Tom Watson is advising Morgan McSweeney to hire lawyers before facing Parliament. And the connections go deep. Watson sits on Palantir’s advisory board. Palantir holds a Β£240 million government contract arranged through Peter Mandelson. McSweeney pushed through Mandelson’s appointment.
Closing Ranks: How the Blairite Network Is Managing the Mandelson Scandal
If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. This was the logic that New Labour applied to CCTV cameras on every street corner, to the accumulation of your data by state and corporate bodies alike, to the surveillance architecture it built and bequeathed to every government that followed. It was never convincing as a principle of civil liberty. It is considerably more interesting, now, as a measure of the men who built that architecture.
Tom Watson, elevated to the Lords as Lord Watson, a peerage being the customary reward in Labour circles for services to internal warfare, and once described by Len McCluskey as a man who lives in “a world of skulduggery,” is now reportedly advising Morgan McSweeney to hire lawyers before he faces the Foreign Affairs Committee. McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, is summoned to give evidence next Tuesday over his role in pushing through Peter Mandelson’s security clearance against official advice.
Let that sit for a moment. The man advising the alleged guardian of due process to launder that process through lawyers is himself sitting on the public services advisory board of Palantir Technologies, while simultaneously chairing the advisory council of Lodestone Communications, the lobbying firm Palantir hired in 2024. Palantir is the CIA-seeded surveillance corporation whose Β£240 million contract with the British state was awarded without competitive tender, arranged through a visit to its Washington offices brokered by Mandelson himself. Mandelson’s own lobbying firm, Global Counsel, listed Palantir as a client throughout this period.
This is not a scandal with peripheral characters. Every figure in this story is connected to every other by the same commercial, political, and factional interests. Understanding that connection is the only way to understand what is actually at stake when Watson picks up the phone to McSweeney.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF MUTUAL PROTECTION
John McDonnell was characteristically direct on X this week. “The gall of it,” he wrote. “Watson, one of Mandelson’s closest old mates, is trying to turn McSweeney into a victim and undermine Emily Thornberry. Watch out for the old Blairites’ next step, which will be to try to rehabilitate Mandelson himself. Shameful and shameless.”
McDonnell is right about the immediate mechanism, whatever one makes of his prediction about Mandelson. The Watson intervention is not merely a friend offering counsel. It is the opening move in a rearguard action by a faction whose first objective is to limit what the committee can establish about those still in office. The goal is not truth. It is narrative management: transform McSweeney from the man who allegedly shouted “just fucking approve it” down the phone at senior civil servants into a private citizen being hounded by a partisan parliamentary committee.
This requires lawyers. It also requires a man of Watson’s specific profile to make the argument publicly. Not because Watson has any particular expertise in parliamentary procedure, but because he has spent thirty years building the kind of relationships that allow a message to travel without a paper trail. He knows how Mandelson’s world works because he has always been part of it. That is precisely why his intervention tells you more than almost anything that has emerged from this scandal to date.
Watson is advising the man who pushed through the appointment of the man who arranged the Palantir meeting. This is a network protecting its shared commercial and political interests through the management of information, the deployment of lawyers, and the careful construction of victimhood narratives.
WHAT LABOUR TOGETHER ACTUALLY WAS
To understand why McSweeney requires legal protection, it helps to understand what he actually built. Labour Together is described in the official record as a think tank. It was, in practice, a covert political operation constructed specifically to take the Labour Party back from its membership and return it to the donor class that Corbyn had alarmed.
Its leading architect was Morgan McSweeney. Between 2017 and 2020, while he was its director, Labour Together failed to declare over Β£740,000 in political donations, in direct breach of electoral law. The Electoral Commission had written to Labour Together in December 2017, specifically confirming it was a “members association” required to declare donations promptly. McSweeney asserted in a January 2019 parliamentary meeting that declarations were being made fully and correctly. They were not. The Electoral Commission ultimately fined the organisation Β£14,250 for more than twenty separate offences.
These donations were not small contributions from party enthusiasts. They were large sums from millionaire businessmen who had fled Labour under Corbyn and who wanted to fund, covertly, the mechanism that would bring him down. Publicly, Labour Together was presented as a grassroots cross-factional initiative to unite the party. Privately, as investigative journalists would later establish, McSweeney was constructing a highly organised political operation in the shadows. Had the money been declared at the time, Labour members might have seen that the kumbaya project was being bankrolled by exactly the kind of big money that had fled under Corbyn, funding the operation that would return power to those donors.
