The Conservatives are continuing to suggest that Morgan McSweeney has been engaged in some sort of conspiracy to dispose of his mobile phone, and stop parliament getting hold of his messages with Peter Mandelson. Yesterday Kemi Badenoch said “it is only right that Morgan McSweeney testifies in Parliament and explains exactly what happened”. And this morning Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, told Sky New that “the whole thing is as smelly as a fish market on a hot summer’s afternoon”.

Referring to claims that McSweeney’s account of how he had his phone stolen (meaning the messages potentially cannot be recovered) and that the police did not investigate it propertly, Griffith went on:

It just doesn’t compute, does it? I worked in Number 10. Briefly, I had a Number 10 phone. There was a paranoia about devices like that falling into other people’s hands.

And so whether it was the Met Police, whether it was Morgan McSweeney, and what sounds like pretty evasive set of reporting, even when you look at that transcript, or whether it was the Number 10 security team following up something that at the time they could not have been sure had not been taken by a state actor, a phone with all sorts of government secrets potentially in it, that’s precisely why people in government have two separate phones.

Griffith worked in No 10 for Boris Johnson, who reportedly told the Covid inquiry that it could not read messages on one of his phones because he had forgotten his password. Perhaps this explains why Griffith is sceptical about explanations from No 10 figures about why phone messages cannot be obtained.

Keir Starmer has said that the idea that McSweeney was engaged in a plot to dispose of the phone is “far-fetched”. Others are more dismissive, suggesting the Tories have gone into full conspiracy theory mode. There is precedent for this; last year Badenoch and her team spent several weeks pushing the theory that Jonathan Powell, the PM’s national security adviser, has intervened to get the CPS to drop the China spy case, before they eventually gave up after an inquiry by a parliamentary inquiry found no evidence at all to support the claim.

But it is not just the Tories who think there is something fishy going on.

Last night the Labour MP Karl Turner posted these on social media, accusing McSweeney of lying when he told the police his phone had been stolen.

I don’t believe McSwindle had his iPhone stolen

Honest believe, Matt. It’s smacks of the liar Johnson defence of ‘lost all my WhatsApp messages’. 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!

I believe the report was made. McSwindle didn’t mention that he was the chief of staff to the PM. A significant omission of he’d wanted the police to prioritise the offence.

Turner is an outspoken MP who is willing to go much further than his colleagues in saying things that are provocative. But this morning he has received partial backing from Richard Burgon. He has tabled some parliamentary written questions about McSweeney’s phone which suggest he does not think the full truth is being told.

Burgon is a leading figure in the Socialist Campaign group in parliament, which represents leftwingers, and he was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour left hate McSweeney because he masterminded the Labour Together operation to destroy Corbynism, and some respects Burgon’s intervention might be best understood as a new instalment of Labour internal feuding.