Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, does not immediately display the demeanour of a disruptor. He speaks softly, picks his phrases with care, and cultivates an unassuming image. But underneath the sober blue suit are the scars of a streetfighter. As a young man, McSweeney came to political maturity fighting the hard left in Lambeth and the far right in Dagenham, winning back working-class voters to a Labour party that had forgotten its roots. He went on to secure last year’s landslide, gifting Keir Starmer a majority large enough to remake Britain.
His style as an insurgent owes something to his background. He grew up in Ireland with parents who were activists in Fine Gael, the party that venerates the IRA mastermind Michael Collins as its founder. His paternal grandfather served in the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, winning a medal for his service. In many ways, McSweeney is Collins’s spiritual successor: a believer in basing strategy on hard intelligence work, a fighter ruthless in identifying the real enemy, an organiser conscious of how internal rivalries threaten success – and a realist scornful of soft-headedness.
For McSweeney the insurgent, Labour’s first six months in office proved a frustrating time. Many of his insights – those that made Labour electable – appeared to have been overlooked by the very ministers he propelled into power. Instead of concentrating on crime, migration and the cost of living, the government appeared captured by Treasury mandarins and soft-left lobbies. They cut fuel payments for pensioners, raised taxes in a way which depresses wages, pursued changes to education policy designed by the teachers’ unions, and struck poses on the international stage which had more to do with decolonisation than defending the national interest.
McSweeney has now responded by trying to wrench the government away from complacent incumbency and back to true insurgency. He believes Labour should fight for working people against the establishment, rather than seek comfortable accommodation with its institutions.
In many ways, he is Michael Collins’s spiritual successor: a believer in basing strategy on intelligence work
The nature of McSweeney’s politics is illuminated, in unsparing detail, in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s brilliant new history of Labour’s path back to power, Get In, which is published this week. The authors report McSweeney asking party colleagues a series of uncomfortable questions: ‘Are we always going to be for the judges? Are we always going to be for the BBC? Why should Gary Lineker be paid £2 million a year?’
McSweeney, they write, felt ‘Labour’s instincts had become conservative, elitist, too willing to defend failure provided those failing were its friends: lawyers, activists, columnists. For all its sentimental claims of iconoclasm and people power it was really a “party of the status quo”, an echo chamber for the received wisdom of metropolitan England that its traditional voters despised’. None embodied it better than Lisa Nandy, whose thinking McSweeney described with a devastating tricolon: ‘No gender, no borders, no Queen.’
To be fair to Nandy, she has at times been a champion of Leave voters. But there is no doubt about the fire McSweeney feels on behalf of working-class voters, nor about his disdain for the smuggery of the professional left. This outlook places him at a significant distance from some of Starmer’s instincts.
Starmer’s own political outlook does have one area of overlap with McSweeney’s: he, too, sees himself as a genuine tribune of working people. Biography is not always destiny, but in Starmer’s childhood there were the roots of his radicalism. He was deeply affected by the condescension he saw displayed towards his working-class family in Surrey. The innate worth of all, the need to accord dignity to those for whom life is a dogged struggle, inspires his politics. And his sense of injustice is fired by the easy path through life that he sees afforded to the entitled. He has a very personal dislike of Boris Johnson.
So there is certainly an affinity between McSweeney and Starmer, as warriors for the workers. But there are two important areas where there is tension – and crucially, these areas are essential to the Prime Minister’s political personality. They are the law and Whitehall.
Starmer’s success as a lawyer won him professional prestige and personal ideological satisfaction. He was respected by the liberal intellectuals of the human rights bar for his diligence and intellect. He also secured admiration from the broader left for his championing of the workers who lost out in the Wapping dispute with Rupert Murdoch, and the environmental campaigners who took on McDonald’s in a landmark libel case.
Starmer’s reputation as a Jacobin advocate – more Robespierre than Rumpole – made him a hero for many young radicals. He fought for the people who became the Corbyn generation. He then went on to combine that with establishment laurels as director of public prosecutions, managing the Crown Prosecution Service. He became respected in Whitehall and won over the grandees of the civil service. These twin achievements – campaigning radical lawyer and reassuring establishment manager, both Mark Darcy and Sir Humphry – made him the ideal candidate to succeed Jeremy Corbyn. He was left enough to seduce idealists and reassuring enough to soothe realists.
