Kmflett's Blog

McCullum & McSweeney. The King Midas in Reverse men?

On the face of it there isn’t any specific connection between England cricket coach Brendan McCullum and Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney except that both have beards.

The connection however is in their approach to turning around the project they are tasked with managing, from failure to success.

McSweeney has been Starmer’s key advisor since 2020 and was responsible for the strategy that saw Labour turn around its 2019 Election defeat into a remarkable victory in 2024. McSweeney’s method was not to build the Labour vote in core seats but to do just enough to win seats across a much wider area. It worked but as the period since July 2024 has underlined it also carried within it the seeds of failure. It left Labour’s core seats open to challenge from the left and sometimes the right but did not build anything substantial in most of the wider layer of seats that were won.

Could Labour have won without this strategy? Given the unpopularity of the Tories it seems likely.

There was a further element to the McSweeney method which was that it was relentlessly factional. The left were cut out and only those who were on board with the McSweeney project were welcome.

Brendan McCullum took charge of the England cricket team in May 2022 and after a period of poor results it was clear a change was needed. He introduced what the media (not McCullum) himself termed Bazball. It brought an initial period of considerable success.

However since the beginning of 2024 results have dropped off as other teams worked out strategies to counter Bazball, or sometimes adopt parts of it. The current Ashes series in Australia is the most recent unhappy result. Again like McSweeney, McCullum built a team not particularly always of the best or most suitable players but rather those that followed his approach. Again the factional approach was important.

The point, and it remains an arguable one, is that while winning is important, how you win is also important. Winning in the wrong way can lead to later defeats. Or as it’s known in popular culture the King Midas in Reverse approach