In This Episode
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet circles the wagons as he survives another hellish week in office. One that saw the loss of his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and his director of communications, Tim Allan, as the scandal over Peter Mandelson’s ties to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein rages on.
Nish and Coco are joined by Paul Holden, the “unofficial biographer” of Morgan McSweeney, to discuss his key role in the rise of Keir Starmer to power and his close relationship with Mandelson. Plus – reports that Labour Together hired a PR firm to investigate Paul and others looking into its funding under McSweeney.
Also, comedian Stuart Goldsmith on the serious business of being funny about climate change and why it goes all the way to the top of British intelligence.
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WISE
GUESTS
Paul Holden, Investigative Journalist and author of The Fraud
Stuart Goldsmith, Climate Comedian
USEFUL LINKS
The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy
https://orbooks.com/catalog/the-fraud/
Stuart Goldsmith
CREDITS
Sky News / YouTube
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TRANSCRIPT
Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK, I’m Nish Kumar.
Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan.
Nish Kumar The Epstein files are packed full of dodgy deals, leaked information and sexual abuse. So why is Keir Starmer, who actually isn’t in the files, the person who seems to be taking the biggest hit?
Coco Khan He’s either very unlucky or very bad at politics. We consider the PM’s latest nightmare week with the investigative journalist, Paul Holden. He’s become an unofficial biographer of Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
Nish Kumar Plus, comedian Stuart Goldsmith is here to try and make us laugh about serious things. Honestly, who would try that? The Epstein Files continues to have more of an impact in the United Kingdom than in America. This week it nearly brought down our Prime Minister, who isn’t actually even mentioned in the files. Keir Starmer started, I don’t know what number we’re at, number 78 of his weeks from hell. He lost his Chief of Staff and Head of Communications in less than 24 hours.
Coco Khan And then the leader of Scottish Labour, Anna Sauer, got his pointiest of political knives out and said it was time for the PM to go. It really was touch and go for Starmer on Monday. Sky News was streaming a live shot of the front door of number 10, in case he tried to slip out with his sunglasses on or something.
Nish Kumar But his cabinet and Angela Rayner came through with a flurry of supportive tweets and messages that really had the ring of, do not just copy and paste, please turn into your own words. He’s managed to hang on at the time of recording on the 11th of February, at this moment he remains in post.
Coco Khan First, in a meeting with Labour MPs, Downing Street released some of the Prime Minister’s comments. So that included, I’m not prepared to walk away from my mandate or my responsibility or to plunge us into chaos as others have done. So it just, you know, all sounds very Prime Ministerial. Yesterday morning, he met with his cabinet colleagues and then faced some members of the public. There was an appearance at a cost of living event. Yeah, here’s a clip of him just really trying to get that back on track.
Clip It’s been a busy week and therefore it’s very nice to be here with you and whatever’s going in in the turmoil of politics, let’s be quite a lot of that, going on in the last few days, I know that for you and for millions of people what matters most is the cost of living.
Nish Kumar It’s quite weird to talk about the turmoil of politics like it’s something that’s sort of happening to him.
Coco Khan Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nish Kumar But look, let’s briefly summarize this latest chaotic week that he’s referring to. So Morgan McSweeney took the hit for the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as our ambassador to the United States of America. He stood down on Sunday in his resignation letter. He said, I advise the prime minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice. The only honorable course is to set aside.
Coco Khan Yes. So there was also the director of communications, Tim Allen, you would be forgiven if like me, you thought of home improvement, but it is a different person. He went on Monday and his statement said, I have decided to stand down to allow a new number 10 team to be built. So in his place, there were two appointments, so acting co-chiefs, Jill Cuthbertson and Vidya Elexan. To women, actually, which all feels a bit like the glasscliffs. Do you know that idea that women are only appointed to senior roles when it’s basically a disaster and certain death?
Nish Kumar And then, another hit for Starmer, his decision to send his former communications chief, Matthew Doyle, to the Lords, despite knowing that he had campaigned for a counselor charged with sex offenses.
Coco Khan The story of Doyle’s association with Sean Morton, who had been charged with possession of indecent images of children, was broken by The Times in late December, but Starmer only removed the whip on Tuesday after an investigation was launched by the Labour Party.
Nish Kumar Number 10 say that Stumble wasn’t aware about the connection and they’ve not stripped Doyle’s peerage as we record on Wednesday, they’re pointing to an ongoing investigation. It does feel like their vetting process is, are you left wing? Yeah. And if you answer yes, then you’re gone. And even if you want to know, but I am an enormous pedophile that seemed to be like, listen, as long as you’ve ticked yes, we’ll just move you through. I’m not left-wing, but I have consorted with an international sex tra- hey, hey, you said no, wave them in. The FTE had broken a story about a year before the election that said that Mandelton continued a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein even after he’d been jailed for sex trafficking, sex offenses. So the idea that Starmer didn’t know about any of this is really, really hard to swallow. And he has essentially spent the last couple of weeks, while Morgan McSweeney has taken responsibility for this. Essentially sounding like the worst, dumbest, traitors contestant. Like he spent the whole time going, I had no reason not to believe him. I’m 100% faithful. I assumed he was a hundred percent faithful. Like there’s no, how, why would this person who only had nothing to gain other than loads to gain benefit from lying to me? I’m a lawyer so you can trust my judgment. Like that scene, it really is like, it’s honestly like a deleted talking head. If he does get ousted from office, he should have to sit and explain his behavior to Ed Gamble. On the Traitors After Show podcast, they should sack off all the political interviews and just get Ed Gamble to interview him. Because I know Ed, I lived with Ed. So when Ed is saying to people on the traitors, you played a really good game, I can see in his eyes, you’re fucking dumb as hell, man. I will know when Ed’s talking to Starmer about how he’s fucked it, that Ed will be looking in his eye and going, you’ve been absolutely like that.
