Kmflett's Blog

This is the story of Morgan McSweeney. The man who tried to fix the space where Starmer’s worldview was supposed to be.

Reading extracts from a new book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund about Labour’s July 2024 Election victory, Get In, (Times 2-4th February 2025) I was struck by a reported view of Tony Blair that Starmer’s politics didn’t really come from anywhere except they were ‘vaguely progressive’.

Former Editor of the New Statesman Jason Cowley wrote in the Sunday Times (8^th February 2026) that Starmer has the politics of a pre-woke, London liberal left, anti-apartheid, Amnesty International and the Guardian as it was in the 1980s. Cowley, who has the ear of Lord Blue Labour Glasman, claims this world has gone and this is a key problem for Starmer.

The book’s partly unevidenced ripping yarns, are entertaining and like much that would be found in an old style paper diary column, having enough of the truth about them to be possibly true, don’t really get to the root of the Starmer enigma.

Jason Cowley reviewed the book in the Sunday Times (9th Feb 2025) and suggested that the core of it is the Morgan McSweeney story. McSweeney provided the political organisation Starmer lacked. A note of caution, which wasn’t sounded in the media, is that McSweeney was the manager of Liz Kendall’s bid for the Labour leadership where she got 4.5%. In respect of the July 2024 Election it might be speculated that Labour would have won without McSweeney’s strategy, given how hated the Tories were, but perhaps not as big

The book does at least underline an already existing view that Starmer is much more a professional lawyer than a politician and in particular someone with a lack of political sensibility.

McSweeney’s ideas, or lack of them, made him a standard Labour right-winger. The Labour right has been bereft of ideas on how to change the world for the better or even make sure it doesn’t get worse since at least the 2008 financial crash. That was a key reason why Jeremy Corbyn had the appeal he had, he did some have ideas.

In place of Starmer’s (possible) 1980s North London worldview came McSweeney’s organisational fixing (advised as Get In reports by Peter Mandelson). That is Labour Together and the late reported donations, the construction of an anti-Semitism crisis in Labour aimed at the left, and more recently allegedly the fixing of who was and was not a Labour candidate in July 2024.

The fix has unravelled, is another project possible? Or is the future of left politics, electoral and beyond, now outside of Labour?

Your Party has to an extent unravelled and Andy Burnham is on the slow train from Manchester. Meanwhile the Green Party, a reformist but not a socialist party, has well over 200,000 members. And Morgan McSweeney has disappeared along with his work phone only to reappear still with his beard at a Commons Committee on 28th April

Interesting times but hopefully not so interesting as to send Farage to a pub near Downing St (Red Lion). Stopping that will need not the fixing of McSweeney but actual organisation and mobilisation of anti-racists.