In March 2023 the news broke that Sir Keir Starmer, odds-on favourite to become the next Labour prime minister, was looking to recruit Sue Gray to be his chief of staff. Gray was a senior civil servant, the Cabinet Office Second Permanent Secretary with a formidable reputation for effectiveness and maintaining ethical standards. Whitehall and Westminster took the view that this was a shrewd move by Starmer – Sue Gray certainly knew her way around Whitehall.
Starmer and Labour duly won in July 2024 but in October Sue Gray resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff. Although denied by some, there was clear evidence that a bitter turf war had been raging in Number 10 Downing Street between Gray and Starmer’s campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, the man behind Starmer’s rise to power.
An effective campaigner and ruthless street fighter
Over a number of years McSweeney had proved himself a highly effective campaigner and a ruthless street fighter. His characteristics include strict discipline and top-down control; words like ‘pluralism’ and ‘liberal’ seem not to be in his vocabulary.
As a director of the think tank Labour Together, McSweeney was able to pursue his personal project: to purge the party of Corbynism. He had a visceral hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and the far left who surrounded him and what they stood for. His eyes alighted on Sir Keir Starmer as a tool with which to change the direction of the party, and he went on to run Starmer’s successful leadership campaign.
Within Number 10, Gray and McSweeney battled for control of the Labour project. On two occasions Gray moved McSweeney’s desk away from its close proximity to Starmer’s office, at the same time requesting of Starmer that McSweeney be denied access to certain confidential networks. But Starmer’s sense of obligation to McSweeney meant that it was Gray who was moved out.
A dangerous ‘Trojan horse’
Neal Lawson ascribes McSweeney’s rise to power to his “Trojan horse” tactics: “he sucked up the language of the left so he could destroy it”. His target, according to Lawson, is not just Corbynism but also the centre left of the party, and campaign promises he masterminded – “Corbynism without Corbyn” – were a lie.
In pursuing his agenda, McSweeney may have chosen well in Starmer, a prime minister who appears to have no strongly held political opinions. According to Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund of The Times:
“McSweeney and his acolytes saw themselves as insurgents within the Labour Party. As long as Starmer’s private office was functional, they could control the party’s politics themselves – without interference from small-minded Westminster villagers. They knew that Starmer’s real life – his true self – was not the work they shared with him. Their political project was predicated on this unpolitical leader doing as he was told.”
The “small-minded Westminster villagers” being referred to here are the Labour backbenchers sitting in the Commons. Recently McSweeney told a couple of MPs from the new intake: “you are nothing more than a legal necessity. Don’t forget that”.
Unelected apparatchiks such as McSweeney usurping the prerogatives of members of parliament and treating back-benchers as convenient lobby fodder is not only, in governance terms, unacceptable, but the power that McSweeney wields is having troubling and indeed electorally harmful consequences for Labour.
Blue Labour: a reactionary rejection of Labour values
Maurice Glasman sits in the Lords as a Labour peer. He has been described as “the anti-immigration, pro-faith-flag-and-family” lord who berates “progressives” as “a sickness” and “the enemy”. He is the originator of Blue Labour, a movement that is economically interventionist and socially conservative. Given McSweeney’s project to rid the Labour party of Corbynism – a socially progressive movement – it is not surprising that Glasman identified McSweeney as a useful ally. McSweeney has bought into Blue Labour and is promoting it, drawing Starmer into pursuing its priorities.
Thus, referring to immigrants, the phrase “an island of strangers” finds its way into a Starmer speech, pandering to what are believed to be the nationalist instincts of working-class Labour voters. In a further effort to keep the Red Wall onside, the government continues to set its face against moving to join the EU single market and customs union, although such a shift is seen by a majority of economists as the quickest and most certain way to generate economic growth. (We may note that Glasman remains an ardent Brexiter – and an admirer of Donald Trump).
In an article for Labour List, Jeremy Gilbert describes the Blue Labour project as “advocating for a policy of re-industrialisation, immigration controls and universities being replaced by technical vocational colleges. In other words: turning the clock back to 1962, before globalisation and the expansion of universities spoiled everything”. Gilbert notes that Blue Labour’s “reactionary cultural commitments” are in fact “a total rejection of everything the party has ever actually stood for.”
Seeking success by ‘preying on divisions’
Another worrying development under Morgan McSweeney is the making of bad appointments. The most egregious of these is the recent appointment of David Dinsmore as government communications chief.
In his Byline Times column, the journalist Peter Oborne describes Dinsmore as “the repellent Sun editor who hosted the racist columnist Katie Hopkins who labelled asylum seekers who wished to come to this country as “cockroaches”. Oborne continues: “The appointment of Dinsmore is a vivid reminder that the McSweeney/Starmer project can only succeed by preying on divisions, creating new ones and in the process turning Britain into a rancid, hate-filled nation.”
Leading Labour to electoral loss
The focus on Blue Labour politics has caused despair among many Labour party members who worked hard to win the 2024 election. By concentrating on the Red Wall seats, McSweeney and co are fishing in a small pond. There is a much larger, well-stocked lake of voters who are progressive in outlook, re-distributional in tax and spend issues, in favour of electoral reform and moving much closer to the EU. These progressives feel ignored by Labour and are slipping away, sometimes to other parties.
Late August saw a local government by-election in West Hampstead ward, part of Camden constituency – immediately adjacent to Starmer’s own patch. A Labour seat was lost to the Liberal Democrats on a 19% swing. Results like this are likely to recur, with the Lib Dems or Greens benefiting at Labour’s expense. Oborne’s prediction is that “…if current trends persist, the McSweeney/Starmer legacy will be twofold: the final destruction of Clem Attlee’s Labour Party – and a Nigel Farage premiership.”
Progressives may tend to see Reform UK Ltd leader Nigel Farage as the most dangerous man in UK politics today. But in terms of the harm he is causing not just to Labour but to the country, Morgan McSweeney is giving him a run for his money.
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