Paul Ovenden
 Paul Ovenden      ( SPAD) | |
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| Alma mater | University of Southampton |
Starmerite Downing Street special adviser who had to resign | |
Paul Ovenden is a former British special adviser and political aide who was Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Head of Political Strategy from July 2024 to September 2025, when Morgan McSweeney was Downing Street Chief of Staff.
Resignation
Ovenden was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had made sexually explicit and offensive remarks about black Labour MP Diane Abbott.[1]
Ovenden's resignation came just a few days after PM Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson as his ambassador to the US and less than two weeks after Angela Rayner resigned as deputy prime minister.[2]
Anti-Corbyn
In 2017, Ovenden was a junior press officer at Labour Party HQ when he was exchanging messages with Blairite colleagues that were critical of other staffers and MPs who supported the then Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Eight years later, investigative journalist and author, Paul Holden, revealed the existence of these messages in a book published in October 2025, but released to certain media outlets a month earlier.
On 13 October 2025, Holden explained why he had given exclusive extracts of "The Fraud" to The Canary and Inside Croydon:
"Last month, I started releasing exclusive stories from my upcoming book, "The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy".
"The results were immediate.
"In the first week, Paul Ovenden, Number 10’s director of strategy, resigned after I revealed his role in problematic chat messages, conducted via his Labour Party messaging system, about Diane Abbott."[3]
Resignation statement
Ovenden said in his statement:
"I am accused of eight years ago as a junior press officer sharing with a female colleague the details of a silly conversation that I was party to with other female staff members.
"Before summer, I had announced to some of my colleagues my intention to leave government.
"Though the messages long pre-date my current employment and relationship with the prime minister, I've brought forward my resignation to avoid distracting from the vital work this government is doing to positively change people's lives.
"As an advisor, my duty is to protect the reputation of the prime minister and his government.
"While it is chilling that a private conversation from nearly a decade ago can do this sort of damage, I am also truly, deeply sorry for it and the hurt it will cause."
References
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