Morgan McSweeney fights back

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck
In the days after Labour's 2024 election victory, at an event with Barack Obama's former strategist David Axelrod, Morgan McSweeney declared that the new government would be 'insurgent'. Rather than succumbing to the technocratic inertia that had defined so many others, it would crusade on behalf of working-class voters – those afflicted by injustices, from Hillsborough to the grooming gangs (a matter of moral outrage for McSweeney long before Elon Musk).
Yet it is McSweeney himself who now faces insurgencies. Nigel Farage's Reform UK – in its new 'workerist' guise – triumphed in the local elections in May and enjoys a sustained poll lead. Rebel Labour MPs, meanwhile, openly demand McSweeney's removal as No 10 chief of staff in the aftermath of a mass backbench revolt over welfare cuts that forced an almost complete reversal. 'The relationship is completely broken,' one minister told me.
The media's fixation with McSweeney is, as allies point out, disproportionate in many respects. It reflects a political culture in which supposedly omnipotent advisers – Alastair Campbell, Nick Timothy, Dominic Cummings – are revered or denigrated, while elected politicians are forgotten. (Few, for instance, could name the select committee chairs who signed the rebel welfare amendment.) But it is also testimony to McSweeney's dominance. 'Without Morgan, there would be no project left,' one senior Labour figure told me.
Divisions over McSweeney and the government's welfare cuts are emblematic of a wider battle for Labour's soul. Soft-left MPs and figures such as Sadiq Khan and Campbell are urging Starmer to be true to his original left-liberal instincts and embrace an unashamedly progressive agenda (a No 10 source told me Campbell 'wouldn't last two minutes in Morgan's job' and was 'utterly clueless about the sentiment and state of the country'). McSweeney's confidants, in the words of one, regard him as a 'constant ballast that ensures we look beyond SW1'. Without him, they warn, Labour would become detached from the common ground of public opinion on defining issues such as immigration and welfare, retreating to the comforts of opposition.
'The reality is Morgan and I have been working together for many, many years, running up and down the pitch together,' Starmer told the Sunday Times on 29 June, as he dismissed suggestions that McSweeney controls the government's political direction. It was a telling analogy in several respects.
Starmer and McSweeney have played five-a-side football together (with the Irishman sometimes wearing the shirt of the Cork Gaelic Athletic Association). Their partnership – often described by insiders as 'transactional' – was born of a shared desire to win, rather than any deeper personal or historical bond. Unusually, in the often claustrophobic world of Labour politics, the pair did not meet formally until the summer of 2019, when they were introduced by Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary (alongside whom McSweeney reclaimed Lambeth for Labour in 2006). As chronicled in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's Get In, both men quickly recognised that they needed each other. McSweeney needed Starmer as the frontman for his project of reclaiming Labour from the Corbynites; Starmer needed McSweeney as the strategist who knew the party's membership better than anyone else.
The result was two landslide victories that many once deemed impossible. Starmer won the Labour leadership with 56.2 per cent of the vote, comfortably defeating his Corbynite rival Rebecca Long-Bailey (a rout from which the party's left has never recovered). And Labour won the election with a majority of 174 seats, its biggest victory other than Blair's 1997 triumph.
McSweeney's critics now cast the latter result as the inevitable byproduct of Tory failure – a conclusion disputed by his allies. 'Take a look around the world, take a look through human history and see how often the left wins when the right screws up and the answer is hardly ever,' said one. 'The right screwing up is necessary but woefully insufficient to the left winning.'
These victories offered Starmer a far greater degree of protection than most of his predecessors. Until recently, he faced no significant internal opposition inside either Labour or parliament. Yet Anthony Seldon, the doyen of prime ministerial history, now deems Starmer to have made the most 'inept start' of any No 10 occupant for 100 years. This, he emphasised, included Liz Truss, who 'at least had a clear plan'.
A plan, senior Labour figures concede, is precisely what the party lacked in its first 100 days. Rather than 'insurgent', as McSweeney vowed, the government was submergent, seemingly overwhelmed by the burdens of office. The void left by the absence of a clear strategy was filled by winter fuel payment cuts, rows over 'freebies' and divisions inside No 10 (with special advisers unionising in protest over pay and conditions). Blame for this was ultimately placed with Sue Gray, who was ousted as chief of staff after just 94 days in the role.
With her replacement by McSweeney, who speaks softly but with force and intent, the government took on a more identifiably political character. Its trajectory has been reminiscent of Labour's 'old right', a wing both more economically interventionist and more socially conservative than New Labour. As well as raising public spending and taxes, the government adopted hawkish stances on defence and immigration (much like forebears such as Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey).
For a period, no taboo appeared too great to demolish. The foreign aid budget was cut from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.3 per cent to fund higher defence spending (prompting the resignation of Anneliese Dodds, once shadow chancellor, as international development minister). NHS England was abolished as Starmer denounced the 'overcautious and flabby' state. In a letter to the cabinet, designed to distil his 'philosophy', Starmer wrote that 'increasingly, politics is no longer built around a traditional left-right axis. It is instead being reimagined around a disruptor-disrupted axis.' This jarred with his governing style, which has been conservative with a small 'c'.
But over the past month, Labour's traditional soft left has reasserted itself. In a matter of weeks the party has made three U-turns – over winter fuel cuts, disability benefit cuts and Starmer's 'island of strangers' remark (which foes likened to Enoch Powell's declaration that the white British 'found themselves made strangers in their own country'). No 10 now recognises that it needs to do 'more to bring people with us'.
