Manchester, June 2024. At Labour’s election manifesto launch, I asked Sir Keir Starmer what his big idea for government was. Would he, for instance, make a defining statement as Tony Blair had done by giving the Bank of England independence in 1997?
“The first thing I would do is return politics to service,” Starmer told me. “On day one the most important thing will be country first, party second.” We should have known then. Unlike the bold ideas of Blairism, Starmerism is not defined by a grand theory of political reform or a coherent critique of British state failure, nor by an analysis of the country’s place in the world. Instead, the mission was conservative and limited, simply aiming to protect the New Labour settlement that Blair built with the help of Peter Mandelson and since eroded. After years of Tory chaos, mere stability would be enough. We’ve not even had that.
Eighteen months into Starmer’s administration, Mandelson, merely unpopular in the 90s, is now held up as figure of revulsion. As a consequence, the Labour right is on its knees and the battle for Keir’s ear is in full swing. Scroll back nearly a decade and Morgan McSweeney was a man on a mission. While Starmer was serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, McSweeney was wrenching control of The Labour Party from the hard left. He and his supporters saw the socialist faction Momentum as ideologically extreme. This organised Corbynism were determined that their version of Labour must be right at almost any cost made it alien to Labour’s mainstream, never mind voters.
Now Labour’s left believes the right has squandered any claim to the moral high ground, which is why they were so furious when The i Paper revealed Mandelson helped to identify potential candidates who were seen as too left-wing to run for the party. He was given access to a secret Google spreadsheet of potential candidates that McSweeney and his allies used. McSweeney, a protégé of Mandelson, was the party’s campaigns director at the time and until last Sunday was chief of staff at No 10. In the shared spreadsheet used in the years running up to the general election, would-be candidates were allocated a letter. A = Solid, B = Ok, D = Don’t know and M = Momentum. Solid meant acceptable to McSweeney and Mandelson’s vision of what Starmer’s Labour Party should look like.
The Labour Party correctly asserts the list was compiled without its knowledge, but its very existence shows the cliques which divide and continue to divide the movement. Data is power: Momentum used to run parallel information gathering of the Labour Party. Would-be Labour candidates who were refused selection for the 2024 election have been contacting The i Paper keen to know if they were victims of factionalism. Some are even considering a class action against the party to see what data people employed by Labour held on them, even if it was used in a private capacity.
The Jeffrey Epstein plague has made those factional rifts resurface.Mandelson is now in moral and political Siberia for maintaining a friendship with a convicted paedophile and what former prime minister Gordon Brown effectively called treason for sending Epstein market-sensitive information. And Peter’s friends are not far behind.
Those on soft left are eager to distance themselves from any connection. “Wes [Streeting] had dozens of messages with Peter, and I had none,” remarked one Cabinet minister this week after the Health Secretary sought to draw a line under his connections to Mandelson by publishing their interactions. Critics see the promotion of Mandelson to Washington and former No 10 director of communications Matthew Doyle to the House of Lords as evidence of a fish rotting from the head down: a party willing to compromise women, girls and child sexual abuse victims for political expediency.
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And the collapse of the boys club in No 10 has allowed women in the party to grab their moment to express their rage that has been palpable for some time.
Another Cabinet minister told The i Paper she had been furious for years at the briefing culture which appears to attack women far more than their male colleagues. Leaving a meeting of Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party on Wednesday, Starmer was grim-faced; he’d faced a barrage of suggestions on culture change and warned he didn’t have much time to effect it. Told MPs were facing cat calls from constituents about being a party which protects paedophiles, any bonhomie from Monday night’s full PLP had evaporated.
With McSweeney and Mandelson gone, up popped Ed Miliband to tell Starmer what Starmerism is: “I tell you what angers Keir most about this country, it’s class. It’s the class divide. He exists to change that,” the Energy Secretary said.Not to be outdone, would-be leadership candidates threw in their two pennies’ worth. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the focus of British politics needed to switch to lower earners while former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner intervened on fiscal policy, arguing the hospitality sector needs more support with business rates.
The irony of McSweeney’s departure is that he, with other members of the Blue Labour movement, opposed the tendency of Blairite metropolitan liberalism at the expense of the working classes. Friends describe a polite man driven to anger over the treatment of girls who had fallen victim to grooming and rape and disgusted by the cover-up involved.
McSweeney’s exit, followed swiftly by Blair-era comms strategist Tim Allan leaves a hole in No 10. The organisational and political authority over whatever Starmerism is has gone. The moral authority is under question. Hovering into view is an as-yet-defined leftism. No wonder Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said she loathes the phrase “soft left” because it makes her think of a jellyfish.Jellyfish may be flabby, but they still sting. What this leftism looks like is still up for grabs. And it will determine how Starmer’s limited time in office unfolds.
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