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

‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘Someone just robbed my phone.’

The caller explains that his assailant, a ‘black guy’ in his ‘late teens’ of slim build and average height, had brazenly ‘come on to the pavement to grab my phone and cycled off on a bike’.

Although he’d given chase, it had been in vain: the street criminal travelled ‘a few blocks’ north before turning left into a park and disappearing.

There follows a short conversation in which the phone operator apologises that no one can be deployed to the crime scene, since ‘we are having extreme demand on police officers’.   

They instead offer to take a crime report over the telephone. Details are duly shared, and a couple of minutes later, the victim is issued with a ‘crime reference number,’ and wished goodnight.

So ends what, in Sadiq Khan’s London, is a depressingly common series of events. Some 117,000 phones are pinched in the capital each year, with around 80,000 taken via robberies.

Many, including the one in this incident, are snatched from the hand of an unwitting pedestrian who happens to be texting while walking along a pavement after dark.

At the time his phone was stolen, Keir Starmer’s former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney was heavily embroiled in the fallout from his close friend Peter Mandelson’s sacking as UK Ambassador to the United States

McSweeney had recommended Peter Mandelson’s appointment (Both pictured on June 23, 2025) – and played an active role in the vetting process

Yet in this case, the victim is no ordinary pedestrian. And today, some five months later, his phone (or more particularly its contents) lies at the epicentre of an explosive political scandal.

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

His stolen iPhone was a work device. Throughout the almost 18 months since his boss had moved into Downing Street, he’d been using it to run the country.

At the time of the 999 call, McSweeney also happened to be heavily embroiled in the fallout from his close friend and mentor Peter Mandelson’s sacking as UK Ambassador to the United States.

In addition to recommending the Labour Peer’s appointment in the first place, he’d played an extraordinarily, and perhaps inappropriately, active role in a subsequent vetting process which had seen Mandelson parachuted into the £161,000-a-year role – leapfrogging several highly-qualified career diplomats in the process.

It was McSweeney, rather than a member of the Number Ten ‘propriety and ethics’ team, who was instructed to interrogate his old chum over various links to Jeffrey Epstein which had been ‘red-flagged’ during a civil service vetting process. 

Unsurprisingly, he’d then given the paedophile’s associate a clean bill of health, prompting Keir Starmer to rubber stamp Mandy’s move to Washington in December 2024.

That had, of course, ended in tears. And following Mandelson’s chaotic departure from Washington which cost the taxpayer £75,000 in compensation, and caused significant damage to the UK’s reputation, McSweeney’s role in the whole thing was coming under severe scrutiny. One might say that vultures were circling.

Most pressing, was an issue flagged in early October, when a group of Labour whips had attended meetings at which they discussed how to respond to an expected ‘humble address motion’ by the Tories on the whole thing.

It was feared that they would seek disclosure of every email and WhatsApp exchange related to Mandelson’s appointment and resignation.

According to the Spectator, those involved had later told colleagues: ‘If the Tories pass a humble address motion, Morgan is f***ed.’

All of which is broadly what came to pass. Following disclosures made via the Epstein Files, the Government has already released one tranche of official documents (they show how McSweeney had dismissed concerns about his powerful friend via a memo claiming, wrongly, that they had ‘all been dispelled’) and is expected to make more papers public shortly after Easter.

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

Particularly juicy would be the large number of WhatsApp messages he’s believed to have exchanged with McSweeney, in which the duo would, given the Prince of Darkness’s extensive track record, be expected to have exchanged insider gossip about everything from policy to reshuffles, to the competence (or otherwise) of the Prime Minister and various cabinet ministers.

They could, in other words, be political dynamite. But for one important fact: thanks to the conveniently timed mobile phone theft of Monday October 20, those messages appear to no longer exist.

To understand why, we must interrogate both the Metropolitan Police’s transcript of the 999 call plus various pieces of guidance, and public statements, about the whole thing that have been issued by both Downing Street and senior ministers over recent days.

At times, they are strangely contradictory. And in the cold light of day, several aspects of the official account don’t entirely seem to add up, prompting Tory frontbencher Alex Burghart to say yesterday that ‘the whole thing stinks of a cover-up’ while Nigel Farage declared: ‘What a convenient theft for McSweeney. Does No 10 think the British public are complete idiots?’

Back to that emergency call, which raises several significant questions. Not least why McSweeney doesn’t bother to tell the police that he happens to be the Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff, which would surely have seen the force divert significant resources to recovering the stolen device. Instead, he said, somewhat vaguely: ‘It’s a government phone.’

Then there is a strange passage during which McSweeney told the call-handler that the incident had occurred in

‘Belgrave Street,’ an address in Tower Hamlets. In fact, it had occurred in Belgrave Road, a busy thoroughfare connecting Pimlico with Belgravia. 

When the call-handler asked whether he’d followed the assailant to Stepney Green Park (which is again in Tower Hamlets) McSweeney replied, wrongly: ‘Yeah. He turned left there.’

As Andrew Neil observed last night, that ‘couldn’t have been true… It’s almost as if McSweeney [was] deliberately misleading the police call handler to sow confusion.’ 

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

Then there is the small matter of what happened to the iPhone’s automatic tracking function, which should in theory have allowed either the police or Downing Street’s security staff, who might (in the context) be expected to have taken the incident very seriously indeed, to quickly locate the stolen device.

McSweeney to this end tells the operator: ‘About two minutes before I rung you and I chased… I rang my office to get the phone tracked.’ Yet somehow, Number Ten’s finest sleuths appear to have been unable to find it.

What instead seems to have happened is that they decided to both shut off the stolen device and wipe it remotely. 

Somewhat weirdly, Starmer’s office refused to answer questions yesterday about whether they had subsequently contacted the Met to liaise with them over the incident.

There is further confusion over how the police followed up the incident. On Tuesday, Labour sources were briefing that they’d been ‘too busy’ to mount a further investigation. 

But the Met said yesterday that they’d instead made two calls to the victim the very next day, via the personal phone he’d made the 999 call on. They did not get a response.

Conveniently, given the context, there appears to have then been no way for McSweeney or anyone else to access the WhatsApp messages that were sitting on that phone. 

While most people’s devices are backed up to Apple’s ‘cloud’ services, meaning they are automatically downloaded each time they log into a new telephone, security concerns mean that senior government officials aren’t allowed to use that service.

Neither are they meant to run WhatsApp on their laptops or tablets, which might create alternative records of past correspondence.

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

That McSweeney seems to have failed to follow such protocols seems, at the very least, careless.

Indeed, some have compared his situation to that of Rebekah Vardy’s agent, who prior to the infamous ‘Wagatha Christie’ trial managed to lose a phone containing a number of key messages relating to her feud with Coleen Rooney, which were expected to cause significant damage to the Vardy case, by dropping it into the North Sea during a fishing trip.

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

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

Former Labour colleagues are meanwhile busy digging themselves into holes. At the weekend, Communities Secretary Steve Reed told LBC radio that the phone had been stolen ‘well in advance of anything happening about Mandelson… Maybe even a year before.’

Health Secretary Wes Streeting explained the situation as a ‘cock up rather than conspiracy’

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

Health Secretary Wes Streeting was meanwhile handed the poisoned chalice of doing yesterday’s media round. 

‘I can totally understand the cynicism in these sorts of cases,’ he conceded, before insisting that the loss of the Mandelson messages was nonetheless ‘a cock-up rather than a conspiracy’.

Labour hasn’t always been so forgiving when ministers manage to mislay old WhatsApp communications. 

Back in 2023, it emerged that Boris Johnson was unable to access an old phone containing messages he’d exchanged in 2020 and had been asked to provide to the Covid Inquiry.

It led to a furious political row, with Keir Starmer’s then deputy Angela Rayner accusing the Conservatives of ‘a desperate attempt to withhold evidence,’ adding: ‘The public deserve answers, not another cover-up.’

Some might argue that Ms Rayner’s silence over the McSweeney affair reeks of hypocrisy. Others might call it sensible politics. 

But she was right about at least one thing: unless the public starts to get some proper answers, the mystery of the missing iPhone will rumble on.