Westminster is once again in turmoil, this time over revelations that have sent shockwaves through both the Labour Party and the wider British political landscape. On September 17, 2025, Paul Ovenden, a once-powerful Labour insider and Keir Starmer’s director of political strategy, resigned after private WhatsApp messages from 2017 surfaced, revealing sexually explicit and derogatory remarks about Diane Abbott, the longest-standing female MP and the current Mother of the House. The episode has not only reignited debates about racism and sexism within British politics but has also raised thorny questions about privacy, accountability, and the digital age’s unforgiving memory.
The leak, first reported in a forthcoming book by investigative journalist Paul Holden, detailed Ovenden’s participation in a group chat where he and others played a game of “shag, marry, kill,” making Abbott the subject of crude sexual commentary. Downing Street was swift in its response, condemning the comments as “appalling and unacceptable.” According to The Guardian, the messages were sent when Ovenden was still a junior press officer under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, intended for a small group of close colleagues—including women—via the Labour Party’s internal instant messaging system.
Yet the fallout has been anything but private. Ovenden’s resignation comes at a precarious moment for Labour and Keir Starmer, who is already grappling with the resignations of Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson. As The Independent noted, Ovenden was one of Starmer’s longest-serving aides, and his abrupt departure leaves the Prime Minister even more isolated with the Labour Party Conference looming. The timing is particularly damaging, feeding into a narrative of a government beset by crisis and internal strife just 14 months after a historic election victory.
The scandal has also reignited scrutiny of Labour’s internal culture and its treatment of black and brown MPs, especially women. Diane Abbott, who has long been a lightning rod for both racism and misogyny, finds herself once again at the center of a storm not of her making. In a poignant reflection, a Labour MP confided, “I am just sad. They still just want to harvest our votes and use us. But racism, they ignore.” This sentiment echoes the findings of Martin Forde KC, the respected barrister commissioned by Starmer to investigate racism within Labour. Forde’s 2022 report concluded that antisemitism was being taken more seriously than anti-Black racism or Islamophobia, declaring Labour “an unwelcoming place for people of colour.”
Forde’s attempts to engage the party further on his recommendations were rebuffed. In 2023, he told Al Jazeera that “no one from Labour had been willing to discuss the recommendations further.” Instead, Labour responded with a legal letter accusing him of “acting against the party’s interests” and warning of possible further action. For many, this episode laid bare the party’s ongoing struggle to confront its own shortcomings on race and inclusion.
The issue of racism in British politics, of course, is not confined to Labour. The Conservative Party, too, has a long and chequered history, from Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech to Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 warning that Britons feared being “swamped by people with a different culture.” More recently, in 2019, prominent Tory donor Frank Hester made violent and racist remarks about Abbott, saying she made him “want to hate all black women” and that “she should be shot.” Though Hester later apologized, he denied his comments were racist or sexist. Abbott, frightened and upset, reported him to the police. Starmer denounced the government in the Commons, but in a telling moment, Abbott stood up 46 times and was never called to speak, forced to watch as others debated her dignity without her voice being heard.
While the explicit nature of Ovenden’s messages is undeniably offensive, the episode has also sparked a wider debate about the standards to which political figures are held, particularly regarding private communications from years past. Former Jeremy Corbyn spokesman Matt Zarb-Cousin suggested that the broadcast media—including the BBC—were aware of the messages before the election, implying the leak’s timing was calculated to coincide with the current crisis in Starmer’s government. Zarb-Cousin observed, “the ultimate irony here is the person whose job it was to do attack and rebuttal is finished off by an attack story,” adding, “the game is the game indeed, and if anything the Labour Right made the rules.”
Others have questioned whether it is reasonable—or even desirable—for political careers to be derailed by private messages sent years before, often in the context of internal party banter. The case of Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, who was suspended earlier in 2025 for offensive WhatsApp messages, is frequently cited as another example of this trend. As The Spectator noted, “penalising political figures for what they say on WhatsApp quickly becomes a race to the bottom.” A senior Labour staffer, himself caught up in the trove of leaked messages, revealed that colleagues had contemplated suicide over the fear of exposure, painting a picture of a toxic and paranoid political culture.
This blurring of the professional and personal is not unique to Labour. The digital revolution has transformed political communication, making WhatsApp, Facebook, and other platforms the default venues for both official business and private venting. The Covid inquiry in 2023, with its publication of WhatsApp exchanges between senior government figures, exposed the extent to which policy and personal banter now coexist in the same digital spaces. As one observer put it, “the actual work of governing will be derailed each time a political opponent gets hold of ammunition everyone knows is out there.”
In response, many MPs have adopted auto-delete settings for their messages, seeking to erase potential digital skeletons before they can haunt future careers. This has troubling implications for transparency and accountability—freedom of information requests lose their power when records are routinely scrubbed—and leaves the public with the uneasy sense that the business of government is conducted in the shadows.
Ultimately, the Ovenden affair is about more than one man’s resignation or even the immediate crisis facing Keir Starmer. It is a story about the intersection of racism, sexism, digital culture, and political accountability in modern Britain. It raises uncomfortable questions about who gets to speak, who is silenced, and how we balance the need for higher standards in public life with the realities of human imperfection and the permanence of the digital record.
As the dust settles, the Labour Party—and indeed all of Westminster—must reckon with the fact that every politician, staffer, and adviser is only ever one leak away from scandal. The challenge, now more than ever, is to build a political culture that is both transparent and humane, holding individuals to account without losing sight of the broader, systemic issues that so often go unaddressed.
