For there is little that Downing Street’s chief of staff seems to enjoy more than “hippy-punching”. The irreconcilables on the party’s Left have been sidelined or exorcised through a combination of forcible banishment and self-exile. Party discipline has been enforced more rigidly than ever before. But, at some point, you have to identify yourself positively, with what you are for, rather than simply buckling down for permanent counter-insurgency, identifying yourself negatively, with what you’re against. On Friday afternoon, Starmer said that Labour faces “a battle for the soul of this country”, offering “patriotic national renewal”. But what kind of patriotism is he offering, and what kind of renewal, and to what kind of nation?

These are the questions that might normally be answered with the help of McSweeney. But McSweeney is in trouble. Revelations about £700,000 in undeclared donations to Labour Together, a think tank that he led during the Corbyn years, have recently resurfaced. Leaked emails reveal that lawyers advised that there was “no easy way to explain” the supposed oversight, telling the Starmerite outfit to blame “admin error” since they could not deal with the discrepancies “substantively”. Labour Together has already been fined, way back in 2021. But the story rumbles on. Perhaps more importantly than the low-level pecuniary scandal, McSweeney has become a lightning rod for everything that has afflicted a spluttering Starmerism in recent weeks.

The British press delight in creating a Machiavellian puppetmaster: the power, the anchor behind an otherwise ideologically unmoored throne. But unlike Boris Johnson’s equivalent Rasputin figure, Dominic Cummings, with whom he is often compared and is rumoured to have met on several occasions, McSweeney has not produced hundreds of thousands of words of esoteric, polemical invective via his personal blog before ascending to the apex of the British political system. There are no McSweeney lectures on YouTube, explaining his role in organizing against the BNP in Dagenham, where by most accounts he played a crucial role cleaning up fly-tipping zones and fixing up dilapidated housing to counter an incipient far-Right threat.

More from this author

How Starmer clipped Labour’s wings

By Jonny Ball

But this kind of “pavement politics”, redolent of a well-worn hyper-localism long practiced by the Lib Dems, is no substitute for a coherent worldview. Even New Labour’s own Prince of Darkness — the thrice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, a close McSweeney confidant — had the kind of intellectual scaffold that his softly-spoken younger protégé lacks. Third Way theorists like Anthony Giddens and the trendy bourgeois-bohemian Eurocommunist thinkers around Marxism Today presaged a post-class, center-left politics for the individualized, post-industrial consumer society, buoying Mandelson’s back-room Svengali operations in service of a Blairite nation-building project that was, at least, ideologically coherent.

But what is McSweeney’s guiding light, the source of his first principles? Thatcher, perhaps apocryphally, slammed down a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty during a tense cabinet stand-off, bellowing “This is what we believe!” What book does Starmer slam down? Is it Roy of the Rovers? Nobody can say. And what about McSweeney? We hear, in briefings, second- and third-hand, that he has an instinct for the electorate, and a strategic mind that is lacking among many members of the political classes. No doubt this is true. He correctly surmises that the niche obsessions of the contemporary Left are an electoral dead end: the old, stalwart “anti-imperialist” stances that lead to alignment with terrorist groups; the apologia for all variants of anti-American Third World strongmen; and, among the younger, millennial-socialist currents, the obsessions with gender fluidity, postmodern cultural poses, or wildly unpopular attempts to push extreme climate evangelism on a bemused public. These are what drove the Irishman’s war against Corbynism. But to what end, other than victory for victory’s sake?

This week, an international brigade of center-left sensibles met for the Global Progress Action Summit in London. McSweeney was reportedly behind preparations for the event, which included high-profile Democrats like Pete Buttigieg, alongside the Spanish Socialist PM, Starmer himself, and senior UK cabinet ministers, among them Rachel Reeves and David Lammy. It was briefed that the PM’s chief of staff “sees Keir as being a leader among global progressives”. Perhaps becoming a leader among British progressives would represent the first baby steps. One has to crawl before one can walk. But the source of the briefing nevertheless claimed that the social-democratic jamboree would look to “write a kind of playbook of what it means to be a center-left government in the era that we’re now in”, eschewing both Left and Right populisms and the Third Way model of the Nineties.

