MP who accused McSweeney of lying stripped of whip

Just five days ago Rats in a Sack reported how Labour MP Karl Turner had cast doubt on Morgan McSweeney’s story of having his phone stolen, calling him “McSwindle” and effectively accusing him of lying. Now he’s independent MP Karl Turner.

The MP, on Labour’s soft left, was referring to the news that McSweeney, former chief of staff to Keir Starmer, reported his phone as stolen last year. The news has emerged since the government promised to comply with a demand from MPs to publish all messages relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

“It’s [sic] smacks of the liar Johnson defence of ‘lost all my WhatsApp messages’,” wrote Turner, MP for Hull East, on X. “We mustn’t take the public for fools. And I am afraid this smacks of too convenient by far. I won’t do it. I will say what I actually think. And I don’t believe it. End of!”.

What it might be “end of”, though, is Turner’s time as a Labour parliamentarian – the party today stripped him of the whip. Sources say it is due to complaints about his conduct online as well as in parliament from other MPs, although Turner had been leading opposition to plans from the Ministry of Justice to cut the number of jury trials and introduce new judge-only courts.

Suggested Reading

Caroline Wheeler and colleagues no longer labouring together at Sunday Times

Rats in a Sack

The final straw for Labour whips appears to have been an interview Turner has given to Jody McIntyre, an activist who stood at the 2024 election against Labour’s Jess Phillips, running for George Galloway’s hard left Workers Party of Britain on a single-issue platform of Gaza and cutting her majority to just 700 votes.

In the interview with McIntyre, Turner described McSweeney as a “lying bastard” and claimed he was “still running the job”, despite leaving Downing Street last month. “If I lost my phone, I’d be calling Shabana [Mahmood] direct,” he said. “I’ve fucked up, I’ve got messages slagging off X, Y and Z and I don’t want them on the front pages. Every police officer in the area would be notified, fact.”

Turner today wrote on X: “I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not.”

The MP, who had been shadow solicitor general but was not given a government role after the election, has previously said he was on a “conduct warning” from the whips and suggested he would spark a byelection if he was suspended. Given that he was reelected in 2024 with just a 3,920 majority over Reform and, if he stood as an independent, would draw away some of the remaining Labour vote, Starmer needs that at the moment like a hole in the head.