The complete unknown who could wreck Labour

Also, there were two vocal critics of liberalism, the broadcaster Trevor Phillips and former Prospect editor David Goodhart, who now works for Policy Exchange. On hand, naturally, was Maurice Glasman of the Blue Labour campaign group, who preaches about “conservative socialism” and says the party should “represent the working class rather than be the party of the aspirant middle classes”.

The handful of participants who might still be described as of the left were former Labour MP Jon Cruddas, Sunder Katwala of the British Future think tank, and Blue Labour stalwart Jonathan Rutherford. But the gathering was expecting one particularly high-profile speaker – No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, perhaps the most influential man in government, and one whose voice is rarely heard.

What he would have said about Keir Starmer’s plans to tackle populism and their shared vision for the future of the left, alas, remains a mystery. McSweeney appeared in the room during a prolonged monologue from Glasman, and after surveying those present for a time, quietly slipped out without saying his piece. 

Whether he was simply bored by Glasman’s overly long remarks, or whether he realised that comments from No 10’s chief of staff the day after a Trump victory might be unwise, we will never know. 

Such intrigue tends to follow the enigmatic McSweeney everywhere. It was once perceived as a strength. But now, with Labour battered by local election defeats, tanking in national opinion polls and apparently trying to resist the surge of Reform with what seem to be illiberal and ill-considered moves on immigration, the focus is firmly on McSweeney. Having taken credit for election success last July, he is being blamed squarely for almost all of what has come since.

The reason is that McSweeney has risen to an astonishing level of power and influence with the government, not least through the brutally effective removal of internal rivals, such as his predecessor, Sue Gray. His control over Starmer’s operation – and allegedly over Starmer himself – has already been chronicled in a book and seems likely to feature in many more.

He follows the Dominic Cummings mould of the campaign chief who goes on to run the No 10 operation; something that did not end well for either Cummings or his PM, Boris Johnson. But what McSweeney actually thinks remains mostly unknown, even to those within the government.

Despite being invisible to most voters, the 48-year-old Cork native’s rise to the chief of staff job is fairly well documented. His origin story is that he helped to run the campaign to dislodge the BNP from east London and retain Labour’s seats there, when the far right party was in the ascendancy locally – and did this largely by focusing on services: getting the bins emptied reliably and on time.

From there, he went on to run Liz Kendall’s ill-fated 2015 leadership campaign (she finished a distant fourth, with less than 5% of the vote) before founding the think tank Labour Together, which essentially served as the internal resistance to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. 

As the coalition that grew about Labour Together began to look for candidates who might succeed Corbyn once his leadership was done – Owen Smith’s disastrous 2016 challenge showed the perils of going too early on that front – Starmer’s name eventually emerged, and McSweeney backed him. He served for a time as Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition, but was shifted aside in 2021, reportedly against his will but without too much protest. 

He then served as Labour’s campaign chief and is credited with its strategy in 2024 to focus on marginal “red wall” seats, rather than piling up liberal and left wing votes in safe Labour seats. After a relentless and aggressive public briefing war against Gray, Starmer’s first chief of staff, over her competence, pay, handling of issues and more, McSweeney returned to the role last October.

He is now more than six months into the job, and they have not been happy ones. Though Starmer is often praised for his statesmanship, his personal numbers are under water and Labour has not led in any of the last 16 opinion polls. The strategy that won the general election appears to be in tatters, with Reform taking hold in the red wall and left wing Labour voters who do not like the McSweeney-driven tough talk on immigration and benefit cheats peeling off to the Greens and Liberal Democrats.

Obsession with the aides around the prime minister is a perennial habit of the media and dates back decades – as the New European’s own Alastair Campbell knows only too well. But senior Labour figures insist things really are different when it comes to McSweeney.

Campbell, they note, was surrounded by figures of similar stature, even if not all of them were as well known to the public. Tony Blair was also advised by Jonathan Powell (then No 10 chief of staff, now serving as national security adviser), Sally Morgan, Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson.

Since Gray was ousted, few advisers around Starmer have had anything like the clout or connections of McSweeney. 

Stuart Ingham, who heads the policy unit, enjoys a close relationship with Starmer, but there are rumours of tension between McSweeney and Liz Lloyd, recently brought in as Starmer’s director of policy delivery and innovation. Neither, though, attracts anything like the level of internal speculation or conversation as McSweeney. Now the talk is overground; Nigel Farage mentioned him often on the local election campaign trail, with the narrative that Starmer was his puppet.