The problem for all these parties, from Labour to the Democrats to their European equivalents, is that they’ve never abandoned the Third Way. They each placed all-in bets on the inevitability of a linear progression towards an end-of-history vision of social and economic liberalism. They consciously realigned themselves to rainbow-coalition voter blocs constituted around groups of urbanite sophisticates that represented a future of knowledge and service work and the sublimation of class for identity politics; the professional-managerial classes, public sector workers, the urban precariat, and ethnic and sexual minorities. The working class, understood traditionally as those in manual professions not requiring a degree, were considered expendable; their industries were on the way out, in any case, and they would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

That politics has died in a wave of populist insurgency across the developed world. The working class didn’t disappear, but they’re no longer working on production lines, or unionized, and they’ve certainly no longer got an ear bent towards the gray, stodgy representatives of a distant liberal graduate class. And the attempted reconstitution of productive industrial capacity in Western economies is now the core focus of center-left politics. McSweeney seems to grasp both these trends. But he also seems either unable or unwilling to do what’s necessary to chart a course for genuine renewal for building a new growth model, almost two decades since neoliberalism died, or for reanimating Labour as the real party of the labor interest. This would involve identifying losers, as well as picking winners.

Over the summer, an anonymously authored paper circulated among disgruntled backbenchers and parliamentary staffers. “What did we learn on our summer holidays?”, it asked. It provided a brutal diagnostic for those returning from recess. “Labour”, it says, was governing “a country it does not know”. A rudderless government “is divided in itself”. Multiplying crises “have not produced positive change but political inertia”, with the governing party retaining “its old atrophying instincts… repeating its mistakes, ad nauseum.”

Suggested Reading

The McSweeney Project

By Tom McTague

Even McSweeney’s allies stress his weakness. A Blue Labour-aligned party figure laments the fact that “Morgan is just one man”, albeit a powerful one, struggling forlornly against the tide. But in Get In, McSweeney is the clear protagonist. Rather being driven by Sir Keir, the narrative is centered on the mysterious Irishman who conducts apparent Sun Tzu-like factional warfare while engineering an emphatic but clinical and loveless general election result, only for the curtain to fall and reveal it was all a pyrrhic victory, all much ado about nothing; a government with a historic supermajority, but without a plan for power, a project, or a guiding philosophy.

The Prime Minister’s most senior aide is quoted as telling a friend that “Keir acts like a HR manager, not a leader”. He’s “not driving the train”, says another. “He thinks he’s driving it, but we’ve sat him in front of the DLR”. Everyone knows who we’re meant to think is the real driver. But the thing about briefing to all and sundry that you’re a Clausewitzian strategic genius, pursuing politics as war by other means, is that you have to take the rough with the smooth: you can’t claim credit for the good times without being blamed for the bad. And on the eve of the Labour conference, these are no doubt bad times. One might even posit that for the Government, things can only get better.

MPs with thin majorities smell blood, and Downing Street is rankled. McSweeney is not universally loved even there. Some Labour staffers still gripe at a supposed boys’ club that was built around the Cork man. “I don’t rate him,” one tells me, “but I know I’m an outlier”.

McSweeney isn’t omnipotent. There’s more than a little frustration with the way the Government’s crucial first year has gone in Number 10. National renewal feels more like managed decline. The “Change” headline of the rather thin manifesto turns out to involve only barely perceptible, piecemeal reforms. “Insurgent government” looks more like a process-obsessed administration; government of, by and for the lawyers. If the standard quip is that politicians must campaign in poetry and govern in prose, then Starmer campaigned in prose and is governing in disjointed bullet points. Next week in Liverpool, both the PM and McSweeney will be hoping that today’s Labour librarians stay silent.