Good morning. Pat McFadden has been on media round duties this morning. He is now work and pensions secreratary, and his interviews (conducted from Selhurst Park) were ostensibly about an announcement about premier league football clubs getting involved in a £25m expansion of the youth hubs programme.
In his old job, as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, McFadden was in effect the “minister for the Today programme”, the No 10 figure sent out to hose down the media in the face of assorted scandals and problems and there was quite a bit of that going on this morning. He was asked about Donald Trump’s latest outburst. And he was asked about the Conservative allegations that Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, mislead the elections watchdog over donations to a Labour thinktank when the party was in opposition.
The Tories have been banging away at this for some days, and last night they escalated this, publishing a leaked email from a Labour lawyer to McSweeney implying that McSweeney was advised not to tell the Electoral Commission the full reasons why donations were not declared. The Daily Mail has splashed the story. Here is our version, by Pippa Crerar.
The story has not achieved mega lift-off – BBC Breakfast did not even ask McFadden about it – but on Times Radio he was asked if he had confidence in McFadden, and he replied:
Yes, I do. I worked with him very closely on the election campaign. He’s a person of enormous talent.
And on the Today programme McFadden was asked if he was 100% happy that McSweeney had done nothing wrong. McFadden replied:
The Electoral Commission made a statement on this last night, and they said that they’d looked into all these things some years ago and they really didn’t have anything to add to it.
Look, I’m not surprised that the Conservatives are trying to, attack someone who was very effective, who was an integral part of Labour’s general election campaign last year in delivering the Labour victory. And they don’t have very often; they don’t fall from the sky. They require talented people to work on them. He did that, and he did it in a very effective way.
Asked again if he was convinced that McSweeney did nothing criminally wrong, McFadden said:
Look, I think the Electoral Commission have looked into that. They’ve said there is nothing to add here. They are the people actually charged with policing the rules around declarations to nations and all the rest of that. And they looked into this as far back, I think, as 2021.
I will post more from McFadden’s interviews shortly.
The Commons is in recess, and Labour and the Conservatives are both preparing for their party conferences. Labour’s starts this weekend, and the Tories’ the week after. The political diary looks quite empty, but the news never stops, so something will come up.
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