Morgan McSweeney: He leaves behind a void

Without Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer would never have become leader of the Labour Party and ultimately prime minister. A strategist and campaigner who never sought elected public office, McSweeney resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff last Sunday after a breakdown in their relationship that predated the Peter Mandelson-Jeffrey Epstein crisis.

McSweeney loathed what he saw as the complacency and moral righteousness of the Labour left. He abhorred the antisemitism that had festered under Corbyn’s leadership and was appalled by the response of some Labour authorities to victims of rape and grooming gangs. He was committed to the party’s founding purpose to defend the interests of working people but was not a product of the labour movement. He was an outsider: “the Irishman”, as Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund called him in Get In, their definitive account of the rise of Starmer. At Westminster, for a time after Labour’s landslide election victory in 2024, McSweeney was spoken of as if his powers were omnipotent, so mesmeric was his hold over the party.

“Morgan knows,” Labour people used to say to me in hushed, reverential tones. But the truth is he didn’t always know. The Irishman was being mythologised. He had made enemies on the way up and, as Starmer’s struggles in government deepened, they knew who to blame: McSweeney.

His downfall was inevitable, just a matter of time. “His enemies will be satisfied,” says Jonathan Rutherford, who worked closely with McSweeney over many years. “Large parts of the party will breathe a sigh of relief. They can now return to their comfort zone. But Morgan’s departure is a pivotal moment – it marks the end of Starmer’s authority and means Labour will now avoid the difficult decisions a government must take to turn the country around and prepare for the crises to come.”

McSweeney grew up in west county Cork, in a family that supported the centre-right Fine Gael. After a period of drift and travel in America and Israel, he came to London and studied for a degree in politics and marketing at Middlesex University. Red haired and softly spoken, he joined Labour, finding work at its Millbank headquarters where he first encountered Mandelson. He moved to local government and there he took on the hard left in Lambeth and later the far right in the east London-Essex hinterland. He honed his craft as a campaigner, alert to voters’ needs and interests and the mood in the country, and instinctively hostile to the left.

I first got to know McSweeney at a series of dinners organised by Labour Together, then an informal network and later a well-funded think tank. The early dinners were in effect discussions about ideas, political philosophy and the failures of the left. McSweeney was present but quiet, listening intently.

Later, at one dinner in Soho, he gave a PowerPoint presentation: an analysis of polling and focus group data and of the voters in marginal constituencies Labour needed to attract if it was ever to return to power. Here in outline was a plan to win an election if only a leader could be found to implement it.

After the general election defeat of 2019, when Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935, McSweeney moved closer to Starmer, who was never part of the Labour Together network. A former director of public prosecutions, he had served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet while never being ideologically committed to the hard left. He was something of a blank slate. From the beginning, their relationship was transactional: Starmer wanted to be leader of the Labour Party and McSweeney believed he could make this happen, but first the left’s control over the party had to be broken.

The truth about McSweeney is that too much was asked of him in power not only by Starmer but the cabinet ministers who were closest to him and the special advisers who followed him as if he were some kind of latter-day guru. Starmer’s government had no political programme or overarching belief system and McSweeney took it upon himself to provide it. But he never built the team that could achieve what he wanted.

By the time of his resignation, he was “at his lowest ebb”. He was loathed by many Labour MPs who blamed him for Starmer’s U-turns, careless disregard for colleagues and the appointment of Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington. In his resignation statement, McSweeney took responsibility for the appointment of Mandelson, although the final decision was the prime minister’s.

McSweeney was more than Starmer’s chief of staff. He was his chief strategist, ideologue, fixer and powerbroker. “All roads lead to Morgan,” was the line I heard repeated despairingly by disgruntled ministers and former allies of Starmer who had been marginalised or reshuffled out of government or into roles they did not want. It was as if McSweeney rather than the prime minister and his most senior ministers was most culpable for the failure of an unpopular, crisis-ravaged government.

McSweeney has been denounced for his “hyper-partisan” approach and Labour Together for using in opposition undeclared funding to perpetrate what his detractors consider a “fraud”: installing a leader on a left-wing, or Corbyn-lite, manifesto that was cynically abandoned. Labour is a broad coalition, but McSweeney believed lasting change required control of the party’s rule-making machinery, notably the national executive committee and firm control over candidate selection. Politics was, for him, a war of position. Ideological opponents must be confronted and marginalised.

It went too far. Starmer’s failure to make any kind of political argument meant that administrative means came to dominate. Pluralism narrowed. Candidate selection became excessively centralised. The PLP was often ignored. In one absurd episode, Neal Lawson, who leads the Compass campaign group and is close to Andy Burnham, was stripped of his party membership after 44 years for retweeting a Liberal Democrat MP. Lawson is a democrat and pluralist; he believed the leadership was becoming authoritarian.

More serious was the failure to do the intellectual groundwork for power. There was a strategy for winning office but not for governing. That was a collective political and institutional failure not McSweeney’s alone. The result was that Labour returned to power unprepared for government and without a developed policy framework to deliver the change it had promised. There was no equivalent of “Stepping Stones”, the policy document co-written by John Hoskyns in 1977 that provided the intellectual foundations for the free-market transformations of the Thatcher government.

I remember talking to McSweeney in May last year and sensing, even then, that it was already over for him. What he feared most was coming to pass: the prime minister and the party lacked the will or stamina to confront the systemic challenges facing the country – economic stagnation, spiralling welfare costs, illegal migration, unsustainable public spending. His allies spoke despairingly of the “paralysis of power” at the heart of Whitehall. “Keir wills the ends but never follows through on the means,” one said.

McSweeney’s mantra was country before party, but Starmer has been captured by the party and is now beholden to the so-called soft left, with Ed Miliband inside government and Angela Rayner outside as the chief powerbrokers. The settled view in the PLP is that Starmer will be removed at a time of its choosing and when a successor is ready to make their move.

The problem for Labour, however, is that the now-dominant soft left no less than Starmer himself has neither a policy programme nor a plan for government. The soft left is more of a temperament or instinct than a coherent politics.

Being a special adviser to a prime minister or president, Henry Kissinger once observed, is “like sitting next to a driver who’s heading towards the edge of a cliff and asking you to check the gas tank is full and the tyre pressure is good”.

Starmer has not yet gone over the edge, but he is moving inexorably towards it. McSweeney has gone yet the difficulties are as intractable as ever: the prime minister has lost authority, the government is trapped in a cycle of chaos and recrimination, the mood on the Labour benches is mutinous and there is no clear command from the top. McSweeney leaves behind a void.