When journalists began to piece this together, Labour Together did not engage with the scrutiny. It hired APCO Worldwide, a crisis communications firm, and paid it at least Β£30,000 to investigate the journalists who were investigating it. Among those targeted were Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke of The Sunday Times, and Paul Holden, the anti-corruption investigator whose book “The Fraud” remains the definitive account of this operation. Sources close to McSweeney confirmed he was aware of the APCO commission, though did not dispute that he had not personally made the decision to hire them. That decision was taken by Josh Simons, now a minister in Starmer’s government.
An organisation that responds to scrutiny by hiring private investigators to profile journalists has, by its own conduct, answered the question of whether it had anything to fear from transparency. It was afraid of precisely the truth that has since emerged: that the dark money that brought Starmer, and McSweeney, to power was being systematically concealed from the party membership it purported to represent.
THE VETTING SCANDAL AS THE CROWNING CHAPTER
The Mandelson appointment is not a separate scandal attached to Labour Together. It is the same scandal’s crowning chapter, written in the same hand.
McSweeney was Mandelson’s protΓ©gΓ©. The two men reportedly spoke every other day in the run-up to the 2024 general election to keep Labour policy on track. When Mandelson was proposed as ambassador to Washington, McSweeney was his strongest internal advocate. When UK Security Vetting recommended against granting Mandelson high-level clearance in January 2025, the recommendation was overridden. When Sir Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, reportedly warned that the appointment was being “weirdly rushed,” McSweeney told him the issues had been “addressed” and that he was “satisfied.”
What we know from the testimony of Sir Olly Robbins before the Foreign Affairs Committee is that there was, in his words, “a very, very strong expectation” in Downing Street that Mandelson needed to be in post in Washington as quickly as possible, and “a generally dismissive attitude” in No. 10 towards the security vetting process itself. McSweeney allegedly communicated the instruction to approve the appointment in rather blunter terms than those.
Starmer now says he was never told of the failed vetting and sacked Robbins for the lapse. But Starmer announced the appointment publicly before the vetting was even complete. He told the Commons that “full due process” had been followed. Robbins’ testimony makes that claim untenable. When posh boys are in trouble, it has always been the servants who are sacked.
In February: full responsibility. In Kyiv, four days before the committee sits, McSweeney says ‘that’s all I can take responsibility for, the role that I played.’ The narrowing is precise. It is the language of a man who has read his legal advice.
THE PALANTIR THREAD
Here is where Tom Watson’s advisory role at Palantir ceases to be a footnote and becomes the structural centre of this story.
Mandelson, during his tenure as ambassador, led Keir Starmer on a visit to Palantir’s Washington offices. No official record of this meeting was generated. The Foreign Office holds no emails confirming the arrangements. Palantir was, at the time, an active client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel. Seven months after Palantir’s UK chief was appointed to the Ministry of Defence’s Industrial Joint Council, and four months after Starmer’s Washington visit, the MoD announced a strategic partnership with Palantir worth Β£240 million, awarded without competitive tender. Downing Street has refused to say whether Starmer knew Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s firm at the time.
Tom Watson sits on Palantir’s public services advisory board. He chairs the advisory council of Lodestone Communications, the lobbying firm Palantir hired in 2024. Nicola Blackwood, a former chair of the Commons science and technology select committee whose remit included scrutinising Palantir, also consulted for the company through Mandelson’s Global Counsel. More than thirty senior UK officials have, across this period, passed through what investigators have called a Palantir revolving door.
Watson is now advising the man who pushed through the appointment of the man who arranged the meeting that preceded the contract. The legal advice he is said to be offering McSweeney is offered by a man whose income depends, at least in part, on the same corporation whose government contracts run through the centre of this scandal. This is not coincidence. This is a network operating as networks do, protecting shared interests through the management of information, the deployment of professional cover, and the careful choreography of what is said, when, and to whom.
THE REARGUARD ACTION
What the Watson intervention actually serves is something more immediate. The goal is not to rescue Mandelson. It is to limit what the Foreign Affairs Committee can establish about those who remain in office, whose careers rest on the question of how much they knew and when they knew it. David Lammy was Foreign Secretary when the appointment was signed off, and declared Mandelson “the right man for the job.” Wes Streeting has already been forced to delete photographs of himself fawning over “the legend Lord Mandelson.” The cabinet ministers whose election campaigns were financed by Labour Together carry the same fingerprints. Mandelson is beyond rescue. But the network that elevated him is not. That is what Watson is protecting, and that is what the committee must understand when it evaluates the managed evidence it is about to receive.
