Paul Holden

speaker

257 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 12 Feb

Paul Holden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Pod Save the UK · McSweeney: the man who made Starmer and his ties to Mandelson · 12 Feb 2026 podcast

I think I'm living in a nightmare.

Sure.

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 his first things he did at the Labour Party was input... Oh, that's good.

Yeah, input data into the Excalibur computer system, which...

Mandelson maintained, which basically had 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 it's probably Morgan McSweeney's longest and closest political ally besides Bishop Annamamood.

Yes, and I think that's accurate.

Their positioning in that, it 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 Maguire and Gerald Poggin in their other unofficial biography of Morgan McSweeney say that Morgan McSweeney finds left-wing politics evil.

Like literally evil.

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-welfarist, blue laborish tendency within the Labour Party that really I think is actually quite unpopular with the general public, but is deeply unpopular.

Showing 1–20 of 257 · page 1 of 13