Blair and Scottish Labour McTernan was political secretary and director of political operations at
10 Downing Street for
Tony Blair from 2005 to 2007, where he provided
political management and support for the development of the government's
political strategy. In 2007, McTernan was seconded to the
Scottish Labour Party to run its campaign for the
May 2007 Scottish Parliament election. During the 2006–07 police investigation into the
Cash for Honours political scandal surrounding the Labour Party, McTernan was twice questioned,
under caution, by the
Metropolitan Police. No criminal charges were ever brought against McTernan or anybody else. From 2007 to 2008 he was Special Adviser to
Des Browne,
Secretary of State for Scotland and
Secretary of State for Defence. In January 2008, while McTernan was employed as a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Scotland, it emerged that in 2002 McTernan had branded Scotland as being "narrow" and "
racist" during the period he worked for the Scottish Arts Council. In an email to the then Labour
MSP Karen Gillon, who was about to make a trip to
Sweden, McTernan wrote: "If you've not been to Sweden before, I think you'll really like it – it's the country Scotland would be if it wasn't narrow,
Presbyterian, racist etc. etc.
Social democracy in action." The email was obtained by the London
Sunday Times under
freedom of information legislation.
Work in Australia In 2007 he worked on the November 2007
Australian Labor Party federal election campaign. From February 2011 to October 2011, he was Thinker in Residence at the
Government of South Australia. During 2012–13, a political scandal erupted over his employment. Accusations were made that Gillard had not attempted to find a suitable Australian candidate for the director of communications post, but had flouted Australia's
visa process to employ John McTernan, a British citizen, on a
457 visa – a foreign workers scheme which is designed for employers who cannot find local candidates to fill jobs. When a reporter from Australia's
ABC News asked McTernan if he was working in Australia on a 457 visa, he replied "hardly fucking relevant".
Later career In January 2015, McTernan was appointed chief of staff to
Jim Murphy, then Scottish Labour leader, ahead of the
2015 general election, and oversaw media and policy in this role. McTernan strongly opposed
Jeremy Corbyn, the eventual winner, in the
2015 Labour leadership election, describing Corbyn's popularity as a "strange psychological emotional spasm". He said: "I can't see any case for letting him have two minutes in office, let alone two years in office because I think the damage that will be done to the Labour party in that period makes it incredibly hard to recover". The MPs who nominated Corbyn were "moronic", according to McTernan. Following the 2016 revelations about
David Cameron's earlier offshore earnings, and Corbyn's call for an investigation, McTernan argued in his
Daily Telegraph column that
tax avoidance is an expression of basic British freedoms. In February 2016 McTernan joined the policy and media advice agency Westminster Policy Institute as an associate. He continued to write a regular column for
The Daily Telegraph. In November 2016, McTernan bet blogger
Stuart Campbell $100 on a
Clinton victory in the
2016 US presidential election, which he lost. Campbell has said that McTernan failed to honour the bet, and Campbell has taken court action against him. In August 2017 McTernan joined the Labour Party left-wing pressure group
Momentum, set up to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. McTernan had previously been a critic of Momentum and of Corbyn. In October 2018, John McTernan was asked if he still defended the
2003 invasion of Iraq. He responded in the affirmative: "Any war against a fascist dictator is a good war." He went on to compare the war in Iraq to the
Falklands War, the
Second World War and the
Spanish Civil War. "As my Kurdish friends say 'We never ask why did you invade, we ask why did you take so long?'," said McTernan. He went on to argue that
Brexit was the result of a lack of a humanitarian intervention in the
Syrian civil war because it would have prevented the refugee crisis. In April 2020, McTernan wrote an article in
The Critic advising
Keir Starmer to purge the "Corbynistas" from the
Labour party, saying that "there's no problem with a witch-hunt when there really are witches to hunt". In June 2024, however, he wrote another article, in which he said, "the Left is a vital part of our movement – our broad church", and asked rhetorically, "Where would New Labour have been without
Marxism Today?" In November 2024, Prime Minister
Keir Starmer distanced himself from McTernan following comments he made on
GB News while discussing inheritance tax rises in the budget which would affect farmers. He said that family farming is “an industry we can do without" and suggested that if farmers protested "we can do to them what
Margaret Thatcher did to the miners”. ==References==