Archiv: Number 10 Policy Unit


21.04.2026 - 22:18 [ Spectator.com ]

When Mandelson could bring down Starmer

(March 14, 2026)

As my big piece on Starmer last month revealed, even after Mandelson was appointed, Starmer never quizzed him about how to deal with Trump. All this exposes a Prime Minister with Olympic levels of detachment. It has been known for a while that he has little interest in politics but those who have worked with him have been genuinely surprised at his lack of interest in the detail of governing.

(…)

The book also reveals that the decision to sack Mandelson was taken by McSweeney, not Starmer. On the day the PM defended Mandelson in the Commons, McSweeney was in a secure basement conference room without his phone when two of Starmer’s closest aides – Paul Ovenden and Stuart Ingham – came to find him. Ingham told him: ‘We just can’t answer these questions.’

McSweeney’s response – ‘It’s unsustainable’ – was the moment the decision was effectively made.

21.04.2026 - 21:57 [ PoliticsHome.com ]

Oiling the machine – inside the Number 10 policy unit

(November 20, 2024)

Though it has grown over the past fifty years, the Policy Unit today still comprises fewer than thirty special advisers and junior Whitehall officials. This little platoon tends to be most effective when it acts as both the prime minister’s “eyes and ears”, to borrow Wilson’s phrase, and what Sarah Hogg, John Major’s policy chief, termed “the grit and oil in the government machine.” In other words, the Policy Unit works best by offering the prime minister unvarnished intelligence and advice about the direction of departmental policy, while giving Whitehall strategic clarity about what the prime minister wants or doesn’t want.

21.04.2026 - 21:53 [ theNational.scot ]

No 10 bid for SECOND paedo-linked Labour ally to get ambassador role

He was later pushed on who had ordered him to look into getting Doyle a position, and who had ordered him not to tell the foreign secretary (which at the time was David Lammy).

Robbins said: “I don‘t know what the origin of the suggestion was, and I don‘t know who exactly was behind it or how serious it was.

“It was serious enough for the No 10 private office to ring up the head of the diplomatic service and ask for a forward look of available head of mission jobs, and that‘s the point at which I thought that I needed to lay down some markers.”