McSweeney spotted this earlier than almost anyone. He made overtures to Starmer while Corbyn was still leader, placing at Starmer’s disposal the vast array of data about the party membership that he had gathered for his underground thinktank Labour Together. Starmer welcomed the alliance. He wanted, above all, to win. McSweeney threw himself into the work. He wanted, above all, the Corbynites to lose, for the role they had played in damaging the Labour party.
The path from Starmer’s victory in the leadership election to victory in the general election was not an easy one. Again and again, Starmer’s default position was to swing back to Labour’s comfort zone: making friends with all factions; hesitating to confront hard-left enemies; indulging soft-left allies. Starmer’s natural home was with the lawyers, the activists and the columnists, whom McSweeney anathematised.
There is a new emphasis on growth, an impatience with establishment excuses for inertia
But while he wanted to be liked, Starmer still wanted to win. So again and again, after doubts and prevarication, Starmer accepted the logic of McSweeney’s analysis. Out went soft-left Anneliese Dodds as shadow chancellor and unaffordable green energy spending plans. The national anthem replaced the red flag at Labour’s conference, and Brexit was gingerly embraced.
McSweeney’s plan triumphed for Labour last July. The Red Wall was breached. Those whom McSweeney called the ‘hero’ voters – who had deserted the left under Corbyn to back Brexit and then Boris – came home to Labour.
But since that victory, they have been disappointed. Labour has returned to its cosy comfort zone. Starmer appointed as attorney general an even more zealous human rights ideologue than himself, Richard Hermer KC. No sooner was Hermer installed in the Lords than he set about correcting the behaviour of the elected ministers whose grubby ascent to office through actual contact with voters sat ill with his attachment to legal purity. Whether imposing arms embargoes on Israel, ceding sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, or lecturing his colleagues on the defects of ‘populist’ democracy, Hermer entrenches establishment thinking over insurgent instincts wherever he can.
Metropolitan indulgence has also allowed Ed Miliband to pursue an energy policy which is applauded by NGOs but has alienated working people in industry. The steel, ceramics and oil and gas sectors all face crippling costs and closures. Similar sentimentality has allowed the Department for Education to let the Blob unwind education reforms, while weakening the system of accountability. Failing schools are being let off the hook, meaning pupils and parents must suffer.
And the Whitehall establishment has also Taken Back Control. The Treasury had all its recommendations for last year’s Budget accepted unchallenged by a quiescent No. 11 and a passive No. 10. The choice of a new cabinet secretary was made based on establishment soundness, not disruptive energy. Business policy has been shaped by accommodation with corporatist lobbyists. The effusive welcome to Downing Street afforded to the private equity mogul Larry Fink of Blackrock by Starmer and Rachel Reeves was a signal Labour was happy with establishment investors. The inheritance tax hit to family firms, meanwhile, indicated that those without big lobbying power would lose out.
Labour’s retreat has allowed the rise of other insurgents, most powerfully in the shape of Nigel Farage’s Reform. It now regularly tops the polls and is currently predicted to take the seats of scores of ministers.
For McSweeney and his allies, the answer to this malaise is clear. Labour needs to be the insurgency once more. There is a lesson in Ireland’s past which he will be aware of. When the people’s hero Michael Collins became seduced by London’s establishment, he managed to secure office, temporarily, but was outflanked by those such as his rival Eamon de Valera, who stuck to the insurgent path. McSweeney will not want Labour to make the same mistake as Collins, and it appears he is being listened to by his party. There is a new emphasis on growth, a tougher line on borders, an impatience with establishment excuses for inertia.
But those in Labour who look to McSweeney for leadership believe there is more that must be done. The newly formed Red Wall group of MPs, which has McSweeney’s back, this week broke cover to demand a tougher line on border security. One Labour MP has told his constituents that it is only when Hermer goes that the government will show itself to be serious about being an insurgent administration. Others argue that a proper industrial strategy that is truly pro-worker can never be implemented with Miliband where he is. Those on McSweeney’s wing of Labour worry that Starmer may not have the stomach for the policies on migration and crime the country wants. Past shibboleths like the ECHR would need to be reassessed.
Change of that kind will not be easy for Starmer. The allies and policies he finds himself most comfortable with would face a reckoning. But the insurgents believe that unless Starmer does act, a far worse reckoning awaits him at the polls.
Starmer’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, joins Michael Gove on the latest Edition podcast to discuss Morgan McSweeney and his political philosophy:
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