Without Morgan McSweeney to hold his hand, the Prime Minister will indulge his worst political instincts
To cling on to power, Keir Starmer will have to appease his party's Left with yet more taxes and wokery
Au revoir, auf wiedersehen, goodbye – Morgan McSweeney has departed Downing Street. But no Irish goodbye for this son of Cork. Instead, the Prime Minister’s ex-chief of staff’s exit from Number 10 threatens to bring the whole Starmer project down with it – a house that McSweeney built, and remained the central pillar in, far more so than the charisma, insight and vision vacuum that is our premier.
It is no exaggeration to say that Keir Starmer would not be Prime Minister without McSweeney. It was he, bruised veteran of Dagenham bin collections and Liz Kendall leadership campaigns, who early on identified Starmer as the perfect vessel for his ambitions: a blunt instrument with which to nestle up to and then supplant the Corbynistas in control of Labour. Starmer offered the best of both worlds: leftist credentials as an ex-human rights lawyer, but the establishment imprimatur of having served as Director of Public Prosecutions. He could play footsie with the Left and then turn on them. As he scribbled on that post-Hartlepool blackboard: ‘Change Labour, Change Britain’.
McSweeney’s gamble paid off. Anyone who has read ‘Get In’ by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire will be clear on his central success: wrestling back control of Labour’s machinery from the Left and detoxifying the brand sufficiently that Starmer could take his party from their worst post-war result to a landslide majority in a single electoral cycle. But it was always a shallow project. Its primary objective was winning a factional dispute within Labour, not laying out a plan for government. That was outsourced to Sue Gray – a decision so misguided that it poisoned Starmer’s premiership from its first day when they arrived at Downing Street with nothing to do with their big majority.
As Gray’s replacement as Starmer’s chief of staff, McSweeney’s project was a victim of his own success. He had little interest in what a Labour government did, only on its ability to upset the Left and somehow get re-elected. Undoubtedly, he is a canny political operator, a tall poppy surrounded by mediocrity. But if he only defines socialism as giving a plum job to a mate of the world’s most famous paedophile, why win at all?
Indeed, why do so if it means leaving the government of his adoptive country in the grip of Starmer: a man uniquely unsuited to being Prime Minister in a time of such domestic and international turbulence. There is nothing to Starmer. He is a sphinx without a riddle, a pudding without a theme, a late middle-aged human rights lawyer that had done sufficiently well for himself that he fancied a career change. Most blow their mid-life crises on affairs with au pairs or fancy sports cars. He decided to become Prime Minister, despite having no obvious interest in politics, policy or improving the country. We are all victims of his vacuousness.
In the few decisions that McSweeney let Starmer take for himself, he betrayed his instincts. The appointment of Richard Hermer as Attorney General, Sue Gray as his chief of staff and Chris Wormald as Cabinet Secretary show a man in love with international law and big bureaucracies.
The former is the embodiment of an activist worldview, recently outlined by Michael Gove, that blames Britain for all the world’s problems and wants to counteract it by hobbling us – from the surrendering of the Chagos islands through to the kneecapping of the SAS. The latter pair are the Blob incarnated, Civil Service lifers with no achievements to their names except for a studious love of process.
Without McSweeney to hold his hand, Starmer will be free to indulge these tendencies. But he will also be under immense pressure to double down on the retreat his Government signalled as soon as it crumbled over reducing the benefits bill. This is a Government with a majority of 170-odd that is terrified of its own backbenchers. Their indiscipline is not hard to explain: most have small majorities, never expected to become so unpopular so quickly and are now fighting to prove themselves to their constituencies and their consciences as more than a drone of the most unpopular Government on record. Their incentive is to rebel; Starmer’s only answer is to surrender.
To appease them, Starmer will have to pay the Danegeld: more spending, higher taxes, a studious aversion to any reform of the welfare state and as much woke nonsense – from rewriting the curriculum to declaring war on the countryside – as he can stuff down their gobs. But anything he can do, Big Ange could do better. McSweeney was the only person fighting to keep Starmer as Prime Minister; with him gone, it is case of when, not if, he goes.
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