One among Keir Starmer’s key advisers has resigned over a historic WhatsApp dialog. It’s the newest weird twist in a torrid fortnight for the Prime Minister, as he loses one other necessary ally to scandal.
Paul Ovenden, the No 10 Director of Technique, stop at this time following a leak of personal messages from 2017 through which he relayed sexually specific jokes about Diane Abbott. Whereas he didn’t truly make the feedback, his choice to relay them to a colleague over WhatsApp eight years in the past has been judged sufficiently damaging for him to resign.
A former journalist, Ovenden labored as a press officer beneath Jeremy Corbyn earlier than returning as an adviser to Starmer. He took a senior technique job in No 10 after final 12 months’s election. He’s near the Prime Minister’s chief of employees Morgan McSweeney and can be a key member of the “Blue Labour” motion, a class-based, culturally conservative tendency inside the Labour Social gathering.
Ovenden supplied mental ballast inside No 10, and was seen as an necessary thinker who was ready to problem what some see as a soggy consensus on key points inside the Parliamentary Labour Social gathering (PLP). Ovenden grew up exterior London and didn’t attend an Oxbridge college, in distinction to many civil servants and particular advisors. He had a special sensibility to others inside Labour, which every so often led to battle.
The prospect of one other key advisor being pressured out of No 10 is deeply unhelpful for the prime minister, who has already misplaced his deputy prime minister and his ambassador to the US in two successive scandals over the previous fortnight. Ovenden was valued by Starmer and wrote speeches for him.
The New Statesman understands that Ovenden was already planning to face down from his place. Starmer by no means wished to lose him.
However the leaked messages have turned what may need been a quiet exit from public life right into a messy scandal. It provides to the overall ambiance of chaos round an embattled Prime Minister who promised stability and excessive requirements in public life. He has now confronted three resignation-cum-dismissals over impropriety on the trot.
It’s disappointing information too for McSweeney. Solely final 12 months he was praised in lots of quarters because the election-winning saviour of the Labour Social gathering. Now he’s a lightning rod for criticism, and he has misplaced yet one more good friend on the prime, simply after the sacking of his mentor Peter Mandelson.
Whereas Ovenden’s sudden removing heaps extra distress on the Prime Minister and his prime advisor, his demise may not be mourned by everybody in Labour. His Blue Labour instincts made him a divisive determine on the left the PLP.
This was not helped by persistent rumours (and rumours they continue to be) that he was a supply of adverse briefings about Cupboard ministers and MPs from the soft-left wing of the occasion. Such briefings have been held up as proof of a “boy’s membership” on the prime of No 10.
The Abbott messages date from 2017, when Ovenden was a Labour press officer beneath the management of Jeremy Corbyn. On the time Abbott was shadow house secretary. Ovenden has described them as “a foolish dialog”.
Not one of the different folks concerned within the messages are understood to be working in authorities now.
[See also: How Peter Mandelson became a monster]