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• You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country• Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars• The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss became PM• The ‘Red Tory’ behind one of the most anti-feminist ideas in British politics• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions• The cooking revolutionary who overthrew traditional British dishes• Modern British dating is a car-crash – and Cilla Black is to blame• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury
Sir Keir Starmer famously denied that there was any such thing as “Starmerism”, but there certainly was something that might be called “McSweeneyism”, a project which explains much about the Prime Miniter’s rise and fall.
Morgan McSweeney was Starmer’s chief of staff from October 2024 to February 2026, when he resigned after he was blamed for the calamitous appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington. He will not be present in Downing Street to witness the unravelling of the government he did so much to foster and shape. Yet more than anybody else, he represented the zeitgeist – the spirit and direction – of the Starmer administration. He was its guiding force before and after its general election victory in 2024, and was responsible – perhaps more than Starmer himself – for the self-inflicted mistakes that ultimately destroyed it.
McSweeney has kept himself in the background so far as possible, trying not to give substance to the belief that he was the Machiavellian puppeteer manipulating a compliant Starmer as Labour party leader from 2020, and later as prime minister. Much publicity was given to a damning quote in Get In by journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in which an inside source derided Starmer as sitting in the driver’s seat of the driverless Docklands Light Railway (DLR): “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” Nobody doubted that the collective ‘we’ meant McSweeney and those around him.
After his resignation following the Mandelson scandal, McSweeney spent two-and-a-half hours seeking to persuade a sceptical parliamentary committee that it was not he but Starmer who called the shots: “The prime minister has his own mind. He reaches his own decisions. Sometimes he takes advice from me and will go with it. Sometimes when I was there, he didn’t.” This over-emphatic piece of self-deprecation unintentionally confers the impression McSweeney was really in charge.
He was always a man with a plan, but once Labour was in government it was unfortunately a very bad plan. Hailed as a political genius by some pundits after Labour’s general election landslide, he was described by Starmer as “one of the world’s best strategists”. A kinder interpretation of the McSweeney- Starmer relationship holds that the latter was not entirely his dupe, but he deliberately outsourced the dirty business of politics – which he did not like and was not good at – to McSweeney while the Prime Minister got on with governing the country. In the event, neither of them turned out to be much good at their jobs.
McSweeney was above all a faction fighter, ruthless and effective in seizing control of the Labour party from the hard left after Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 general election. On the national political stage, however, he stumbled from crisis to crisis, less a darkly effective Machiavelli than a disaster-prone Jonah whose poor judgement of people and policies was in time to capsize the good ship Starmer and insure the long running British political crisis has deepened without an end in sight.
As the leader of Labour Together, the think tank/campaign group, from 2017 on, McSweeney outmanoeuvred, displaced and purged the Labour left from the party. His victims were shocked by his ruthlessness and deceptiveness. He successfully ran Starmer for the Labour leadership on a left wing platform in 2020, before swinging sharply and permanently to the right.
Possibly McSweeney’s approach to politics was influenced by his Irish background. Born in the town of Macroom in West Cork in 1977, his family belonged to Fine Gael, the more conservative of the two main Irish political parties. Irish politics in the past has tended to be harder fought and better organised than in Britain, a modus operandi that in the US produced the Irish-American bosses who once ran great cities like Boston, Chicago and New York. McSweeney’s meticulously planned and unscrupulous assault on his political enemies within Labour was very much in this tradition.
But the skills of a faction fighter do not transfer smoothly to national politics and may, on the contrary, be a recipe for disaster. So it proved in the case of the Labour party which always balanced between a right and a left wing who detested each other, yet somehow rubbed along together. By kicking out, marginalising and generally alienating the left of the party, McSweeney ensured that a huge chunk of the Labour vote stayed home on election day or defected en masse to the Greens, who were seeking to rejuvenate themselves under Zack Polanski as the main progressive party.
The Starmer-McSweeney faction of the Labour Party always spoke of their victory in the 2024 general election as their very own battle of Agincourt, won against the odds by their heroic efforts. Many rebutted this interpretation as highly exaggerated with Labour winning two-thirds of parliamentary seats with one third of the votes, thanks to the anti-Tory tidal wave and the right-wing vote split between the Tories and Reform.
But a victory is still a victory which McSweeneyism could claim credit for, though it must also take responsibility for the over-whelming defeat that engulfed Labour in the May 2026 local authority elections. Just 46 per cent of Labour’s 2024 voters stuck with it according to a YouGov poll and analysis, with 22 per cent of Labour voters going to the Greens, 16 per cent to the Lib Dems, 6 per cent to Reform, and 24 per cent not voting.
The bizarre and doomed nature of the Starmer/McSweeney project becomes clearer in retrospect, though it was always to be expected. It involved moving the party sharply to the right in order to win over Conservative and Reform voters, Starmer aping Enoch Powell’s rhetoric about Britain becoming “an island of strangers”. This was not only unsavoury, but likely to blow up in the government’s face – and so it did. Political scientists warned that anti-immigrant rhetoric would simply further poison the British political waters, legitimise far right racism, fail to win over right wing votes to Labour, and infuriate its existing support.
Unsurprisingly, Starmer and McSweeney failed to conciliate their enemies while alienating their friends – and in doing so ratcheting up the permanent political crisis which has consumed Britain since the Brexit referendum in 2016. Each year it becomes more destabilising and more destructive. Labour had a chance of turning the tide, but McSweeneyism ensured that it failed and failed badly – and such an opportunity to reverse the breaking of Britain may not come again.
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