Just over a month ago I wrote a piece on our site headlined “How much trouble is Morgan McSweeney in?” In the interests of variety, we don’t really do sequels here at the New Statesman. But here we are again, asking the same question (albeit for slightly different reasons).
Back in September the heat was on the PM’s chief of staff because of furore around the failure of Labour Together – the campaign group run by McSweeney in the Jeremy Corbyn years – to declare donations to the Electoral Commission. I concluded that it would probably blow over because the story was largely old news and, since parliament was in recess, the Tories couldn’t press the point at Prime Minister’s Questions.
The sequel is more serious, darker even (The Empire Strikes Back, anyone?). Instead of a run-of-the-mill scandal, McSweeney is under fire because of destabilising briefings against Health Secretary Wes Streeting. They have specifically come from what the Guardian, which got the scoop, described as “Starmer’s most senior aides” and Downing Street sources. McSweeney is the most senior of all, though there is no evidence he was responsible for the briefings against Streeting.
This is all a sorry picture. Especially when you consider that McSweeney rode to the post of No 10 chief of staff on the back of a vicious, uncontrollable Downing Street briefing against his predecessor Sue Gray. He arrived with a remit to sort it. And he did, for a while.
But recent weeks have seen unprecedented No 10 attacks on both the Cabinet Secretary and now the Health Secretary. In response there are now Cabinet-level briefings against McSweeney as the man ultimately responsible, after the PM, for what happens in Downing Street. The picture is murky but the subject is clear: a lack of control at the centre.
Wednesday’s PMQs was the first time Keir Starmer has ever said the name of his chief of staff at the despatch box (it is highly rare for a PM to talk about his behind-the-scenes advisors in the chamber or in public at all). Asked to state his full confidence, the PM said: “Morgan McSweeney, my team and I are absolutely focused on delivering for the country.” As the Tories made their jokes about coups and the like, Starmer was laughing light-heartedly. I watched as his front bench sat stony faced (many of them are bewildered too).
Since he replaced Gray in October last year, the PM’s top man has satisfied the media’s desire for a Rasputin figure directing the conduct of the government. But, as for the mad monk, that position comes fraught with danger. Labour MPs who have never even met McSweeney now regularly and almost instinctively reach for his name when moaning to journalists about their party’s predicament. This has spilled into the public, with more outspoken left-wing MPs damning him on the record.
Likewise ministers who were sacked in the reshuffle and other malcontents in the parliamentary Labour Party. Several think they were “done over” by McSweeney. He is blamed for a No 10 culture that is generally thought of as uncaring and increasingly as openly hostile. One Labour MP joked to me, “I’m going to start looking for another job. I want to work in a less toxic workplace, like a chemical plant.”
The barbs against McSweeney are a modern twist on the words that have echoed down English history from dissidents who don’t want to go after the principal: “God save the King and damn his accursed ministers.”
Then there is the political problem. For a year now sources in No 10 have been offering unflattering assessments of the parliamentary Labour Party. This week they were described as “febrile”. Previously some of their number have been described as knobheads. They have been asked to vote for things that they find unconscionable, not least the doomed welfare cuts. There is a hope, possibly a vain one, that the end of McSweeney would allow Labour to become cuddly and nice again, that the bond vigilantes would lay off and voters would stop naming immigration as their priority issue.
But what would the end of McSweeney’s tenure as chief of staff actually bring? It would depend on the manner of any departure – though the conventional wisdom among senior Labour figures is that a shuffle to a more campaign-focused role would be more likely than a straight sacking. Would the future be a “let Keir be Keir” government, as has been suggested to me, in which the North London luvvy and former human rights barrister can come out of his shell? Or would it instead leave the Starmer premiership essentially brain dead, living on borrowed time?
Comparisons are being drawn with the fall of Dominic Cummings, which was followed by the fall of Boris Johnson after a chaotic interlude. In a way, Starmer is even more bound with McSweeney than Johnson was with Cummings. The former London mayor had a rock-solid political brand when he hired Cummings after kissing hands with Queen Elizabeth. Starmer attached himself to McSweeney at an earlier stage in his political career than Johnson, and has since then allowed his politics to be moulded by his advisors (I won’t go over the dumping of the ten pledges and all of the other Starmer volt-faces of recent years).
As my colleague Ailbhe Rea wrote in her cover story this week, there is a late-Boris feeling in the air. That was comically reemphasised today when Downing Street apparently tried to question the journalistic integrity of Pippa Crerar’s reporting by claiming that, following one of the shortest leak investigations of recent times, the No 10 sources quoted in the Guardian were not in fact No 10 staff. Hmm… an increasingly embattled Downing Street contesting the work of one of the lobby’s most respected journalists. First as tragedy, then as farce?
[Further reading: Inside Labour’s briefing fiasco: “Morgan has lost the plot”]
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