How Morgan McSweeney reshaped Labour after the fall of Jeremy Corbyn
Journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund tell Lewis Goodall how Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has been working behind the scenes since Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to shape the Prime Minister, and his politics.
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In brief…
- Maguire and Pogrund have released a new book about Keir Starmer’s leadership and re-imagining of The Labour Party, and how his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney has played a key role in his rise.
- They say this was born from a “loathing” of Jeremy Corbyn and a desire to bring the party back to a centrist standing.
- The Times journalists claim Starmer has had a turbulent time since his 2024 election win, but after bringing in McSweeney to replace Sue Gray as chief of staff late last year, his government may now be more stable.
What’s the story?
Keir Starmer hasn’t had the easiest ride of things since becoming Prime Minister.
Controversies over Taylor Swift tickets, donors paying for his glasses, backlash from farmers over Rachel Reeves controversial budget, and the appointment of (and swift removal) of Sue Gray as his chief of staff.
But, say Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, authors of new book Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, things have been back on track since bringing in Morgan McSweeney as Gray’s replacement.
The pair have worked together for years, and in their book Pogrund and Maguire credit him with not only reshaping the Labour Party in the years following the end of Corbyn’s leadership, but also moulding Starmer into the Prime Minister we see today.
“McSweeney had this loathing of Corbyn, but this love of Labour politics,” Pogrund, Whitehall editor of The Times newspaper, tells Lewis Goodall.
“His view was, the members have twice been consulted on the topic of this gentleman, Jeremy Corbyn, and they've twice emphatically elected him, so let's not try to remove him.
“Let's not scream about the fact that the Labour Party is doomed. Let's contemplate what we do on the other side.”
Corbyn was elected Labour leader by more than 59% of members in 2015, eventually stepping down after defeat in the 2019 general election.
During this period, while some Labour MPS were, at the time, vocally critical of Corbyn and his leadership, McSweeney was taking a quieter approach to the situation.
“He was thinking, well, let's examine the membership. Let's slice them. Let's dice them,” Pogrund adds.
“Let's try and understand them so that whenever Corbyn does go, we are ready to put somebody before them that appeals to the median Labour member and allows us, in due course, to prize the party back.”
McSweeney set up the think tank Labour Together, and presented it to Corbyn, appealing to the then-leader's dislike of confrontation and his goals of left-wing unity.
But, Maguire – political columnist for The Times – says, this was an attempt to destabilise his attempts to pull the party to the left.
“Even the name Labour Together was a lie,” he says.
“What he was really trying to do was develop a toolkit to delegitimise and undermine Corbynism.
“Sweeney was amassing evidence of anti semitism, doing all of this stuff, while at the same time presenting a very conciliatory, quite boring image.”
How McSweeney moulded Starmer
The book claims Starmer's intention was to become Labour leader from the very first day he became an MP in 2015 – and believed he'd be good at it.
“One by one, Keir Starmer starts bringing people he's close to into his confidence,” Maguire says.
And this, in 2019 Maguire adds, included McSweeney.
“Morgan McSweeney has a machine and no candidate. Keir Starmer wants to be the candidate, but lacks the machine, lacks that understanding of the Labour grassroots, and it all falls into place.”
Pogrund describes their relationship as "transactional", rather than one which stems from political closeness or a genuine friendship.
By this point, Pogrund says, McSweeney was developing “a script” on how he could sell Starmer to the country.
“Obviously, the first hurdle to get over was winning over the membership,” he says.
“But from a very early stage, he was thinking that Corbyn backed terrorists, while Starmer locked them up. He always had this idea that because of his history at the Crown Prosecution Service, because of his career, he was an unusual sort of Labour leader that could reach out beyond the party's natural constitution.”
McSweeney was working hard in the background to help Starmer achieve his career ambitions, despite the political gulf between the two.
“McSweeney's politics are related – but separate – to Starmer’s,” Pogrund adds.
“They have different intellectual traditions. McSweeney's much more aligned with Blue Labour, the sort of anti-globalist bent within the Labour tradition.
“Starmer's politics are essentially the European Convention on Human Rights, and they exist occasionally in a sort of uneasy but transactional waltz between the two men.”
But the one leading the dance has always been McSweeney, Pogrund and Maguire argue, due to Starmer’s lack of ideological commitment.
“Starmer, because he travels light ideologically, has been able to change course in a way which you can't conceive of many other politicians doing,” Pogrund says.
“You might call it cynicism. You might call it prescient or just the calculating mind required to engineer what happened in 2019 but I think Sweeney, from the very beginning, knew that starmer's initial phase was only one part of a much grander strategy. I don't detect that Starmer knew that would be the case.
There's an extent to which Mr. Sweeney always had this sort of vision for phase two of Starmer leadership.
And that vision involved Starmer's long term shift from "reconstituted Corbynism to Neo-Blair-ism".
Did McSweeney bring a ‘new lease of life’ to Starmer’s leadership?
Maguire says he doesn’t believe Starmer will have enjoyed the first hundred days of his time as PM, due to the increased press scrutiny, and disorder inside Downing Street, describing his aides as “trying to kill each other” during the months following his July 2024 election win.
“Keir Starmer is abroad for most of it, but back at home, everybody's trying to kill each other,” he says.
“When he's back at home, he's experiencing everything he hates about politics, not least the media intrusion or scrutiny – who's paying for your wife's clothes, where did your son revise for his GCSEs.
“Those are legitimate questions of public interest, by the way, but they intersect with his family, and he absolutely hates his family taking any of the flak for his career choices, which they inevitably did during that summer.”
He believes it would have felt like a "new lease of life" when McSweeney stepped into Gray's vacated role in October 2024.
Despite having co-written a book on the man, Pogrund says he still feels almost incapable of answering the question of who Keir Starmer is, and what his political goals are.
“I think we're probably compelled by this idea that Starmer, the moment he got into Number 10, had fulfilled – if not his life's ambition, certainly, the ambition that had been burning in him when he went from being a human rights barrister to improbably running the Crown Prosecution Service.”
But, despite this, and a "turbulent" start to Starmer's premiership, Pogrund believes that with a more coherent team inside Downing Street, led by McSweeney, he could be heading in a very different, but more "fruitful" direction.