Tories are convinced McSweeney’s phone is the only one in London not to have been stolen | John Crace

Having painted London as a crime-ridden no-go zone, you’d have thought the Conservatives might cut McSweeney some slack

In recent years the Conservatives and the rightwing media have gone to great lengths to tell us that London has become a no-go zone. A hellscape where women are afraid to leave their homes. Where every non-white person is a criminal. Where simply using your phone is an invitation to be mugged. Where the police do nothing, and to make it through the day alive is as much as anyone could hope for.

So you would have thought that when Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, rang the police from his personal mobile to report that his government phone had been stolen, the Tories might cut him a little slack. What do you expect if you are mad enough to be using your phone at 10.30pm on a London street? Count yourself lucky that you weren’t killed.

Only it turns out that the Tories are convinced that McSweeney’s is the only phone in London not to have been nicked. This is the Mysterious Affair of the Phone that was Not Stolen. For rightwing hacks, this is the biggest scandal since Labour’s lockdown Currygate. Some believe to this day there are photos of Angela Rayner drinking tequila shots off a semi-naked Starmer and that the police were bought off with a chicken jalfrezi and a couple of garlic naans.

The timing of the theft is certainly curious. Peter Mandelson was sacked as US ambassador in September. No 10 were concerned about what messages might be revealed in relation to his appointment. In October, McSweeney’s phone goes awol.

Losing the phone isn’t the cleverest plan Downing Street could have come up with. After all, McSweeney was already implicated up to his neck in the Mandelson appointment – he has long since been forced to resign – and the only way the missing WhatsApp messages could have been any more damning was if Morg and Mandy had been texting that being a paedophile wasn’t as bad as all that.

So now we are stuck between cock up and conspiracy. And this time the Tories and the rightwing media appear convinced that McSweeney is a wrong ’un because … they want him to be. After all, it’s a well known fact that men with ginger hair and a beard can’t be trusted. McSweeney’s critics will not rest until a mile long stretch of the river has been dredged to find the phone. If the phone still isn’t found, they’ll say that’s yet more proof of a cover up. You can’t win with some people.

At Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, Kemi Badenoch resisted making more than a passing reference to the stolen phone. Normally the Tory leader appears unable to resist conspiracy theories she has read about on X that morning. But this was all a bit too batshit crazy even for her.

Yet in the time that has passed since PMQs, she – along with some normally relatively sensible members of her shadow cabinet – have been at pains to mention the conspiracy at every opportunity.

Late on Wednesday the Tories issued a statement in the name of the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Alex Burghart, detailing all the reasons why McSweeney was guilty as sin. He had said his phone was stolen in Belgrave Street, not Belgrave Road, the correct name of the location where the phone was allegedly stolen. He hadn’t made a huge fuss and said “don’t you know who I am?” All of which sounds like the relatively normal behaviour of someone who was in shock at being the victim of a crime. But for Alex and Kemi this was all a deliberate attempt to put the police off the scent.

As for the lack of a police investigation? As any Londoner would tell you, the time to get really suspicious is when a stolen phone is investigated by the police. Almost all end up just as statistics with a crime reference number.

Come Thursday, Kemi was demanding that McSweeney be the subject of a show trial in front of MPs. The shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith, soon joined in. The whole things was extremely fishy, he said. When he had briefly worked in No 10 there had been constant paranoia about phones. He seemed to have forgotten that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak also had form on phone management. Both came up with excuses for why they were unable to hand over their WhatsApp messages to the police while they were being investigated for breaches of the lockdown rules. Odd that neither were a scandal worth mentioning. Perhaps what we are learning is that if the Tories had appointed Mandelson, they would have happily tossed their mobiles into the Thames without a second thought.

But we know we have reached peak conspiracy madness when we hit the Hitler moment. That came on Thursday when a Mail on Sunday columnist posted on X that the Guardian would have been in favour of appeasement when Hitler invaded Poland. All because the paper had suggested there wasn’t enough evidence to summarily convict McSweeney and that there was more than enough evidence out there to damn him anyway. You’d have thought a Mail columnist would have been more careful. The Mail was one of Hitler’s cheerleaders in the 1930s. Champions of Oswald Mosley. And in a story of insinuations, that at least is a fact.