Coco Khan I actually really do like that idea, but I’m afraid it might actually rehabilitate his image. Starmer I’m talking about. Not Gamble. So I don’t know how comfortable I feel about that, I do just want to read out some of these polling information. So Keir Starmer, I think we all know that he’s very unpopular, but did you know that it’s to the effect of three quarters of voters view him unfavorably. One Labour front venture told Politico he had bought time, but it is still terminal
Nish Kumar Part of the reason maybe that he’s surviving is because there is not an obvious challenger.
Coco Khan No there isn’t.
Nish Kumar Especially now that they’ve blocked Andy Burnham from standing as an MP. So Wes Streeting was a name that has been sort of bandied around as a future prime minister for a few years now. Wes Streating has tried to distance himself from Peter Mandelson by, I mean, I guess spilling the tea. Like he has released all of his WhatsApp messages. He’s insisted that he knew him well. Others have described it as a friendship. He wrote in The Guardian and said that he wanted to respond to a weekend of smear and innuendo and implications that he had things to hide. In the messages, he wrote off his own re-election chances. He accused the government of not having a growth strategy. When asked for his thoughts on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he admitted, Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes. Now, if you believed that Israel was committing warcrimes and you were at the heart of the British government. Surely you have some moral responsibility to say that publicly and not in a private conversation on WhatsApp. That is absolutely astonishing.
Coco Khan Yeah, it’s astonishing, that’s such a good word, that he would release these messages thinking that it would show the public what a great guy is and to get ahead of any essential people finding out that he was in a text exchange. Yeah, I just find it absolutely shocking and such a misfire.
Nish Kumar He might have scuppered his leadership chances that there’s nobody else that’s really been able to stick their neck on the line. So Angela Rainer was actually had to do some firefighting of her own, because according to the Guardian, a website, angelaforleader.co.uk briefly went live in January. Now she’s claimed that it was a false flag operation. The Guardian is reporting that she’d been planning a leadership bid with private polling and fundraising. Allies close to her say she has no intention of moving against Tom and she has recently offered to help HMRC speed up its investigation into her tax affairs. My belief this week has been that if Angela Rayner had not been caught up in this stamp duty tax scandal where she sort of used to trust, allegedly to avoid paying stamp duty tax on a property she was buying, my feeling is without that she’d be prime minister right now.
Coco Khan There is a part of me that cannot believe that as we are now going to discuss the potential leadership candidates, that there’s only one woman whose name that we are actually properly mentioning. Sure. Cause underlying all of this, despite the way that this Epstein-Files has been covered, you know, in terms of the political machinations, I mean, it’s about crimes against women and girls. And look, I have my reservations about, you know, identity politics and the sort of broad brushstrokes that it applies. BUT it’s not that much of a logical leap to think maybe the Labour Party should have a woman leader. Like maybe that would be a good idea, actually, given everything that’s gone on. And the fact that they haven’t until now really tells you something about the problems within the party of letting women leaders arise. The candidate that is the favorite is Ed Miliband. But he is very clear to say that he doesn’t actually want to do it. So here he is talking to Sky News’ Sophie Ridge.
Clip It sounds a little bit like this is your own leadership pitch? Absolute, absolute baloney. Are you interested at all? Nope. I’ve said this before. No, I know. No, baloney, honestly. So are you interested in the leadership? No, no, I’m interested in supporting Keir Starmer. Can you rule out running for the leadership. I’m not running for leadership, no. Can you roll out running? Yeah, I am not running. I know you’re not running right now, but can you rule running for it? Yes, yes, I will not run.
Coco Khan Yeah. He’s quite clear about it. Having said that though, Nish, we spoke to Andy Burnham on this podcast, probably over a year ago now, and he was like, no, no I’m not interested in that, no no no, I’m not interested. I don’t know how much I buy any of this to be completely honest.
Nish Kumar Listen, we should just say, ever since we just reviewed that clip of Keir Starmer talking about how I know that you’re interested in cost of living and saying to people that I know this is the number one issue for you, that is what we should be talking about. We should not be talking Westminster psychodrama, but in this case, the responsibility lies with you, Keir Starmer. The reason that we are talking about this is not some you know, chattering classes, Westminster bubble. Story. It isn’t because people are being sort of distracted or anything. The prime minister of this country, under advice from his chief advisor, appointed as our ambassador to the United States of America, a man who was known to be a friend of a person who’d been convicted for sex crimes. The whole premise of your government was that it was supposed to move us on to having important conversations and not. Get mired in the weeds of psychodrama about who’s going to run the country and who’s the next prime minister. We had enough of that with the Conservative Party for 14 years, 15 years. We’re done with it. We don’t want it anymore. But this is not something we are doing to you. You have done this to us, Kirsten. This is entirely your fault. We should be talking about employment prospects for young people in this country. We should be talking how we’re going to help the NHS and how we are going to address massive income inequality that exists in this county. But we’re not talking about that and we’re I’m not talking about it. Because of you and the things that you have done. So don’t try and pass this off or pass the responsibility off or maintain that this is some sort of Westminster bubble story, it’s not, it is child sex crimes. The core of this story is the abuse of women and girls.
Coco Khan I keep returning to this thought about how much disdain do you have for the public that you think we don’t care about this? How base or low do you think that we are? We don’t about Peter Feeney, we do care. Nonetheless, given everything we’ve said, it probably explains this fairly large news, which is that Unite, the union, is speeding up a possible split with Labour. They’re launching a consultation about disaffiliation. And that’s according to Sam Coates of Sky News. With a decision expected at their conference later this year. So Unite are a really major donor for Labour, that’s £1.6 million they gave in 2025. But they’re asking the question that we are all asking, which is what is the point of Labour if it doesn’t deliver for workers?
