A very convenient theft: GUY ADAMS investigates the curious case of No 10 chief, his WhatsApps to Mandelson and the handily timed disappearance of his phone

It was just before 10.30pm on Monday 20 October and an urgent call came into one of the Metropolitan Police’s busy 999 call centres. At the end of the line is a 48-year-old man with a soft Irish accent who wants to report an emergency.

‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘Someone stole my telephone.’

The caller explains that the attacker, a “black man” in his “late teens,” of slim build and average height, brazenly “came to the curb to grab my phone and rode away on his bike.”

Although he gave chase, it was in vain: The street criminal drove north for ‘a few blocks’ before turning left into a park and disappearing.

This is followed by a brief conversation in which the telephone operator apologizes for no one being able to be sent to the scene because ‘police officers are in extreme demand’.

Instead, they offer to take crime reports over the phone. Details are shared as required and a few minutes later the victim is given a ‘crime reference number’ and bids good night.

Thus ends the depressingly common thread of events in Sadiq Khan’s London. Approximately 117,000 phones are stolen every year in the capital, and approximately 80,000 of them are seized through robbery.

Many, including the person in this incident, were snatched from the hands of an unwitting pedestrian who was texting while walking on the sidewalk after dark.

McSweeney had recommended the appointment of Peter Mandelson (Both pictured 23 June 2025) and played an active role in the review process

However, in this case, the victim is not an ordinary pedestrian. And today, nearly five months later, his phone (or rather its contents) is at the epicenter of an explosive political scandal.

The debate revolves around a simple fact: the 48-year-old man in question was none other than Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s then-private secretary and one of Britain’s most powerful men.

His stolen iPhone was a work device. For almost 18 months since his boss moved to Downing Street, he has been using it to run the country.

At the time of the 999 call, McSweeney was also greatly affected by the fallout from the sacking of his close friend and mentor Peter Mandelson as the UK’s Ambassador to the US.

As well as recommending the appointment of the Labor Peer in the first instance, he also played an extraordinarily and perhaps inappropriately active role in the subsequent review process, during which Mandelson parachuted into the £161,000-a-year post, beating out many highly qualified career diplomats in the process.

It was McSweeney, rather than a member of the Number Ten “justice and ethics” team, who was instructed to question his former friend about various links to Jeffrey Epstein, who had been “red flagged” in the civil service review process.

Unsurprisingly, the pedophile had given his partner a clean bill of health, prompting Keir Starmer to approve Mandy’s move to Washington in December 2024.

Of course, this resulted in tears. And following Mandelson’s chaotic departure from Washington, which cost the taxpayer £75,000 in compensation and caused serious damage to the UK’s reputation, McSweeney’s role in the whole affair was coming under serious scrutiny. It can be said that vultures circle.

The most pressing was an issue flagged at the beginning of October, when a group of Labor whips attended meetings discussing how to respond to the Conservative Party’s expected ‘modest talking motion’ on the issue.

It was feared that they would want every email and WhatsApp correspondence regarding Mandelson’s appointment and resignation to be disclosed.

According to the Spectator, those involved later told colleagues: ‘Morgan will be devastated if the Conservatives bring forward a modest motion.’

All of this happened roughly. Following the revelations via the Epstein Files, the Government has already released some of the official documents (which show how McSweeney ignored concerns about his powerful friend via a memo falsely claiming ‘they were all distributed’) and is expected to make more documents public shortly after Easter.

This second tranche of documents should, on paper, include both formal and informal communications between Mandelson and the Downing Street machine.

Particularly noteworthy are the numerous WhatsApp messages he shared with McSweeney; In these messages, the pair are expected to trade insider gossip on everything from politics to reshuffles to the competence (or otherwise) of the Prime Minister and various cabinet ministers, given the Prince of Darkness’ extensive track record.

In other words, they can be political dynamite. But there’s one important fact: Thanks to a conveniently timed cell phone theft on Monday, October 20, those messages appear to no longer exist.

To understand why, we need to question both the Metropolitan Police’s transcripts of the 999 call and the various guidance and public statements about everything issued by both Downing Street and senior ministers in recent days.

Sometimes they are strangely contradictory. And in the cold light of day, aspects of the official statement do not seem to quite add up, prompting Tory frontbencher Alex Burghart to say yesterday that “the whole thing reeks of a cover-up”, while Nigel Farage said: “What a convenient theft for McSweeney. Does No 10 think the British people are completely stupid?”

