Keir Starmer’s Chief-of-Staff Morgan McSweeney resigned on Sunday afternoon following the fallout from the Peter Mandelson scandal.
McSweeney, who was a close ally of Mandelson, had pushed for his appointment as ambassador to the US, despite his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
As he prepares to leave Downing Street, we re-publish all of Peter Oborne’s reporting on McSweeney, who Oborne identified early on as “the most powerful individual in Britain.”
Long before anyone else, Oborne traced how a backroom strategist had succeeded in seizing the levers of power, while pursuing a factional war against the left and playing into the hands of the nationalist right.
The Sweeney Strategy
There is a serious problem. And, if recent history is anything to go by, it may end up inflicting grave damage on the Starmer premiership. Starmer is much too dependent on his campaign strategist, Morgan McSweeney, who is now the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications.
There is nothing unusual about this. Almost every PM since Tony Blair has employed their version of McSweeney. Alastair Campbell destroyed Blair’s reputation for integrity. David Cameron hired Murdoch henchman Andy Coulson with shameful consequences. Nick Timothy all but lost Theresa May the 2017 election. And Boris Johnson disastrously relied on Dominic Cummings. Of the above, McSweeney most closely resembles Cummings – who drove out the Tory left, stripping the whip from Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, Dominic Grieve, and others.
In the short-term, Cummings’ project to split the Conservative Party helped Johnson secure his massive election victory in 2019. But in the medium-term, it gave far too much power to the far-right of the party – Patel, Braverman, Jenrick, etc – and removed the Tory soul.
McSweeney has been waging a Cummings-type war against the Labour left. This explains the cynical recruitment of populist Tory Natalie Elphicke; the deranged bid to prevent Diane Abbott from standing as a Labour MP; and the vindictive decision to ban pro-Palestine advocate Faiza Shaheen from running in Chingford and Woodford Green, which handed the seat back to former Tory Leader Iain Duncan Smith. Yet more shocking was the withdrawal of support for Labour’s candidate in Clacton, paving the way for a smooth victory for Nigel Farage and the synchronised dog-whistle attacks against Britain’s vulnerable Bangladeshi community.
McSweeney’s core job is electoral strategy, and I suppose I can see the rationale in mopping up as many voters as possible regardless of how racist or bigoted they are. But Harold Wilson was onto something important when he said the Labour Party was a “moral crusade or it is nothing”.
Wilson, like his great predecessor Clem Attlee, understood Labour is a broad church uniting left and right. There is, moreover, a great deal to be said for doing the right thing and not just the strategic thing. Indeed, Starmer’s promise to put ‘country before party’ involves doing exactly that.
The Myth of Morgan McSweeney
The established press’ focus on supposedly ‘all powerful’ individual advisors often obscures the more important structural issues that come to define politics, writes Adam Bienkov
Cummings or Going?
According to lobby reports, Keir Starmer’s Downing Street Chief of Staff Sue Gray is currently engaged in a power struggle against Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Director of Political Strategy. There is likely to be an element of truth to this. I have never met either party, but I strongly take the side of Gray. In a properly-run government, a political strategist should not be in Downing Street at all. They should be in party campaign headquarters.
This is especially the case with McSweeney, who has already been responsible for a series of judgments that, while in the short-term interests of Labour, have done unnecessary damage to Keir Starmer’s Government.
The first was the unforgivable decision to pull the Labour candidate out of Clacton and give a free pass to Nigel Farage. The second was to introduce an element of racist bigotry into the election campaign, compromising Labour’s recent message over the racist riots. Sue Gray is quite right to keep McSweeney, and his cynical and crude political calculations, as far away as possible from the daily business of government.
All precedent suggests, however, that he will win. McSweeney has a formidable political machinery behind him – for example, it stares you in the face that the leaks come from his camp. Ultimately, Starmer may have to choose between the two. If he allows McSweeney to force out or downgrade Gray, he will inflict deep long damage on his administration – rather as Boris Johnson did when he hired Dominic Cummings.
Starmer’s Disaster
I predicted in this column in August that Morgan McSweeney would win his power struggle with Sue Gray. He has duly done so, and has replaced her as Keir Starmer’s Downing Street Chief of Staff. This is a disaster for Labour, but even more so for Britain. McSweeney is a political strategist. Such creatures may be useful during election campaigns, but should not be allowed near government. Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff was Jonathan Powell, who had many years’ experience as a diplomat. In Downing Street, he played a distinguished role in creating the Good Friday Agreement.