The left's reawakening was in part a counter-reaction to the return of Blue Labour, a group McSweeney is close to – 'He is one of ours, we love him,' Maurice Glasman told me earlier this year – but not synonymous with. Under McSweeney, who is more intellectually curious and ecumenical than his critics assume, No 10 engages regularly with centre-left think tanks such as IPPR. But the charge now levelled against Downing Street is that it has pursued an electoral strategy based on a caricature of a Reform-supporting, Red Wall voter (Blair has warned: 'you are not going to get these people back by going down a Blue Labour route').
This is an accusation that No 10 is determined to dispel. During the local election campaign, sources point out, 'VDL' (the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen) was pictured meeting with Starmer at Downing Street. At the summit that followed – in the aftermath of Reform's victory – agreement was reached on progress towards a youth mobility scheme. They further dispute that a programme including the Employment Rights Bill, the Renters' Rights Bill and the publicly owned GB Energy – measures that McSweeney privately champions – can ever be characterised as 'right wing'. (Some in government complain such policies are 'suppressed' by an overly cautious communications strategy.)
Yet it is spending cuts that have defined Starmer's administration and allowed critics to accuse it of a return to austerity (even as total public spending is increased by £300bn). 'There will have to be an economic reset – is Rachel [Reeves] the person to lead that?' one minister remarked with deep scepticism. 'That's the fundamental question that the Prime Minister has to answer.'
Blue Labour has long inveighed against Reeves, with Glasman once describing her to me as 'just a drone for the Treasury' and calling for the department's abolition. But McSweeney's allies argue that the recent Spending Review encapsulated the community politics that he – and Reeves – have long advocated. Measures such as the rebuilding of Southport Pier, closed for safety reasons since 2022, and the regeneration of Kirkcaldy High Street and seafront are designed to restore a sense of 'pride of place'.
As one No 10 aide put it: 'You shouldn't have to move out to move up, you shouldn't have to leave your home to feel that you're living a better life. The mood of the country is truly what people experience when they open their front door.' Here is an echo of the politics espoused by Anthony Crosland, the late Labour cabinet minister, who wrote in The Future of Socialism (1956): 'We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses'.
For McSweeney and Labour, the path to re-election is forbidding. A private polling presentation by Stack Data Strategy – co-founded by Ameet Gill, a former strategist to David Cameron – is a reminder of the party's 'sandcastle majority'. Labour holds fewer safe seats – defined as those with a margin of victory greater than 20 points – than any government in the past 50 years. Since the general election, the party has retained just 63 per cent of its 2024 vote, with 12 per cent of supporters defecting to the Liberal Democrats, 9 per cent to the Greens and 8 per cent to Reform. Senior internal critics accuse Labour of having a 'forgotten flank' as it loses more votes to the left than the right.
Such is the electoral dilemma intensifying Labour's divisions. During his time as leader, critics accused Ed Miliband of having a '35 per cent strategy' based on uniting the left. But as the right coalesces around Reform, an increasing number argue Labour must embrace something like it. McSweeney and his allies, however, regard Westminster's fixation with 'moving left' or 'moving right' as a choice that ignores the reality that most voters do not view the world through this lens. 'We have to rebalance the economy to support the people who are most economically insecure,' one said (a group that spans swing voters of all persuasions), speaking of the need 'to get in alongside them, lift up the darkness and show them some light'.
Labour's existential angst has spilled into the open. Some in government were outraged when Starmer told his biographer and former Labour aide Tom Baldwin in an Observer column that he 'deeply regrets' using the phrase 'island of strangers' (as he had already implied in an interview with the New Statesman). One Labour MP assailed him for 'throwing his staff under the bus, admitting that he doesn't read his own speeches and sounding like a passenger in his own government'. They added: 'If the PLP eats Morgan, we're finished.'
Red Wall MPs have long welcomed McSweeney's belief that border control is not an optional extra for a social democratic party, but fundamental to it. Starmer, they fear, has set back Labour's attempt to align itself with voters on immigration. Fifty-three per cent of the public, according to YouGov, agreed with the 'sentiment' of the speech, while just 27 per cent disagreed. Progressive liberals, meanwhile, have heralded Starmer's apology as a sign that 'we've got our leader back'. The Prime Minister's private vow to scrap the two-child benefit limit has similarly cheered MPs (McSweeney previously warned of the need to be mindful of public support for it as a matter of fairness).
Speculation that McSweeney could depart as chief of staff began, with Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, who led Downing Street for a decade under Blair, and Liz Lloyd, No 10's director of policy and Blair's former deputy chief of staff, touted as replacements. But at a cabinet meeting on 1 July, Starmer robustly defended McSweeney, declaring that without him 'none of us would be sitting around this cabinet table'.
Will their special relationship endure? Like the alliance between the US and the UK, the partnership has been sustained by common enemies – the Corbynites and the Conservatives. In Reform, Labour faces an opponent that both men regard not merely as an electoral threat but a moral one. When McSweeney excoriates some of the party's candidates as 'reprehensible', he shows he has no desire to conduct a Faragiste tribute act. As Reform basks in its poll lead, can Labour be insurgent once more? This is the question on which its fate will depend.
[See also: The rebellions against Starmer are only just beginning]
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