Nish Kumar We should also say, just in terms of important stories, a group of MPs have written to the government urging ministers to increase and protect SEND spending. Coco, you had a great discussion with parents and campaigners about this on the podcast from a couple of weeks ago on the 29th of January. It’s a great conversation, so I really urge people to go back and check it out. To move back to the Epstein affair, everybody’s second favorite former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, might have hoped that the worst was past for him. However, new documents apparently show that he shared confidential information with Epstein. When he was a trade envoy in the early 2010s.
Coco Khan A job that we are still baffled he ever held. Andrew has always denied wrongdoing, but his brother King Charles has released a statement saying he stands ready to support the police in their investigation.
Nish Kumar The Andrew story is just sort of, it has so many facets to it.
Coco Khan Mm.
Nish Kumar And I think there is a growing sense of disquiet in the public about the protection that’s been offered to him by the institution of the monarchy.
Coco Khan Yeah, I mean, I wanted to actually mention this new story to you that King Charles got heckled. I know you know a lot about heckling, being a comedian. Of course I do. And the nature of-
Nish Kumar And to be fair to me a bad one. I know plenty about being gay.
Coco Khan And the heckle was, it was an unidentified man heckled the king when he was on a walkabout and said, Charles, how long have you known about Andrew and Epstein? Have you been protecting Andrew from prosecution? How’s that for a heckle?
Nish Kumar That’s a too long a heckle. Got to be snappy. Your brother’s a nonce. Sorry, for legal reasons. Is your brother a nonce? It’s got to be pithy.
Coco Khan If you’re listening unidentified man, there’s some tips for you there.
Nish Kumar Coming up, investigative journalist Paul Holden gives a deep dive into Morgan McSweeney and his relationship with Peter Mandelson.
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Coco Khan So with Morgan McSweeney gone, how will this shake things up in the Labour Party? Here to shed some light is investigative journalist Paul Holden, who’s become a, I guess you’re a kind of unofficial biographer of McSweeney. His book, The Fraud, dramatically exposed his influence on British politics and claimed that undisclosed donations and dirty tricks delivered starmer to power. Paul, welcome to Pod Save the UK.
Paul Holden Thanks for having me.
Nish Kumar How does it feel to be described as Morgan McSweeney’s unofficial biographer?
Paul Holden I think I’m living in a nightmare.
Nish Kumar So Paul, he’s resigned and he’s taken full responsibility for advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson. Can you give us a kind of potted history of McSweeney and how he ends up being the kind of chief strategist credited with delivering the Labour relation victory?
Paul Holden So Morgan McSweeney is this extremely powerful and influential figure in the last decade of Labour Party politics. He joins the Labour Party sort of early 2000s. One of his first jobs, incidentally, is working alongside Peter Mandelson. One of the first things he did at the Labour party was input data into the Excalibur computer system, which Mandelson maintained, which basically had a compromise on opponents and internal opponents as well. And that was sort of McSweeney’s first foray into Labour party politics. But thereafter, he goes to local politics and he works very closely alongside a guy called Steve Reid, who’s now the cabinet secretary for housing. And is probably Morgan McSweeney’s longest and closest political ally besides Vishabana Mahmud.
Nish Kumar And we’ve seen Steve Reid, you know, at the Labour Party Conference, distributing red hats and talking about construction and parroting the build baby build Trump catchphrase. Indeed. And we seen Shabana Mahmood, you now, defend her draconian immigration reforms by claiming that as a person of South Asian descent, and the Home Secretary, she has essentially carte blanche to bring in whatever immigration reforms she feels that that’s my perception of what she was saying.
Paul Holden Yes, and I think that’s accurate. Their positioning in that makes a lot of sense when you understand their location within what I call the sort of the McSweeney or Labour Together project. So sort of, the animating feature of their politics is that they just absolutely despise the left. Patrick McGuire and Gabriel Poggin, in their other unofficial biography of Morgan McSweeney, say that Morgan McSweeney finds left-wing politics evil, like literally evil.
Coco Khan Have you considered the conservative part? It’s just an idea, isn’t it?
Paul Holden I’ve spoken to a number of people who have worked with Morgan McSweeney recently, he’s like, we just do not understand why this man is not in reform, they just do not get it. McSweeney is part of this very, very small, sort of right-wing, anti-welfareist, blue-labourish tendency within the Labour Party that really I think is actually quite unpopular with the general public, but is deeply unpopular with a lot of Labour voters and Labour members. But for a lot of people who are part of his faction, they expected— that Jeremy Corbyn was gonna fail on his own terms. That in a sense that when the electorate first came across Jeremy Cornyn, they’d be so repulsed by his left-wing politics, by social democracy, by his own baggage, as they saw it, that the electorates would reject him. And of course, 2017 shows the opposite to be true. They understand at that moment, oh, actually, everything we’ve done to try to dislodge this left-wings political tendency has failed. We’re gonna have to do something else to dislodger. And almost immediately after the election, Morgan McSweeney goes to go work for this organization called Labour Together. Now, at the time, Labour Together was this very anodyne, quite boring seeming think tank. And the idea behind Labour Together initially was quite noble. It was this idea that the Labour Party, regardless of whether you like Jeremy Corbyn or not, is not gonna win power if it splits. Which is actually the perfect cover for what Morgan McSweeney wants to do. So, in July 2017, Morgan McSweeney… Distributes the strategy document with a whole bunch of Labourers together inside, including Steve Reid. And it involves two things. One they will work covertly to undermine the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. And then in the vacuum that that’s created as a result of his defeat, they will choose the successor, which is eventually Keir Starmer. They don’t know it’s going to be Keir Starmer then, but they eventually choose Keir Starmer in July 2019. Now the thing that’s really striking about that document, one of the things that’s listed as a threat, is a Labour government. This is astonishing, this is really quite profound, right? Because what you have is you have these deep Labour right insiders, including a sitting cabinet minister, who is saying that the biggest threat to their political project is if the Labour Party wins the next general election. And I think it’s fair to draw the inference from that, that in their mind, their task was to prevent that from happening, which is what they do. And they go about doing so, they go by running all these very problematic secret projects to achieve it. Morgan McSweeney hooks up with Kirsten Dahmer in July 2019. And what they deliver is this incredibly sophisticated, perfectly executed fraud.
Nish Kumar The fraud that you’re referring to, also it contains elements of financial fraud as well within it, right? So you collaborated with the Sunday Times in 2023 on an article that reported that Labour Together, when it was run by McSweeney, failed to declare donations worth more than £730,000 between 2017 and 2022, the Electoral Commission. On Friday, as we’re talking at the moment, it’s emerged that Labour together paid a of them. £30,000 to investigate you and several journalists that had been looking into its funding. Were you surprised when you found this out?
Paul Holden Yes, and not a little bit terrified. Yeah, sure. Between December 2017 and April 2020, Morgan McSweeney is the company secretary of Labour Together. They’ve taken about £850,000 in donations in their time, of which £730,000 aren’t declared to the Electoral Commission. Now, the law is extremely clear. Labour Together is what they call a members’ association under electoral law. And any donation worth more than £7,500 has to be declared to the Electoral Commission. The result of not declaring the money is that nobody knew for two and a half years that this very boring seeming think tank was actually using close to £1 million to transform our politics. Now, they were found guilty by the Eleutral Commission of violating electoral law. They didn’t report donations. That is plainly illegal. The Electoral commission gave them effectively what to slap on the wrist and gave them a £14,500 fine and did nothing more, which I think is an outrage. Yeah. And… The excuse or the explanation that Labour Together gives at the time is that this was just administrative oversight. Effectively, they forgot. And I came across documents which then fed into the Sunday Times story, which made me think, well, maybe that story doesn’t entirely stack up. So the evidence that I discovered is pretty straightforward. I got an FOI to the Electric Commission, Freedom of Information Request Electric Commission. What it shows is that in November 2017, Morgan McSweeney called the Electric commission and said, look, I don’t want to report donations. We’re not publicly campaigning. Please can you advise? And the Electoral Commission writes back to him and says, no, you are a member’s association. You have to report to a nation. This is how you do it. And they have this extensive correspondence, but the really damning document, the absolutely killer document for me, is this email between a guy called Gerald Chumash and Morgan McSweeney. Gerald Chimash is a solicitor, very closely connected to the Labour Party. He’s now Lord Gerald Chomash because he was put into the House of Lords by Keir Starmer. And he’s advising Labour together how to manage this investigation by the Electorate Commission. And it’s a really interesting damning document where… It seems on its surface that they are discussing internally within Labour Together whether they should tell the full truth to the Electoral Commission, whether they should be candid in their responses, right? Which is really pretty damning stuff. And it’s the basis on which I think the Electorate Commission needs to reopen this investigation. Now, this is what I think is the background to being targeted. What I do know, and what Peter Gagin’s incredible substack Democracy for Sale, and obviously Peter Gagan is channelist. He’s He’s really dug into the story and found stuff that I didn’t even know about. And one of the things that was done, which is this extraordinary, extraordinary story, is that Labour together reported me to security services. They wrote to what’s called the National Cybercrime Security Institute. We said, we think that this journalist, Paul Holden, is the recipient of Russian or Chinese state-sponsored hacks. Seriously, there’s like zero truth to the allegation whatsoever. So John McDonald has called for an inquiry. It made me furious this idea that these people could be so reckless as to just wield this allegation willy-nilly with such potentially profound impacts on people’s lives. But more than that, I think the story needed to be out there. The story needed out there before the election. People needed to know what the nature of this political project was. And I think that’s one of the issues that we really face now is this deep sense of confusion that people have about why is this Labour government like this? Why is it prescribing Palestine action? Why is being so horrific to asylum seekers and migrants? Why did it cut the winter field allowance? It all actually makes a huge amount of sense if you understand its political origins. It makes a big amount of since you understand where it actually comes from, what it actually is.
Coco Khan I’m going to try and summarize Morgan McSweeney. He’s a young man. Like many of us when we were young, he had a data entry job.
Nish Kumar Hahaha
Coco Khan I did mine for a recruitment consultant. He did his for the Prince of Darkness. From there, he kind of, I still don’t fully understand why he’s interested in the Labour Party. I don’t know if it’s just like a sort of desire to be part of power and he’s just looking at like, well, inevitably the Conservatives will lose it. So if I’m at the right place, right time, I don’t really know.
Paul Holden Hm.
Coco Khan Well, let’s come back to that. He ingratiates himself with the Labour Party. He finds his blue Labour faction. They’re all united by this hatred of the left and the grip of socialism or social democracy in the Labour party. And they work out that the thing that’s going to be terrible for them is if a Jeremy Corbyn or adjacent soft left government actually gets the power and it’s popular with the people, it will never work. So they seek to ensure that by the time Labour is going to election, a blue Labour mindset at the top and they work on doing this funded through money that they don’t disclose and that is the fraud. There’s the bit that I am not clear is how they landed on Starmer and does Starmer know about this blue Labour project that he’s being funded or is he just a useful idiot to use that phrase?
Paul Holden Well, so it’s not clear that he would have known, for example, that they weren’t reporting their money at the time. I mean, I think that Starman knew 100% that his pitch to the membership wasn’t going to be what he delivered in power, absolutely. No doubt about that. And we know that not just out of supposition and because we can see what he does afterwards, but because people in his membership team are telling people, they’re telling journalists behind the scenes, people under value, how left-wing. He presented himself in that election. He represented himself as a radical, eco-socialist and inheritor of the Korbanite tradition. And part of the deep despair the public finds itself in is that being promising is different to the Tories. After 14 years of brutal austerity, we have something that looks almost exactly like the Tories.
Nish Kumar I understand the political trajectory of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. I understand that the evolution of people who joined the Labour Party in the 1980s see them get beat repeatedly through, you know, the foot leadership, through the Kinnock leadership. And then, you now, like with Bill Clinton with the Democrats in the States, adapt this version of Third Wave. Democracy, right? But what I don’t understand is, what is the political trajectory of Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reid and Shabana Mahmood if their uniting principle is hating the left? Because as much as Blair and Brown had antipathy towards the left wing of the Labour party because they felt that it made them unelectable, in government they showed evidence of wanting to improve the lives of working class people in this country, right.
Coco Khan Also, and I would follow up with that because I’m also quite confused, would it be reasonable to say, well, now that McSweeney’s gone, that hydra’s had its head cut off. That’s a bad example. Doesn’t the hydra head come back? It’s a great back sack. Well, it might be a perfect example.
Paul Holden That would be the exact perfect example. There’s two enormous questions that I’ll try to deal with very quickly. Like now you have 55 words, 30 seconds, you can only hear it. We’d love to keep it up to the ground. So I think this idea that they are sort of deep blue Labour ideological adherences is a slight red herring. I’m not convinced that McSweeney and the people around him have a coherent ideology, actually. I think they have a inherent political methodology and that’s something quite different. And the political methodology is actually very simple, it’s actually quite juvenile. This concept of shadowing. So what McSweeney does is he identifies whatever political contest he’s facing. He identifies, okay, so this is the opponent. I’m going to copy them as closely as possible. Maybe I’ll flank them to make sure they cannot have any space to develop a coherent set of differences between my candidate and the candidate we’re standing against. And this was openly briefed, right, in 2022, 2023. So how do you defeat Farage using a McSweeney Act methodology, you put his longest. Colleagues, his longest allies, Shibana Mahmud as Home Secretary, and you start off flanking reform and the Tories to the right on immigration.
Nish Kumar So then I think you answered Coco’s question in the answer to that question, which is removing McSweeney does not in any way defang Labour together or the blue Labour movement because they’re already…
Paul Holden They briefing at the time, what always sticks with me, this phrase they use, is that we are remaking the DNA of the Labour Party, and they do. Fundamentally they do, and every level of the Labour Party, McSweeney’s allies, take over the bureaucracy. They then, using the bureaucracy, purge any sort of councilors who are not loyal, who are potentially biddable term andersonian politics, then they choose their Labour Party MPs, right? So you know… Very substantial part of the current Labour Party intake is drawn from this political project or backed by it. So you have this political party that really has been transformed by them. I feel quite disappointed in the Labour Party. But I’m also looking at the Labour Party thinking like this is an 100-year-old institution that has delivered fundamental progressive change for this country. This is a disaster and it’s a tragedy, right, for this institution to collapse. And I can only see this regenerating as if there’s a fundamental break. Really deep and fundamental break with this political project. And the sad reality is is I think this political product is not allowing that break to emerge by doing things like blocking Andy Burnham. Because what you actually need is you need a leader who just didn’t get involved in this factual stuff which just made the party utterly dysfunctional. If you had an Andy Burnham figure like that, they could I think quite realistically unite some of the party, bring it back together, bring its warring factions back together. Build a progressive coalition that can somehow hold together a soft left, even a far left, with a centrist tendency as well.
Coco Khan So let me, let me just move to Mandelson. Cause we’ve talked about McSweeney as someone who doesn’t have an ideology, but I think, you know, consorting with a known pedophile, I feel like that’s not necessarily ideology, that’s just kind of basic human. I can’t believe how many times.
Nish Kumar I can’t believe how many times we’ve had to use the phrase, consulting with an IP defile on this fucking podcast.
Coco Khan So why wouldn’t McSweeney, why was he so keen on Mandelson and he would have known, of course, he would’ve known, everyone knew. So he would of known.
Nish Kumar But everybody knew we all saw the photo. If you had access to the internet, Zarah Sultana tweeted that photo the week of the announcement.
Paul Holden Yeah, can I maybe actually make a suggestion for you guys, instead of saying consortium with the name pedophile, can you maybe replace it with Zarah Sultana’s phrasing in parliament, which is being besties with the world’s most famous nonce?
Coco Khan She does have a way with words.
Paul Holden She does have a way of words, right, not necessarily running a political party.
Nish Kumar How is it possible that Keir Starmer didn’t know?
Paul Holden So the thing that strikes me is about this whole appointment process, there’s so much that we already knew by the time Mandelson was appointed. I mean first of all, this guy’s called the Prince of God Damn Darkness, for God’s sake. It’s in the name. Not only that.
Coco Khan Ozzy Osbourne was also called that.
Paul Holden Was he really?
Coco Khan Yeah, and he’s actually a really nice guy.
Paul Holden Oh, right.
Coco Khan He ate that bat once.
Paul Holden I think apparently that was by mistake.
Coco Khan Well, there we go.
Paul Holden There you go.
Coco Khan You know, anyway.
Paul Holden So, anyway, so Mandelson consulted with the devil by mistake, apparently, so that’s the story apparently in Tokyo Starman. Um, I mean, my sense is, is that, so first of all, Mandelson, you know, is really a big part of the McSweeney story. So it’s not just that Mandelson and McSweeney knew each other. I think that actually the appointment of Mandelson isn’t this aberration. It isn’t like some like tragic misstep by like a fundamentally decent group of people. I think it’s actually, oddly enough, it’s a culmination and expression of this political project. Because the one thing that McSweeney is, McSweeney is, I’ve been trying to get this to work. Can you guys make this happen, please? I want him to be called the princeling of darkness, please. I think of works. I’d think it is catchy. So, first of all, he-.
Nish Kumar The dofan of darkness. Let’s hit the alliteration of the D.
Paul Holden See, this is why you earn the big bucks. I I think I think the key thing to understand is the context in which Mandelson has appointed. Mandelson’s appointed in September. 2024. And he’s appointed at the moment where Morgan McSweeney has achieved probably the height of his political power. Because he’s, because Sue Gray has just been displaced. You have in this moment, what is one of the first things Morgan McSweeney does with his political powers? Of course, he brings in his old friend, an ally. The Trump administration is literally saying, we don’t like Peter Mandelson, don’t appoint him. Yeah. Right. And we do it anyway. Now, what do they know? What do we all know? We knew so much.
