In the ballad of Morgan McSweeney’s stolen phone, the latest verse is a surreal one.
Having taken the unusual step of publishing a transcript of the 999 call that Keir Starmer’s former Downing Street chief of staff made last October to report that his government-issued device had been snatched, the Metropolitan Police have now decided to comb through CCTV footage of the incident.
Thoughts and prayers to those attempting to narrow down which of the guys cycling on the pavement is the holder of McSweeney’s phone, which it is believed may contain messages relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US.
There will have been more than one mobile stolen in SW1 that night. But at least now they can check the right camera footage: in the transcript of the police call, Morgan says the incident took place on Belgrave Road in Westminster, which was misrecorded by the police call handler as Belgrave Street, miles away in east London.
In a way, it’s reassuring that even the prime minister’s chief of staff is subject to the same laws of gravity as the rest of us when it comes to phones being snatched… and the police doing their worst.
I have some skin in the game here. I too have had my phone stolen. It was snatched out of my hand while I was texting, by a big bloke on a Lime bike. Like McSweeney, I did not give chase – nor could I elicit any effective response from the Met.
When I was deputy cabinet secretary, part of my job was to ensure the proper keeping of records, including mobile calls made, emails and messages. In that respect, the theft of McSweeney’s phone oughtn’t to be hugely significant. The crime was (correctly) reported to Downing Street before the police were informed, and so should have been wiped within minutes. Anything on the phone relating to government business will ordinarily have been stored safely elsewhere.
But the theft of McSweeney’s phone does matter, because this everyday tale of low-level London street crime has instead become a haven for conspiracy theories and compounded mistrust in our political systems.
It is eight weeks since the Conservatives, aided by Keir Starmer’s own backbenchers, used the roguish parliamentary trick of a “humble address” to force the government to publish all the information it has about the appointment of Mandelson. Humble addresses shortcut the usual systems protecting the government from disclosing information it would rather keep private. In every other recent case, a humble address has resulted in documents being published within days or weeks. It’s not optional. That’s the point. This time, however, it will be months before the information is disclosed – if it ever is.
The first “tranche” of documents, produced earlier this month, contained industrial quantities of padding. Literally dozens of blank pages and standardised documents about HR processes.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the delay is in part because the government simply doesn’t hold the information it needs to comply with the humble address request. It is only recently that it has occurred to someone high up in Whitehall that they might need to ask people for messages on their personal phones, as well as on the standard-issue kit.
Well, yes. That much was obvious back in February. If a mobile phone belongs to the government and is used for the business of state, no records on it should be deleted. Periodically, the contents should be transferred to the relevant file. And if something important is on your personal phone, those messages, too, should be part of the record.
In the days after Mandelson was sacked last September, there was a cursory attempt to piece together the process of his appointment. The instinct to find out what went wrong was a good one – for all the reasons, including self-protection and even the possibility of learning from experience. But in performing these exercises, you do actually need to lift the drains, not just waft around a bit of Febreze and hope for the best.
This was a missed opportunity, a chance to assemble a file of the relevant messages, notes and documents about how the appointment had come to be made, as well as recollections: asking everyone involved for their perspective. All of this could, and should, have been done well before Morgan’s phone was stolen.
Worryingly, in the Mandelson papers that have been published so far, the voice of the prime minister is absent, as is that of his now former chief of staff. There is so very little written down when there should be emails, notes of conversations, an audit trail. This is why the disappearance of McSweeney’s phone is causing such an outcry. No 10 seems unable to offer reassurance, because the relevant information is… elsewhere.
This failure to write things down goes to the heart of the way in which any government functions. Government business should be recorded. It’s not laborious – it’s the work.
The knowledge that what you are doing, decisions you have taken and advice you have given, will one day be open to the scrutiny of others is such an important, always-on, invisible corrective to the behaviour of everyone involved in governing. I’ve seen my advice, emails and messages published in the cold light of day years later. We should want the people in positions of power to be concerned about what history will think of them.
Unfortunately, one of the lessons that Whitehall and Westminster took from the openness of the Covid inquiry was to turn on disappearing messages, to have fewer honest conversations, and to stop writing down the learning when something has gone wrong: essentially, to record less.
But the official record matters. The views and decisions of key players shouldn’t be in ghostly form: they should be in black and white. If that is the case, it really won’t make that much of a difference the next time someone has their phone snatched.
Helen MacNamara is a former deputy cabinet secretary and co-hosts The Independent’s politics podcast, In the Room, with 10 Downing Street’s ex-deputy chief of staff Cleo Watson. New episodes come out every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube
