What is the controversy over McSweeney's stolen phone?

Helen MacNamara, The Independent

In the ballad of Morgan McSweeney's stolen phone, the latest verse is a surreal one. Having taken the unusual step of publishing a transcript of the 999 call that Keir Starmer's former Downing Street chief of staff made last October, to report that his government-issue device had been snatched, the Metropolitan Police has now decided to comb through CCTV footage of the incident. Thoughts and prayers to those attempting to narrow down which of the guys cycling on the pavement is the holder of McSweeney's phone, which is believed may contain messages relating to Peter Mandelson's appointment as US ambassador. There will have been more than one mobile stolen in SW1 that night. But at least now they can check the right camera footage: in the transcript of the police call, Morgan says the incident was on Belgrave Road in Westminster, which was misrecorded by the police call handler as Belgrave Street, miles away in east London.

In a way, it's reassuring that even the prime minister's chief of staff is subject to the same laws of gravity as the rest of us when it comes to phones being snatched... and the police doing their worst. I have some game here. I too have had my phone stolen. It was snatched out of my hand while I was texting, by a big bloke on a Lime bike. Like McSweeney, I did not give chase — nor could I elicit any effective response from the Met.

When I was deputy cabinet secretary, part of my job was ensuring the proper keeping of the record, including mobile calls made, emails and messages. In that respect, the theft of Morgan McSweeney's phone oughtn't be hugely significant. The crime was (correctly) reported to Downing Street before the police, and so should have been wiped within minutes. Anything on the phone relating to government business will ordinarily have been stored safely elsewhere.

But the theft of Morgan's phone does matter, because this everyday tale of low-level London street crime has instead become a haven for conspiracies and compounding mistrust in our political systems. It is eight weeks since the Conservatives, aided by Keir Starmer's own backbenchers, used the roguish parliamentary trick of a Humble Address to force the government to publish all the information they have about the appointment of Peter Mandelson.

Humble Addresses short-cut the usual systems protecting the government from disclosing information they would rather keep private. In every other recent case, Humble Addresses have resulted in documents being published in days and weeks. It's not optional. That's the point. This time, however, it will be months before the full information is disclosed — if ever.

The first “tranche” of documents produced earlier this month contained industrial quantities of padding. Literally dozens of blank pages and standardised documents about HR processes. What is becoming increasingly clear is the delay is in part because the government simply doesn't hold the relevant information it needs to comply with the Humble Address request. It is only recently that it has occurred to someone high up in Whitehall that they might need to ask people for messages on personal phones, as well as on the standard-issue kit.

Well, yes. That much was obvious back in February. If a mobile phone belongs to the government and is used for the business of state, no records on it should be deleted. Periodically, the contents should be transferred to the relevant file. And if something important is on your personal phone, those messages too should be part of the record. In the days after Mandelson was sacked last September, there was a cursory attempt to piece together the process for his appointment. The instinct to find out what went wrong was a good one — for all the reasons, including self-protection and even the possibility of learning from experience. But in these exercises you do actually need to lift the drains, not waft around a bit of Febreze and hope for the best.

This was a missed opportunity, a chance to assemble a file of the relevant messages, notes and documents about how the appointment had come to be made, as well as recollections: asking everyone involved for their perspectives. All of this could, and should, have been done well before Morgan's phone was stolen.

Worryingly, in the Mandelson papers that have been published so far, there is no voice of the prime minister, nor his now former chief of staff. There is so very little written down when there should be emails, notes of conversations, an audit trail. This is why the disappearance of McSweeney's phone is causing such outcry. No 10 seems unable to offer reassurance because the relevant information is... elsewhere.

This failure to write things down goes to the heart of the way in which any government functions. Government business should be recorded. It's not laborious — it's the work.

The knowledge that what you are doing, decisions you have taken and advice you have given, will one day be open to the scrutiny of others is such an important, always-on invisible corrective on the behaviour of everyone involved in governing. I've seen my advice, emails and messages published in the cold light of day years later. We should want the people in positions of power to be concerned about what history will think of them.