Morgan McSweeney, Richard Nixon and the Art of the Resignation Letter

Finito World

Resignation letters are among the strangest artefacts of political life. They are written at moments of acute pressure, often in haste, yet are expected to sound timeless. They must absorb blame without admitting too much, express contrition without legal exposure, and preserve loyalty while explaining departure. Over time, the genre has evolved from patrician understatement to moral theatre. In that evolution sits Morgan McSweeney’s resignation statement — a document that tells us as much about modern politics as it does about the man leaving office.

McSweeney’s letter is striking for its explicit moral architecture. “The only honourable course is to step aside,” he writes, reviving a word — honour — that once dominated political resignations but now appears mainly as quotation or irony. Responsibility is not merely acknowledged; it is dramatised. “In public life responsibility must be owned when it matters most, not just when it is most convenient.” This is resignation as ethical argument, not administrative necessity.

Earlier resignation letters assumed a shared moral universe and therefore said less. When John Profumo resigned in 1963, his letter to the Prime Minister was devastating precisely because of its brevity and formality. “I regret very much that I misled the House of Commons,” he wrote. “I tender my resignation as Secretary of State for War.” There is no attempt to explain himself, no appeal to wider causes, no reference to victims or systems. The offence was clear, the convention understood. The resignation was an act of closure.

Go back further and the tone becomes even more austere. In the nineteenth century, resignation letters often read like changes of lodging rather than public reckonings. Sir Robert Peel’s resignation letters are exercises in restrained dignity, heavy on duty to the Crown and light on personal feeling. The assumption was that reputation would be judged elsewhere — by Parliament, by history, or by silence.

What has changed is not simply politics but the audience. Profumo wrote for Parliament and the Prime Minister. McSweeney writes for a country, a party, a media ecosystem, and a moral court of public opinion that expects explicit gestures of accountability. His letter does not merely resign; it narrates. It identifies error (“The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong”), establishes causality (“When asked, I advised the Prime Minister”), asserts moral agency (“I take full responsibility”), and then widens the lens to include victims, process reform, and loyalty to the leader.

That widening is significant. “We must remember the women and girls whose lives were ruined by Jeffrey Epstein,” he writes, before turning to institutional reform. This is resignation as policy intervention. Where Profumo’s letter ended a career, McSweeney’s attempts to shape what comes next. Modern resignation letters are rarely exits; they are positioning documents.

American political resignations show a similar evolution, albeit filtered through a different constitutional culture. Richard Nixon’s resignation letter in 1974 is famously bloodless. “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States,” it reads, addressed to the Secretary of State, as if vacating a tenancy. The moral drama played out in speeches and television addresses, not in the letter itself. The form remained legalistic, even as the moment was seismic.

Contrast that with more recent US resignations, which increasingly resemble open letters. When Al Franken resigned from the Senate in 2017, he spoke of letting constituents down, acknowledged shifting standards, and framed his departure as part of a broader reckoning. The resignation became an act of participation in a moral movement, not merely a response to procedural failure.

This evolution reflects a deeper shift in how politics understands legitimacy. Earlier systems relied on unwritten codes, elite consensus, and shared assumptions about honour. Modern politics operates in a fragmented moral marketplace. Silence is suspicious; brevity looks evasive. A resignation letter must now demonstrate values, empathy, and awareness of systems, not just personal fault.

McSweeney’s statement is exemplary of this modern form. It is carefully balanced: contrition without self-abasement, loyalty without self-exculpation. He insists he did not oversee vetting, yet calls for the process to be “fundamentally overhauled”. He steps aside for “the bigger cause” while reaffirming commitment to the party and leader. Even departure must be productive.

What is lost in this evolution is ambiguity. Profumo’s letter allowed history to do the judging. Today’s resignation letters attempt to pre-empt it. They seek to frame the narrative before others do, to anchor interpretation in moral intent rather than factual sequence. This makes them richer texts but less final acts.

What is gained is transparency of a sort — or at least the performance of it. Modern political life demands visible accountability, not just enacted accountability. The resignation letter has become a ritual of reassurance, aimed at restoring trust in institutions by showing that individuals can still be held to account.

The irony, of course, is that the more elaborate the ritual becomes, the more sceptical audiences grow. Honour declared too loudly can sound rehearsed. Responsibility too carefully apportioned can feel managed. Yet the absence of such language would now appear callous or incomplete.

In that sense, the resignation letter has become a mirror of modern politics itself: more self-aware, more performative, more morally explicit, and more anxious about legitimacy. McSweeney’s letter sits squarely in that tradition. It is not merely an ending, but an argument about how endings should now look.

And perhaps that is the final lesson. Resignation letters no longer close chapters. They annotate them.