Morgan McSweeney kept winning: in opposition he devised the strategies that won Keir Starmer the Labour leadership and his party the general election; in government he won an internal power struggle with Sue Gray. But it was precisely victory – and fame – that left McSweeney exposed. Advisers who become the story – as Alastair Campbell, Nick Timothy and Dominic Cummings can testify – never outlast their masters.
As much as the Starmer-McSweeney relationship was deemed to invert that hierarchy, the latter’s resignation statement served as a reminder of it. “When asked, I advised the prime minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice,” wrote McSweeney of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. But if the advice was wrong then so was the decision – and it is Starmer who bears responsibility for that.
For McSweeney, this was a fittingly political end. The man who rose through his ability to divine his party’s mood ultimately fell victim to it. A poll of Labour members, which influenced his departure, found that 78 per cent believed McSweeney should resign compared to a third who believed that Starmer should. Soft-left MPs – antagonised by the welfare bill, the “island of strangers” speech and Labour’s collapsing support – had long implored the Prime Minister to cast his most powerful adviser aside.
Confusion endures over what McSweeney, who joined Labour in 1998 after being inspired by the Good Friday Agreement, truly represented. The man described to me by Blue Labour’s Maurice Glasman as “one of ours” is also cast as the protégée of Mandelson whose New Labour project was yesterday damned by Glasman as “an alien body that took over the party”.
But this apparent paradox is easily resolved: the long war against Corbynism and the Conservatives had the effect of uniting Labour’s right in a tactical alliance. As a consequence, tensions and contradictions went unresolved. A campaigning project was never developed into a governing one. There is no better proof of this than the government’s tax lock, a New Labour-inspired device that left it struggling to raise scarce amounts from pensioners, farmers and pubs, undercutting McSweeney’s supposed communitarian impulses. The appointment of Mandelson similarly reflected an administration better at restaging the past than at inventing the future.
“My motivations have always been simple: I have worked every day to elect and support a government that puts the lives of ordinary people first,” McSweeney wrote yesterday. This was what he meant when, in the aftermath of Labour’s election victory, he spoke of “insurgent government”. Rather than succumbing to the technocratic inertia that had defined so many others, it would crusade on behalf of working-class voters and those afflicted by injustices – from Hillsborough, to exploitative bosses (McSweeney championed the employment rights bill) to the grooming gangs. But far from being insurgent, Labour has found itself submerged beneath a succession of scandals while Reform on the right and the Greens on the left ascend. As Starmer’s alliance with McSweeney is severed, his premiership reduced to an exercise in survival, it will be for his successor to devise the project Labour has lacked.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: How long before parliament burns down?]
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