There is no chance of McSweeney doing anything like that. His consideration is winning votes. This means he will automatically oppose the difficult or unpopular decisions which serious Prime Ministers must make if they are to do their job properly. Starmer’s foolish attachment to McSweeney explains his failure to show leadership as Prime Minister. Instead of using the opportunity granted to him by a massive Commons majority to address Britain’s multitude of problems, Starmer appears to be listening to McSweeney’s advice of not offending voters – thus creating a vacuum inevitably filled by minor or non-existent scandals. For these reasons, Sue Gray was right to try to keep McSweeney at arms length.
McSweeney has established himself as the most powerful individual in Britain. He, not Starmer, sets the tone. This is an awful shame because anybody who loves Britain yearns for good government after the incompetence and moral corruption of the Tory years.
Far-Right Gift
I try not to read mainstream newspapers these days. The reporting is bent, the opinion columns deranged, and you almost never learn anything new or worthwhile. But, the day after Donald Trump won the American presidency for a second time, I made a special trip to the newsagents and bought the lot. Almost without exception, they amplified, normalised or celebrated the result, while mocking Trump’s defeated opponent, Kamala Harris. This was power worship rather than serious journalism.
Britain’s three big newspaper groups – Murdoch, the Rothermere empire, and the Telegraph Group – between them account for about three-quarters of newspaper readers. Yet, anybody with half an ounce of decency and intelligence can see that Trump’s victory is an unmitigated disaster for the United States and a mortal threat to her allies. It is plain from the favourable newspaper coverage here in Britain that Trump’s victory is a spectacular and, in all likelihood, game-changing gift to the far-right.
The Sun set aside two pages for Islamophobe Douglas Murray, who praised Trump for his war on immigration. Elsewhere, Murray issued a photograph of himself in consultation with the next US President at an “historic evening yesterday at Mar-a-Lago”. The Telegraph awarded Nigel Farage front page space for an article calling on Britain to “roll out the red carpet” for Trump. Meanwhile, The Daily Mail gave over a full page to a tirade demanding that Farage should be the next British ambassador to the United States.
Trump’s noxious brand of Republicanism, which has nothing in common with British conservatism, is already crossing the Atlantic. Two former Conservative Prime Ministers – Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – supported Trump ahead of the election. They and others want to do to the Conservatives what Donald Trump has achieved with the Republicans: capture a famous political party and use its name for the promotion of a movement that has more in common with fascism than Conservatism.
With three major newspaper groups on-side, it is hard to see what will stop the eventual merger of Reform UK and the Conservatives, and the creation of a party akin to AfD or National Rally in Germany and France. In theory, the Tory lurch to Trumpian politics ought to open up immense vistas of political space for Keir Starmer.
Very sadly, under the baleful influence of his strategist (now Chief of Staff) Morgan McSweeney, the Labour Leader has so far chosen to appease rather than challenge Trump’s mutant politics. In the wake of Trump’s victory Starmer will need to choose between Macron’s Europe and Trump’s United States.
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A Sad, Bad State of Affairs
Much of this flows, as I have explained before, from Starmer’s dependence on his new chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who maintains that Starmer can only win the next election by governing through a ‘permanent campaign’. This calamitous methodology, which first saw the light of day in the Blair era and was adopted by Boris Johnson, means that every decision is dictated after consultation with focus groups and pollsters for its likely effect on target voters. It is the antithesis of the 20th Century proposition that British Prime Ministers should govern in the national interest, leaving political campaigns to the few weeks before each general election.
The ‘permanent campaign’ guarantees bad government, and I am not even sure that it works electorally. There is a reason for this. Prime Ministers who depend on focus groups and care what newspapers think end up at the mercy of fashion, do a great deal of inadvertent harm, and achieve nothing substantial. Sue Gray, trained in the traditional civil service, despised this debauched system of popular rule. This explains why it was so important for McSweeney and his allies to dispose of her.
With Gray out of the way, McSweeney can now focus on his short-termist stunts (Starmer’s ‘relaunch’ in December was a good example) and dog-whistle messages to racist voters. Serious discussion about the great issues of our time – the legacy of Brexit, social degradation, climate change, political corruption, the growing menace of the far-right – has been eradicated.
Instead, McSweeney has se