until they bleed once more.

Morgan McSweeney’s foray into politics begins in the same, evil entrepot of both Keir Starmer and Sue Gray; the Good Friday Agreement, which as a young man he found so inspiring that he joined the Labour Party. After years of trying and failing to attain an undergraduate degree, he found himself a job working at Labour Party HQ, where he worked on a very sinister creation of Peter Mandelson; Excalibur. Excalibur was a database held within Party Headquarters that was used to store vast volumes of information about Labour Party members, then used to blackmail them into submitting to Mandelson’s whims. Hugh Kerr, a Labour MEP in the Guardian:

“When I was a Labour MEP, Millbank got some wrong information that I was about to join the Socialist Labour party. In true Millbank style they decided to attack me in advance: they passed my Excalibur records to selected journalists. One told me it contained detailed records of private Labour meetings where I had dared to challenge Blair, as well as all my public activities.

Also, several Labour MPs told me how Mandelson had shown them their Excalibur printouts and threatened them with action if they stepped out of line.”

McSweeney’s entry to politics, then, was not as a vaguely respected local organiser but as an apparatchik of Peter Mandleson, who has subsequently lavished McSweeney with praise. The principle of using leaks and compromising information to attack political enemies is one that runs as a consistent thread throughout his career. His campaign to ‘tackle’ the BNP in Dagenham, in 2010, supposedly achieved on the back of ‘bins collections’, was done in connivance with ‘Hope Not Hate’, a “charity” with a deeply malign reputation for using sting operations to uncover the far right.

McSweeney’s greater political achievement came later, after a failed attempt to install Liz Kendall he founds a think tank which gives him a platform to influence Labour politics after the 2017 election defeat by giving direction to MPs who wanted to move beyond Jeremy Corbyn, ultimately by destroying the Left of the party. Anushka Arthur explains some of the methods that McSweeney used to achieve this aim: