Tories are convinced McSweeney’s phone is the only one in London not to have been stolen | John Crace
In recent years, the Conservatives and the rightwing media have gone to great lengths to tell us that London has become a no-go zone.A hellscape where women are afraid to leave their homes.Where every person of colour is a criminal.Where simply using your phone is an invitation to be mugged.Where the police do nothing, and to make it through the day alive is as much as anyone could hope for.
So you would have thought that when Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s then chief of staff, rings the police from his personal mobile to report that his government phone has been stolen, the Tories might cut him a little slack,What do you expect if you are mad enough to be using your phone at 10,30pm on a London street? Count yourself lucky you weren’t killed,Only, it turns out the Tories are convinced that McSweeney’s is the only phone in London not to have been nicked,This is the Mysterious Affair of the Phone That Was Not Stolen.
For rightwing hacks, it is the biggest scandal since Labour’s lockdown Currygate,Some believe to this day there are photos of Angela Rayner drinking tequila shots off a semi-naked Starmer and that the police were bought off with a chicken jalfrezi and a couple of garlic naans,The timing of the theft is certainly curious,Peter Mandelson was sacked as US ambassador in September,No 10 was concerned about what messages might be revealed in relation to his appointment.
In October, McSweeney’s phone goes awol.Losing the phone isn’t the cleverest plan Downing Street could have come up with.After all, McSweeney was already implicated up to his neck in the Mandelson appointment – he has long since been forced to resign – and the only way the missing WhatsApp messages could have been any more damning was if Morg and Mandy had been texting that being a paedophile wasn’t as bad as all that.So now we are stuck between cock-up and conspiracy.And this time the Tories and the rightwing media appear convinced that McSweeney is a wrong’un because … they want him to be.
After all, it’s a well-known fact that men with ginger hair and a beard can’t be trusted.McSweeney’s critics will not rest until a mile-long stretch of the river has been dredged to find the phone.If the phone still isn’t found, they’ll say that’s yet more proof of a cover-up.You can’t win with some people.At Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, Kemi Badenoch resisted making more than a passing reference to the stolen phone.
Normally the Tory leader appears unable to resist conspiracy theories she has read about on X that morning,But this was all a bit too batshit crazy even for her,Yet, in the time that has passed since PMQs, she – along with some normally relatively sensible members of her shadow cabinet – have been at pains to mention the conspiracy at every opportunity,Late on Wednesday, the Tories issued a statement in the name of the shadow chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Alex Burghart, detailing all the reasons why McSweeney was guilty as sin,He had said his phone was stolen in Belgrave Street, not Belgrave Road, the correct name of the location where the phone was allegedly stolen.
He hadn’t made a huge fuss and said “don’t you know who I am?”.All of which sounds like the relatively normal behaviour of someone who was in shock at being the victim of a crime.But for Alex and Kemi this was all a deliberate attempt to put the police off the scent.As for the lack of a police investigation? As any Londoner would tell you, the time to get really suspicious is when a stolen phone is investigated by the police.Almost all end up just as statistics with a crime reference number.
Come Thursday, Kemi was demanding that McSweeney be the subject of a show trial in front of MPs.The shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith, soon joined in.The whole things was extremely fishy, he said.When he had briefly worked in No 10 there had been constant paranoia about phones.He seemed to have forgotten that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak also had form on phone management.
Both came up with excuses for why they were unable to hand over their WhatsApp messages to the police while they were being investigated for breaches of the lockdown rules,Odd that neither was a scandal worth mentioning,Perhaps what we are learning is that if the Tories had appointed Mandelson, they would have happily tossed their mobiles into the Thames without a second thought,But we know we have reached peak conspiracy madness when we hit the Hitler moment,That came on Thursday when a Mail on Sunday columnist posted on X that the Guardian would have been in favour of appeasement when Hitler invaded Poland.
All because the paper had suggested there wasn’t enough evidence to summarily convict McSweeney and that there was more than enough evidence out there to damn him anyway,You’d have thought a Mail columnist would have been more careful,The Mail was one of Hitler’s cheerleaders in the 1930s,Champions of Oswald Mosley,And in a story of insinuations, that at least is a fact.
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NS&I chief executive replaced in ‘fresh start’ over missing savings crisis; bad day for markets – as it happened
The boss of National Savings and Investments appears to have been dismissed over the £476m savings scandal at the bank.Pensions minister Torsten Bell has told MPs that he has appointed Sir Jim Harra, a senior civil servant, to take over as the chief executive of NS&I on an interim basis, replacing Dax Harkins.Bell says Harra, a former first permanent secretary at HMRC, will provide “a fresh start for NS&I”, following its failure to trace missing savings belonging to customers who have died.Updating MPs on the crisis over deceased customers’ savings, Bell says he wants to make sure NS&I has “the very best leadership” in place.Bell tells MPs: double quotation markSir Jim will undertake a review over the next three months to spell out in detail the background to this tracing problem and to set out what lessons must be learned for NSI going forward
New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK
New York City’s public hospital system announced that it would not be renewing its contract with Palantir as controversy mounts in the UK over the data analytics and AI firm’s government contract.The president of the US’ largest municipal public health care system, Dr Mitchell Katz, testified last week before the New York City Council that the agreement with Palantir would expire in October.He said at the hearing that the contract, which focused on recovering money for insurance claims, was always meant to be short term, and that there was an “absolute firewall” preventing Palantir from sharing information with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said that the agency has “not had any incidents”.The contract and related payment documents shared with the Guardian by the American Friends Service Committee and first reported by the Intercept, show that NYC Health + Hospitals has paid Palantir nearly $4m since November 2023
Brussels opens investigation into Snapchat amid concern over children’s safety
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Sinner continues smooth Miami progress with win over Tiafoe as rivals fall
The past nine days at the Miami Open have not been kind to most of the world’s best male tennis players. One by one, so many have fallen, most dumped out with mediocre performances. Even Carlos Alcaraz, the world No 1, was not immune to the string of giantkillings in Florida.One man remains completely unbothered. Having broken Novak Djokovic’s 2016 record for most consecutive sets won at Masters 1000 events earlier in the tournament, Jannik Sinner has continued to bulldoze through the draw as he tries to follow up his recent Indian Wells title by winning the Sunshine Double
From Laurel Hubbard to sex testing in five years: why the Olympics U-turned on transgender rules | Sean Ingle
The IOC’s shift in position on trans women in elite sports is seismic, but new president Kirsty Coventry is reflecting a changed political climateBy any measure, it amounts to one of the most astonishing U-turns from a governing body in modern times. Four and a half years ago, the International Olympic Committee was lauding the appearance of the first transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, at an Olympics, and issuing a framework to sports saying that transgender women “should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage” over biological women.Now it has not only ripped up every last morsel of that guidance but also performed a spectacular 180-degree turn.Over 10 tightly worded pages, the IOC now states that the female category must be protected for fairness and safety reasons, and makes it clear that SRY screening – a sex test using saliva or a cheek-swab – will be used to determine biological sex.It is a monumental shift that means transgender women and athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), who were reported as female at birth but have internal testes and have undergone male puberty, are now banned from the female category at all future Olympics
Transgender women athletes banned from female events at Olympics by IOC
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