2.2.4 – The ways in which Parliament interacts with the Executive
This week the government finished publishing the bulk of the files relating to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to the United States. These files were not limited to formal documents; they also included private messages between Mandelson and government ministers, some of them acutely embarrassing. Presenting the disclosure to the House of Commons, Darren Jones – the newly created Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister – called it one of the largest government publications ever laid before the House, an exercise that cost the Cabinet Office alone more than £1 million. Even Jones did not emerge unscathed.
The first problem was not what the files contained, but what they didn’t. It quickly became clear that thousands of messages which should have formed part of the disclosure could not be released, because ministers – including Jones himself and Keir Starmer – had used WhatsApp’s “disappearing messages” feature, which deletes messages and renders them unrecoverable after a set period. Jones told the Commons he was among those who no longer had access to all his exchanges. This has been a problem in government for some time. Indeed, the very practice of conducting government business over WhatsApp, rather than official channels, is itself troubling.
When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, his government pledged to introduce a Freedom of Information Act. It passed in 2000 and became operational in 2005. The Act gives the public access to information held by public authorities. Exceptions were built into it – for national security, for example – but the default position is that government information is disclosable. The aim was to make government more transparent and to rebuild public confidence in political institutions.
The difficulty is that the Act has arguably discouraged ministers and officials from communicating openly, precisely because they fear their communications may one day be disclosed. Blair himself later regretted introducing it, writing in his 2010 memoir, A Journey:
‘You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.’
The issue of “government by WhatsApp” first reared its head after the COVID-19 pandemic, when the public inquiry struggled to obtain government data. Awkwardly for Labour, they had been fiercely critical of Boris Johnson’s government over exactly this issue while in opposition – which makes their current position look distinctly hypocritical.
Beyond the missing messages, several of those that were published have proved damaging. The most widely reported came from Pat McFadden – then the senior minister in the Cabinet Office, and now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions following the September 2025 reshuffle. On 24 May 2025, agreeing with Mandelson that the parliamentary party was in a “mutinous state,” he wrote: “Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.” That the man who now runs the welfare brief once voiced this frustration only sharpens its sting.
Starmer’s struggles to manage his own party over welfare cuts run to the heart of his problems as Prime Minister. The most notable was a plan to cut welfare spending by around £5 billion a year by 2030 by tightening the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments. It became one of Starmer’s many U-turns when more than 130 Labour MPs indicated they would back an amendment that would, in practice, have killed the bill.
To have such a statement from a sitting minister in the public domain is damaging, and the Opposition will return to it for years. This has happened before. By tradition, an outgoing minister leaves a note for their successor after a change of government – sometimes serious, sometimes playful. In 2010, Liam Byrne, the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, left a one-line note: “I’m afraid there is no money.” It was made public by his successor and brandished by the Conservatives for the next five years to attack Labour’s economic record.
The ghost of Peter Mandelson, it seems, continues to haunt the government of Keir Starmer.