Morgan McSweeney has denied giving the police intentionally wrong information when his UK government phone was stolen last year.
Concerns have been raised that the theft of the former No 10 chief of staff’s phone could result in important messages about Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador being lost.
The messages could fall within the scope of a call by MPs for the release of all documents relating to Mandelson’s posting to Washington in the wake of revelations about his links to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
McSweeney, who resigned over his part in the scandal in February, sought to explain to the Foreign Affairs Committee the events surrounding the theft of his UK government phone, which took place in October last year.
He told MPs on the committee he was a “a victim of crime” on October 20th.
The political strategist and adviser said: “Somebody hopped onto the pavement and took my phone from me. The first thing I did was to try and retrieve it. I tried to chase, which is probably a mistake. The next thing I did was I phoned No 10, and I would have gone with whatever they told me to do.”
McSweeney said: “I then called 999. If No 10 had told me you need to tell the police or you need to tell the call handler what your job is, I would have done so. But otherwise, I didn’t do that as a matter of course. I didn’t in any part of my job go around saying ‘I’m a very serious and senior person’.
“If No 10 had asked me to do it, I would have done that.”
He later made “further calls to No 10”, and said he was “quite surprised by how limited the security is around the chief of staff’s telephone”.
Asked why he had described his location as Belgrave Street – an address in Stepney, east London, rather than Belgrave Road in Pimlico – McSweeney said: “I also said I was in Westminster.
“So I said I was in Belgrave Street, Westminster, where I think I was on… Lower Belgrave Street. So it was some months ago, and I missed the ‘Lower’. I didn’t see it.”
The former No 10 chief of staff said: “I was also quite adrenalised. So what happened was, I chased the guy who stole my phone as far as I could.
“I was out of breath, I was completely exhausted, because at 48 years of age you shouldn’t be chasing people down the street, and then I was trying to go back to the original location that it happened, so that I could tell the 999 operator.”
He said: “I haven’t heard the audio. I can’t imagine that I was clear and coherent at the time. I was out of breath, I was adrenalised, and if I gave any wrong direction, it wasn’t intentional.”
Everything that I had at that time in September, which was more than a month before my phone was stolen, I shared it with the No 10 team
McSweeney also said that the location he gave did not result in a police vehicle being sent to the wrong address, as the call handler said a “squad car wasn’t coming as we were on the call”.
The ex-aide said there was “probably not as much” about Lord Mandelson’s appointment on his stolen phone than had already been made available to Downing Street, which conducted its own “research” after the peer was sacked as US ambassador in September 2025.
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“Everything that I had at that time in September, which was more than a month before my phone was stolen, I shared it with the No 10 team,” McSweeney said.
Correspondence between McSweeney with ministers and officials after the phone was stolen “would still be on their phones”, he said.
The former adviser also told MPs that police had not yet recovered his phone, and said he had “probably” used disappearing messages on WhatsApp in his exchanges with Lord Mandelson.