Nish Kumar A year before the election, the FT, I think it’s Jim Pickard of the FT has run the story that Mandelson had kept his ties to Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction. I believe it was also, I don’t know if it was to his face, but I believe Jim Pickard was told by Mandelsohn to fuck off when he raised.
Paul Holden That was an incredible interview. Yeah, really, really incredible interview, the extent to which like the impunity that Madison felt at the moment. They said, do not ask me this fundamental question. Jim Pickard’s story is based on an underlying document. This underlying document is I think that everybody, if you have the stomach, should read it. What this document is, is JPMorgan, which is the big multinational mega bank, they were being sued in America and they’re being sued by victims of Jeffrey Epstein, who saying that because you banked Jeffrey Epstein, JP Morgan was his bank. It’s possible that you knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities and you facilitated them. And there’s been this massive mega lawsuit. Internally, JP Morgan conducts an investigation exercise, digging into the relationship between JP Morgan and Jeffrey Epstein. And one of the things they’re doing is looking at all the emails that have been exchanged between a particular JP Morgan executive and Jeffrey Epstein. And it’s in those emails that they suddenly discover. Oh, it turns out they’re constantly talking about Petey, constantly talking about Peter Mandelson, you know, it’s a 15 page document. And what it is is basically just a timeline setting out a chronological list of every single email in which this executive is talking to Epstein. And then the own unique section two and a half pages long of a list of every single e-mail where they’re talking about Peter Mandelson or forwarding emails between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, and it shows, for example, that Peter Mandelstein was staying at Jeffrey Epstein’s flat while he was in prison. Now this document is not secret. It was submitted in the U.S. Courts. One of the great things about American court systems is you can download this stuff. So it’s the literal context in which this document appears. It’s not just this document that appears in a chosen relationship about Peter Mandelson. It’s this document appeared that’s in the public domain. Everybody can download it. Everyone can read it. And it’s in a context of a trial about the systematic trafficking and rape of minors.
Coco Khan I still come back to this thing being like, he’s meant to be the shrewd operator with great instincts for how things run with the public. Peter Mandelson consulted with a trafficker, a pedo, a rapist, a horrible, horrible man. Why did he not think that this would play badly with the pubic?
Paul Holden Hubris.
Coco Khan Hubris, another man. Another man brought down by his own hubris and his fundamental disdain for women. Because clearly those victims don’t matter. Sorry to say.
Nish Kumar Now, and also listen, the JP Morgan connection really matters, I would encourage listeners if you haven’t done it to listen to last week’s episode where we talked with Ann Pettifor.
Paul Holden Oh that was great, by the way.
Nish Kumar Thank you very much. That wasn’t me fishing for a compliment, Paul.
Paul Holden Actually, you were terrible, Ann was great. thank you very much.
Nish Kumar Ann was fantastic, I was also there, where we talked about the lobbying efforts that involve a kind of coordination between JP Morgan, Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson when he was at the heart of Gordon Brown’s government in 2009. But anyway, before we let you go, Paul, thank-you so much for your time and for joining us. Two quick questions. Is Starmer Toast, I sense I know the answer to that and I think the answer is yes and it’s a matter of time. But if it’s matter of who is the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham has not been allowed to stand. Who’s next? Is Streeting not as damaged by the Mandelson?
Paul Holden No, he’s massively damaged by this. I thought it was amazing. This thing that he did the other day where he shared his whatsapps, I was like, this is your power move? This is your power move, is to say that, oh, by the way, I was really mean about Israel and I was mean about this government, which most public, you know, I read that as, okay, so you weren’t brave enough to criticize Israel and you weren’t brave enough to criticize this government in public, but you were doing it in private text to, should we use Zarah Sultana’s phrase?
Nish Kumar Yes.
Paul Holden One of the besties of the world’s most infamous nonces, right? You think this reflects well on you? The smart money would be, if they hold out until May, it’s going to be Angela Reyna. West Streeting, I think, was going to make a move earlier, but I think he’s toast. Yeah. I think there’s a real political vacuum.
Coco Khan But who’s not in Labour together?
Paul Holden So obviously Angela Rayner is not involved in Labour Together, although she was funded by one of its big funders. Andy Burnham, of course, is not involved at all. Generally speaking, the soft left is not super associated with it.
Coco Khan Ed Miliband?
Paul Holden Ed Miliband is not associated with the Labour together.
Coco Khan This is a fun game.
Paul Holden Although, yeah.
Coco Khan I’m just saying names. Look what happens.
Paul Holden I think Ed Miliband is the sort of politician that the Labour Together project has a lot of contempt for, actually. Which I think is a real sign that, you know, I mean I can get behind Ed Milaband’s Premiership for actually, even if it’s just an interim thing. I feel like there’s something about him. Like I saw a photo online last night comparing him back in 2015, comparing him back now. Ed Milaband now, he’s got something.
Nish Kumar He’s an advert for, um…
Coco Khan You bringing it back to the Milabae?
Nish Kumar He’s an advert for men aging.
Paul Holden I don’t understand why, as I’ve gotten older, my hair has fallen out and his hair looks better. It’s not fair.
Coco Khan Just for clarity, for your safety and mine, Labour Together and APCO worldwide have not responded to requests for comment. A government source says we’re looking into the claims.
Nish Kumar I can’t think of a better way to round off this conversation using legal language to stop you from getting in even more trouble than you already have. Paul Holden, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Paul’s book, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy is out now.
Coco Khan And a quick mention before we move on. I was on one of our Crooked Sister podcasts earlier this week with Jane Kostan, we had a great conversation about the different ways the UK and US are reacting to the Epstein files. Please do give it a listen.
Nish Kumar After the break, some light relief, climate change and suppressed government reports with comedian Stuart Goldsmith.