Part of the problem is that McSweeney seems to do everything himself: he was the campaigns director, but now occupies the job most directly involved in delivering and executing policy. He is known to brief select figures in the media himself – rather than leaving it to the comms team – and what McSweeney is reportedly thinking often appears in the pages of the newspaper.

The media is, in fact, often the only way to know what McSweeney is thinking, according to No 10 staff and those who have seen him briefing the cabinet. When McSweeney presents, he comes with a slide deck and notes, reads from his prepared script, and then stops. The rest of the time, he will be listening rather than speaking. If compelled to offer a few words, he speaks extremely softly, and is much more likely to ask a question than offer an opinion. 

Far more people guess what McSweeney is thinking than ever hear it from the man himself. He is believed to be behind No 10’s ambivalence – sometimes bordering on antipathy – towards net zero. “He talks a lot about immigration,” according to one senior Labour source. He has taken his bins strategy from east London and transformed it into a plan to tackle Reform by fixing potholes.

Some are beginning to worry that the silence isn’t serving to hide the moves of a master strategist, but is instead masking the absence of a plan – and validating the fears of a Reform-obsessed government making policy via focus group.

There is mounting alarm as to whether McSweeney is more fired up by battles within the Labour Party than outside it. He was a core foot soldier in the internal resistance to Corbyn during his leadership, and was behind efforts to stamp out dissent once Starmer won. He helped to oust Gray. He and Pat McFadden were widely believed to be behind briefing wars against Ed Miliband and his £28bn net zero investment after Labour lost the Uxbridge by-election.

Labour’s only cabinet departure so far – transport secretary Louise Haigh – was a Miliband ally, dumped over a spent criminal conviction of which Starmer had long been aware. This string of internal and internecine conflicts – and the departures caused by them – have not escaped the notice of Labour’s backbenchers. “Almost immediately after we were elected, the scale of off-record briefing and factionalism felt more like the dying days of a government rather than an insurgent new one,” says one.

McSweeney’s love of a scrap might be making him the subject of increasingly waspish and frustrated conversations within Labour – where MPs and staffers alike despair at how a government with a landslide majority feels lost less than a year after an election – but others feel he may just be unlucky to be a lightning rod. 

There are few other aides with any kind of media profile, or who are getting attention among MPs, and since the speculation has to go somewhere, it is all heading in his direction, they suggest. Others counter that the resurgence of the culturally conservative Blue Labour faction is coming from somewhere – and while reports that Glasman and McSweeney are talking are said to be incorrect, he is believed to be in regular contact with the more reasonable face of the movement, Jonathan Rutherford.

The biggest danger to McSweeney, though, is hubris – at least according to several of those around him, more than one of whom said they were keen to see him stay involved in the operation, though perhaps in a more curtailed role. All point to Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer.

McSweeney did not speak on the record to Maguire or Pogrund for the book, but manages still to be quoted at length in it through recollections of his remarks at the dining table of Roger Liddle, head of the Labour think tank Progressive Britain (Wes Streeting is rumoured to have bought a blue plaque for that table to honour its supposed role in the party’s political resurrection).

The book paints McSweeney as the pivotal figure of Labour’s rise to power – even more so than Starmer himself. One analogy, offered unprompted by several people in the book – so it must have originated from somewhere – was that the PM was being allowed to sit at the front of London’s driverless Docklands Light Railway trains pretending to be in control, while McSweeney steered remotely.

The quote may not have come directly from McSweeney, but people were aghast that it was ever used – regarding it as terrible for Starmer and even worse for McSweeney; the kind of thing that, if said at all, should come out years after power, not one year into government. Starmer is famously “very fucking competitive”, according to one close confidant, and will not have appreciated his apparent demotion to frontman of convenience one iota.

Ultimately, McSweeney risks an Icarus narrative. He is the campaign chief, he is now directly responsible for the delivery of government policy, and he still seems to brief the media too – three deeply demanding jobs with often contradictory goals. 

Those around him note that if he claims the credit for 2024’s electoral victory, he must surely deserve a share of the blame for the party’s current calamities. As Labour lines up to offer more cuts, more austerity, and little in the way of good news – leading to reports that McSweeney and Rachel Reeves are now also at odds – No 10 is running out of people to blame.

A reshuffle and relaunch is likely to follow soon, but unless Labour’s fortunes change, its architect faces being reshuffled himself.

For now, no one knows what McSweeney is thinking. The danger for him is that they grow tired of waiting to find out.