McSweeney\u2019s deputies Jill Cuthbertson and Vidhya Alakeson will immediately step up as acting chiefs of staff, a senior U.K. official confirmed after Starmer emailed No. 10 Downing Street colleagues with the news Sunday night.<\/p>\n
Earlier Sunday, McSweeney said in a statement that the decision to appoint Mandelson was \u201cwrong\u201d and \u201cdamaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he took \u201cfull responsibility\u201d after personally advising Starmer to make the appointment. He added: \u201cIn public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient. In the circumstances, the only honourable course is to step aside.\u201d<\/p>\n
McSweeney has been a key aide to Starmer throughout his time as Labour Party leader. His work behind the scenes in the late 2010s, first at the Labour Together think tank and then for Starmer himself, helped rout the party\u2019s left flank and propel Starmer to the leadership and then Downing Street.<\/p>\n
However, McSweeney had long been under pressure to resign. This escalated after the U.S. Department of Justice published further emails showing the extent of the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein.<\/p>\n
Mandelson was appointed to the role in December 2024, but was sacked in September last year after further details of his relationship with Epstein were made public. Following the publication of further emails earlier this month, Mandelson resigned his Labour Party membership and place in the House of Lords.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McSweeney\u2019s deputies Jill Cuthbertson and Vidhya Alakeson will immediately step up as acting chiefs of staff, a senior…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,420,50,424,56,54,158,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-415348","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-keir-starmer","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-peter-mandelson","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}