The management of that evidence began, in public, on Thursday, when McSweeney spoke at the Kyiv Security Forum. The choice of venue was not incidental. While Parliament prepares to question him about whether he pressured senior civil servants into overriding a formal security recommendation, McSweeney presented himself to an international audience as a figure of foreign policy seriousness, an architect of electoral strategy now engaged with the wider world. It is the image of a statesman, not an apparatchik with questions to answer.
What he said in Kyiv was more revealing still. Asked about reports of his behaviour in pressuring civil servants over Mandelson’s vetting, he replied: “I don’t recognise that description of me.” This is not a denial of facts. It is a denial of characterisation, which is precisely what legal preparation teaches you to offer instead. You do not engage the evidence; you dispute the portrait. You tell the camera you find it “strange reading about a character with the same name as mine sometimes”, and you allow the absurdity of the framing to do the work that a direct denial cannot safely do.
He added that he did not want to “in any way disrespect” the committee’s process. This is lawyerly circumspection dressed as deference. The committee’s authority is being deployed as his reason for not answering questions publicly, while simultaneously the public characterisation of those questions is being pre-emptively challenged. The committee, when it sits on Tuesday, should be aware that it is receiving a witness who has been preparing his answers since at least Thursday morning, at an international security conference, with legal counsel behind him and Tom Watson’s phone number in his pocket.
The Foreign Affairs Committee must not be taken in by this choreography. Emily Thornberry and her colleagues were sent to Parliament to represent the public interest, not to provide a platform for the management of liability. The power to take sworn evidence exists. If there is any moment in recent British political history that demands its use, it is this one.
FULL RESPONSIBILITY, NARROWLY DEFINED
Morgan McSweeney resigned in February saying he took “full responsibility” for advising the Prime Minister to appoint a man whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein were described in Cabinet Office reports as a “general reputational risk.” He received what was widely reported as a warm, even grateful, farewell from Starmer.
By Thursday, at the Kyiv Security Forum, that definition of responsibility had quietly contracted. “That’s all I can take responsibility for,” he told the BBC’s Mark Lobel, “the role that I played.” Compare those two statements with the care they deserve. In February: full responsibility. In Kyiv, two months later, with a parliamentary committee four days away: that is all I can take responsibility for. The narrowing is precise and deliberate. It is the language of a man who has read his legal advice and understood that “full responsibility” means something different in a resignation statement than it does under parliamentary questioning.
“Full responsibility,” in British political culture, has become a formula for the avoidance of consequences rather than their acceptance. You say the words. You exit stage left on favourable terms. You resurface at a foreign policy conference in Kyiv, present yourself as an international statesman, tell the cameras you don’t recognise the character being described, and then you face the committee having had lawyers prepare your answers and Tom Watson working the phones. It is an entirely rational response to the situation McSweeney finds himself in. It is also, in itself, the clearest possible answer to the question of whether the public interest was served.
THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE MUST BE INVESTIGATED
This publication has argued consistently that the Mandelson scandal cannot be examined in isolation. The vetting failure, the Labour Together dark money, the Palantir contracts, and now the Watson intervention are not separate stories. They are one story, told in chapters, about a network of interconnected relationships between political operatives, commercial interests, and the British state that has operated, for the most part, without adequate democratic scrutiny. And the truth is this: we are not at the end of that story, we are only just reaching the part they hoped youβd never read.
The questions that remain unanswered are not peripheral. Who in the Foreign Office overruled the security vetting decision, and under whose instruction? Why was no official record generated of Starmer’s visit to Palantir’s Washington offices? Did Starmer know that Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm before the Β£240 million contract was awarded? What is the full scope of Labour Together’s undeclared funding, and why has the Electoral Commission resisted publishing the details of its investigation? And why is a man with a paid advisory role at Palantir offering counsel to a man at the centre of a scandal in which Palantir’s interests are directly implicated?
McSweeney and Labour Together, the Irishman and the British Prime Minister, Mandelson’s creature and Mandelson’s project: these are not separate threads. They are the same rope, and it is fraying. The committee must pull.
They told us the surveillance state had nothing to fear from those with nothing to hide. Now the men who built it are hiding behind lawyers. The irony would be richer if it were not so costly.
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