In defence of Morgan McSweeney

New Statesman​

a day ago

Photo by Karl Black / Alamy Stock Photo
This week's Westminster main character is Morgan McSweeney – a high-risk position for any political figure to be in, but particularly dangerous for an unelected advisor.
Keir Starmer's election coordinator turned chief of staff has become a lightning rod for Labour MPs' anger at the welfare reform bill – on which the Government now faces a rebellion that is veering on existential – and their frustration in general at how quickly their triumph last July has turned to ashes. The Times led on Thursday (26 June) with demands for a 'regime change', for which we can read 'McSweeney's head on a platter', served with a healthy side dish of humble pie.
Criticisms of McSweeney include that he is arrogant, beset with tunnel vision, detached from the parliamentary Labour party and wider Labour movement, and obsessed with Reform to the point of taking Labour's core left vote for granted. Above all, there is anger that his influence over the Prime Minister has pushed a government with a majority that should imbue a sense of confidence into positions that appear weak, indecisive, and markedly un-Labour.
Cutting the welfare bill by £5 billion at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in society epitomises the sense that the government has already lost its way. And Starmer's strategy of holding firm and staring down the left of his party to cement his authority has had the opposite effect. As one minister reportedly put it, 'Morgan is completely off his rocker.' Another MP noted it is rarely sustainable once an advisor becomes a household name. Surely, McSweeney's days must be numbered?
A controversial advisor who antagonises MPs, restricts access to the Prime Minister and leads their government into impossible dead ends… Stop me if you've heard this one before. Maybe you're picturing Dominic Cummings and his Silicon Valley 'move fast and break things' approach to governing, or remembering Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill indulging Theresa May's worst bunker mentality instincts. Or perhaps you're casting your mind further back to the rows over such contentious New Labour figures as Damian McBride and Alastair Campbell. If McSweeney does go, he will be the latest in a long line of shadowy power-behind-the-throne figures whose presence in Downing Street became a scapegoat for the travails of the Prime Minister, and whose departure was demanded as proof of a change of course.
Cummings is a particularly useful comparison, not in terms of style (McSweeney has so far not vowed to fill Whitehall with 'misfits and weirdos'), but because he too won his boss a glorious election victory which quickly crumbled upon contact with actual government. Writing in the aftermath of his resignation (or sacking – delete as appropriate) in November 2020, almost a year since the election that was meant to stabilise British politics for a decade, Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government pointed to a 'pattern of botched communications, badly-handled announcements, mixed messaging and leaked briefings which have dogged this government'. If any of that sounds familiar, note the period of calm, decisive, well-communicated government that followed that notorious photo of Cummings exiting No 10 with a carboard box of his belongings. Oh, wait.
The concept of the wicked advisor who tweaks the puppet strings and manipulates the poor king into making poor decisions dates back hundreds of years – think Rasputin, Cardinal Richelieu, or the Persian grand vizier Jafar ibn Yahya, thought to be the inspiration for the villainous Jafar in Aladdin. Taking aim at them is a powerful way to signal discontent with a regime without criticising the leader directly. McSweeney himself should know that – look at what happened when he clashed with Sue Gray.
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But zooming out, those baying for the blood of Starmer's chief aide should pause. McSweeney's pedigree is not as a policy advisor but an election strategist. His trademark move is using data to run ruthlessly targeted campaigns. In her book Taken as Red, which chronicles how Labour won the 2024 election, Anushka Asthana points to his work in the 2006 Lambeth Council elections when he realised Labour could triumph by winning over just 6 per cent of Lambeth's total electorate. The fact the 2024 general election campaign was built on a tactic of spreading votes as widely as possible to win the most seats with the slimmest margins (what politics professor Rob Ford has called a 'masterpiece of political jenga') was not some huge error: it was McSweeney's intended aim. A Labour leader who wanted to pursue a different strategy that would make it easier to govern should have hired a different strategist.
It is notable, too, that before Starmer had properly settled into Downing Street McSweeney was already plotting the 2029 campaign. It's important to have someone in government looking ahead to the next election; it is not wise to put them in charge. This is not a man who was ever intended to run the country, or to singlehandedly reform Whitehall. Nor is he an expert in comms – something everyone in Westminster agrees the government is truly dire at, and which has been a large part of its failure to sell its reforms to both the electorate and the parliamentary party.
On that subject, party management requires another skillset entirely. The welfare rebellion is a case study in how not to keep your MPs onside, with backbenchers talking openly of being sidelined by the leadership. The new 2024 intake complain of being patronised and treated like the children; those already in the Commons talk of being overlooked for jobs, with barely a conversation to make them feel reassured and valued. There is frustration among both groups at the aloofness of the Prime Minister, who rarely turns up to vote himself. While the rebels have fierce ideological objections to disability cuts, at least some of the 120-plus MPs who have signed the wrecking amendment could have been brought onboard with a more conciliatory approach from Downing Street.
It is easy to pin this failure for this on an unpopular advisor, but who could seriously expect a campaign guru who sees politics in terms of raw data to be the solution to a fractured and disheartened parliamentary party? That is not McSweeney's job, it is the job of the Prime Minister. If Starmer has devolved that responsibility to a man fundamentally unsuited to it, that is his error. If he cannot tell a compelling story to the country and to his MPs about what he is doing and why, a personnel switch will salvage nothing.
Catherine Haddon warned back in 2020 that 'changing the supporting cast is not enough to fix a stumbling premiership'. It would be easy for Starmer to scapegoat McSweeney over the welfare row. Fixing the foundations, to borrow one of the Prime Minister's favourite phrases, will become that much harder.
[See also: Labour is locked in a vicious blame game]
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