Coco Khan [AD]
Nish Kumar On this show, we sometimes struggle to make climate stories cut through, but just because we aren’t hearing them doesn’t mean that they’re going away.
Coco Khan Someone else who’s been wrestling with this question is Stuart Goldsmith. As a climate comedian, he’s taken on the unenviable task of trying to get laughs out of the most serious subject imaginable. We caught up with him last week.
Nish Kumar Let’s just declare all of our interests here. Stuart is the first guest who I have ever lived with.
Stuart Goldsmith Yes, that’s true.
Nish Kumar My first ever former housemate to be a guest of this show.
Stuart Goldsmith Well, it’s very, very nice to be here. And just for Coco and the benefit of the listener, the last time we saw each other in person was when you introduced my nine-year-old to the C-word.
Nish Kumar Correct.
Coco Khan Oh my god, Nish!
Nish Kumar And to be clear, it was because your son came to see me do stand-up comedy.
Stuart Goldsmith Yes, we had to smuggle him in.
Nish Kumar I didn’t call him that.
Stuart Goldsmith It was a very long car ride.
Nish Kumar Yes, to all families, Nish Kumar, like Wu Tang, is for the children.
Stuart Goldsmith 100%.
Nish Kumar Stu, the fact that you and I know each other means that you know about all of the areas in which I personally fall short when it comes to saving the planet. I did your climate confession series recently and confessed to the fact I own about 600 reusable cups, which I don’t think can be good for the environment.
Stuart Goldsmith No, it’s not, but so much of climate is a contradiction and so much of it is about finding a balance. If you lose your reusable coffee cup before you’ve used it 50 times, you might as well have been using compostable ones. So there’s all sorts of contradictions. You mentioned the climate confessions thing. I do solicit confessions from friends and audiences and what have you when I’m digging. But that’s really just to undermine the idea that if you don’t lead a carbon-free life, then you’re not entitled to a voice.
Coco Khan Have you had any that are really egregious?
Stuart Goldsmith I kicked a horse. I mean, most of them are minor infractions, but there was a guy from Oklahoma who said he’d taken the catalytic converter off his car in order to make it sound better. We killed him, beat him to death.
Coco Khan Of course we could all make individual change and we ought to where we can, but fundamentally we are limited by what we can do, by a system in which we, you know, need to have livelihoods. That’s not me saying, and therefore do dump all your waste in the Thames, but where do you draw the line there in trying to make people say, look, you’re empowered to make individual change and also collective change, but also I’m not going to let you off the hook.
Stuart Goldsmith Yes, yeah, absolutely. We all exist inside that contradiction of going, well, even if I never have another disposable plastic water bottle as long as I live, it’s not really going to make that much difference. Because what we need is pandemic era urgency ground all the planes yesterday action. We need huge legislative change, and we’re not going to get that anytime soon, and I can’t do anything about it with my individual choices. The mentality I try and have is it’s like voting. Voting is simultaneously the most important weapon that you’ve got. And also it feels completely, you know, pointless, like some people are in boroughs, areas where their vote won’t make a difference, but you still have to turn up and vote. If we have conversations about it all the time, it stops climate being invisible. Because if it’s invisible, how can we vote? How can we decide? You know, how, how we can try and steer the direction we’re going in?
Nish Kumar The context that you’re talking about it most often is to a comedy audience. So how do you stop the audience from just immediately switching off?
Stuart Goldsmith One of the big challenges is climate has this awful branding problem. Like, it sounds like it’s tedious homework, do you know what I mean? I thought for a while I should call the show Climate Wanker, just to let people know what they’re getting. But like, you have to say to people, look, come and see this. It’s going to be funny, it’s going be uplifting. Yes, some of it will be scary, but you’re scared anyway, or I feel you probably should be a bit scared anyway. So you have try and get people into it. So I remember the first time I did a show in Edinburgh in 2023, was the kind of debut show, it was called Spoilers. I wanted to allude to climate. But I didn’t realize at the time that this big conversation I was having with myself, like what am I going to call the show, is completely representative of the macro challenge of how does anyone get anyone to listen to it. If you want to give a talk to people about the climate and you call it a talk about the climate, then the only people you’ll get will be people who are already opted in, nice older couples in North Face and really wild-eyed crusties. And it concerns absolutely all of us. Increasingly, these days, I have to mention my own hypocrisy, because otherwise I can’t risk having them sit there for five minutes going, well, how did you get here, and how are you? Do you mean, like, it shouldn’t be about us judging each other about what good climate people we are, because that’s a classic problem of the left, isn’t it? You’re not good enough, you’re not in this thing, people’s front of duty, a kind of territory. And all of that plays into the hands of the fossil fuel companies. There’s a guy called Chris DeMayer, who’s the head of climate outreach at UCL, and he says we just have to tell stories of action. Here’s a thing I tried and just kind of insinuate it into the public consciousness. I nearly said inseminate. I pulled back at the last minute.
Nish Kumar You can make sense of that, you have to inseminate, we have to impregnate the idea of the climate into the public.
Stuart Goldsmith That’s not off base. Yes, I was both disseminating and insinuating it nearly went really badly wrong.
Coco Khan And I wonder as well with the topic of the climate, whether it suffers from a false feeling of we already know it. We already know how bad it is. We can look out of our window and see that the weather has changed. And maybe there’s a feeling that it’s too known. Having said that though, there was an interesting story I wanted to mention to you. So a national security assessment on ecosystem collapse was supposed to have been published in October last year, but it was blocked by government officials. The report was only unearthed last week due to a freedom of information request by the Green Alliance. The Times reported it had been significantly abridged with the worst findings omitted. So my first question is, what do you think? Great material? And my second question is what do think about the idea that we know everything when we so clearly don’t?