Let’s get back to the emergency call, which raises several important questions. It is also important that McSweeney at least did not bother to tell the police that he was the Prime Minister’s chief of staff; This would certainly indicate that the force was spending a significant amount of resources recovering the stolen device. Instead, he said, somewhat vaguely: ‘This is a government phone.’

Then he told McSweeney’s dispatcher that the incident had happened.

‘Belgrave Street’, an address in Tower Hamlets. In fact, the incident took place on Belgrave Road, a busy street connecting Pimlico to Belgravia.

When the interviewer asked if he had followed the attacker to Stepney Green Park (also in Tower Hamlets), McSweeney replied incorrectly: ‘Yes. He turned left from there.”

As Andrew Neil observed last night, ‘this couldn’t be true… It’s like McSweeney [was] ‘He deliberately misled the police call handler to create confusion.’

Thanks to the convenient timing of the mobile phone theft, Mandelson’s WhatsApp messages to McSweeney no longer exist (Image: Mandelson and McSweeney, 23 June 2025)

There’s also the small matter of what happened to the iPhone’s auto-tracking function, which theoretically should have allowed the police or (in context) Downing Street security staff, who were expected to take the incident very seriously indeed, to quickly locate the stolen device.

To this end, McSweeney tells the operator: ‘About two minutes before I called and chased you… I called my office to have the phone tracked.’ But somehow Number Ten’s best detectives can’t seem to find him.

Instead, they seem to have decided to both shut down the stolen device and wipe it remotely.

Strangely, Starmer’s office yesterday refused to answer questions about whether they had contacted the Met to contact them about the incident.

There is further confusion about how police are pursuing the case. On Tuesday, Labor Party sources said they were too busy to launch any further investigations.

But the Met said yesterday that they made two calls the next day via the victim’s personal phone, from which she called 999. They did not receive an answer.

Conveniently, given the context, there seems to be no way McSweeney or anyone else could have accessed the WhatsApp messages found on that phone.

Although most people’s devices are backed up to Apple’s ‘cloud’ services, meaning they are automatically downloaded every time they log in to a new phone; Security concerns mean that senior government officials are not allowed to use the service.

They are also not intended to run WhatsApp on their laptops or tablets, which could create alternative records of past correspondence.

Instead Government guidance states they must forward messages to an official system or take a screenshot and are responsible for protecting personal data from ‘accidental loss’.

McSweeney’s failure to comply with such protocols seems careless, to say the least.

Indeed, some compared her situation to that of Rebekah Vardy’s manager; this man had managed to lose a phone, which contained a number of important messages relating to his fight with Coleen Rooney before the infamous ‘Wagatha Christie’ case, which was expected to cause serious damage to the Vardy case, by dropping it in the North Sea during a fishing trip.

McSweeney resigned from Downing Street last month, saying: ‘The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. ‘He damaged our trust in our party, our country, our politics… I recommended the Prime Minister to make this appointment and I take full responsibility for this recommendation.’

As a result, his view on this week’s developments remains unclear.

Former Labor colleagues, meanwhile, are busy digging themselves into holes. At the weekend, Communities Minister Steve Reed told LBC radio that the phone was stolen ‘long before any Mandelson-related incident… perhaps even a year ago’.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting described the situation as ‘more of a plot than a conspiracy’

This was of course untrue, prompting SNP leader Stephen Flynn to refer Reed to the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser, asking: ‘Why did he lie?’

Meanwhile, Health Minister Wes Streeting has been handed the poisoned chalice of yesterday’s media tour.

‘I can completely understand the skepticism in these types of cases,’ he conceded, before insisting that the loss of the Mandelson messages was still ‘more of a plot than a conspiracy’.

Labor hasn’t always been so forgiving when ministers have managed to smuggle out old WhatsApp communications.

In 2023, it was revealed that Boris Johnson was unable to access an old phone containing messages he shared in 2020, which he was asked to submit to the Covid Inquiry.

This sparked a fierce political debate, with Keir Starmer’s then deputy Angela Rayner accusing the Tories of a ‘desperate attempt to hide the evidence’, adding: ‘The public deserves answers, not another cover-up.’

Some might argue that Ms. Rayner’s silence about the McSweeney affair smacks of hypocrisy. Others might call this sensible politics.

But he was right about at least one thing: Unless the public gets the right answers, the mystery of the missing iPhone will be revealed.