Stuart Goldsmith Yes, absolutely. So the report was commissioned by the Joint Intelligence Committee. So that was, well not commissioned, it was produced by them. So that’s the heads of MI5 and MI6. And they’re basically going, let’s look into how much of a threat this is, how much of a global security threat the climate crisis is. I think they were specifically looking at the collapse of certain key areas of biodiversity. The potential cascade effect are things like, there will likely be a global food shortage. That will increase migration. You know, that will increase the slide into fascism that we’re already seeing. Resource scarcity scares people. There will be more risk of further pandemics, you know. There is this huge kind of domino rally of potential effects. It’s the same with insurance. If you’re an actuary and your job is effectively to predict the future, as scientifically as you can, you can’t pretend that the climate crisis isn’t going to massively shake everything up. So I’m hopeful that if MI5 and MI6 are going, uh, guys… And all the people in insurers all over the world are going, yeah, guys, I don’t know about this. Then eventually, those are languages that business understands. And no matter who are the leaders of the world at that time, money itself, industry, will be going, we’re going to need customers tomorrow, so we have to actually make a difference. You don’t want to scare people. As a climate communicator, if people are scared and have no agency, then they panic and they don’t what to do. It’s okay to scare them as long as you say, hey, look, there’s a fire, there is the exit, run towards the exit. But if you just go, there’s a fire, ah, then that’s not useful or productive fear, it doesn’t give people agency. And it’s staggering that people had to do a Freedom of Information request to get this warning. Nick Aldridge, who did that, I think you did a video within where you were translating, Climate Science translated, you did one, I just think Joe Brand, yeah. So the people behind those videos have created this National Emergency Briefing, and that is a system whereby, as in wartime, they kind of want to go, this is almost like a COVID-type national announcement. This is all the information you want to hear from super qualified experts saying, hey, everyone, let’s all just calmly face the fact that elements of this are baked into our future, and how fast we adapt and mitigate these is going to make an enormous difference to every aspect of British life.
Coco Khan I genuinely find it baffling that this particular Labour government, Stama in particular, doesn’t see this as a, and I’m so sorry to use this language, an opportunity, you know, like to stand up in front of the country and say, here is a problem, here are experts that can fix it, here is science, here’s my managerial approach. Like that’d be quite a good flex for him. You know, there’s a tendency for politicians to use other crises as a way to show how powerful and strong they are. And, you, know, and we can’t do that with this. If the government did take up the framing that you’ve, you’ve outlined, do you think it would be powerful? Do you think you would be a vote winner?
Stuart Goldsmith Absolutely. Well, and again it’s another big challenge. Do I think it would be powerful? Yes. Would it be a vote winner? Only if they’re very, very careful in how they communicate it. The thing that frustrates me is they’re not shouting about their successes enough. They’re doing really, really great things, and I don’t understand what Starmer’s tactics are. Is it just keep your head down, apparently do nothing, and then just before the next election if he makes it that far go… Oh, and by the way, Britain’s flourishing now, and we’re all buzzing off that during the week before the election. I don’t understand what the thinking is, because there’s loads more to do, but they have done a lot, but haven’t told anyone they’ve done a lots.
Nish Kumar It’s nice for us to bring a conversation to a close on a note of some positivity, though I will say increasingly as we talk about the starboard government on a week to week basis, the phrase that occurs most often is, I don’t know what they’re doing.
Stuart Goldsmith Yeah
Nish Kumar So look, if you want to check out more, which I would really urge people to do about the National Emergency Briefing, do as Stu says, go to nebriefing.org. Stu, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Stu is on Instagram at Stuart Goldsmith Comedy, and you can find out more about his future climate-based stand-up comedy dates on his website, www.stuartgoldsmith.com.
Coco Khan So speaking of climate stories, before we go, it snowed two weeks ago in New York. Since then, the temperature has barely risen above freezing, so snow is clogging up the city’s streets.
Nish Kumar Whose fault is this? Is it science? No. Is it the climate? No. Is it decades of pollution and carbon in the atmosphere? No. It’s Zohran Mamdani’s fault. If you’ve been listening to right-wing critics in America, you will know that they have been blaming Zohran Mamdani for snow.
Clip What is it like there in New York living under this regime that can’t deal with the snow? How is the warm embrace of collectivism treating you? Just outside, it’s a disaster. It’s just incredible how badly he has mismanaged his very first snowstorm.
Nish Kumar Listen, what I would say to the people of New York is welcome. For a long time you’ve been hearing stories about how London is overrun by hordes of criminal gangs even as all of our violent primarates have gone down across every available metric. You’ve been reading stories about how it’s sort of unsafe. You’re been reading stories about the air is full of human shit. And the reason you’ve been hearing these stories is our mayor is a Muslim and now your mayor is Muslim. Get ready for an absolute cavalcade. Of some of the most batshit conspiracy theories to be spread about your city. I’d argue people around the world and within our countries already don’t like the cities of New York and London. And these are two cities that I’d say have a pretty friendly relationship and have a lot in common with each other. And in an extension of that sibling style relationship that I feel we’ve always had between London and New York. Welcome to the club. You are about to have right wing tick tockers walking down your street saying things like, oh, my God, these buildings are so gray. How has that been allowed to happen? Probably Sharia law. Get ready. It is gonna be, you thought the campaign was bad. You thought the level of Islamophobia and conspiracy theories in the campaign was bad, you don’t know what’s coming for you my friends. Oh my God. But the important thing to remember is no one gives a fuck about what these people think because they are all absolutely bananas.
Coco Khan Well, that’s it. Thank you for listening to Pod Save the UK. Don’t forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok, X and Blue Sky.
Nish Kumar Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.
Coco Khan Thanks to lead producer May Robson and digital producer Jacob Liebenberg.
Nish Kumar Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.
Coco Khan Our engineer is Dana Ruka and our social media producer is Nada Smilinich.
Nish Kumar The executive producers are Pierce Lynch, Kate Fitzsimons and Katie Long with additional support from Ari Schwartz.
Coco Khan And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
