The No. 10 aide had fallen on his sword, sacrificing himself on the altar of Keir Starmer’s continued reign of error. The press, the public, and even the Parliamentary Labour Party, with one eye on its dismal polling, demanded someone’s head on a plate — and it certainly wouldn’t be the man who was ultimately responsible for the decision to appoint the thrice-disgraced friend of a convicted paedophile as US ambassador. Advisors advise and ministers decide, yes. But who in their right mind would want to see an otherwise successful PM, delivering essential reforms, resign over such a trifling matter?

The feeling was by no means universal. One aide told me that they wanted to reply with “[waving emoji] Off ya fuck”. That aide will be pleased that McSweeney is being hauled over the coals for his alleged role in pressurizing Foreign Office officials to expedite Peter Mandelson’s appointment, with or without due process. To the McSweeney skeptic, yesterday’s pitiful Foreign Affairs Select Committee performance would have been no surprise. Here sat a man whose image, as a Malcolm Tucker-esque fixer, had for years been carefully cultivated, not least by his allies’ incessant briefing to journalists. By this telling, “Morgan” was the real power behind the throne, a latter-day Thomas Cromwell steering the government while Sir Keir was plonked obliviously at “the front of the DLR”.

But who among us isn’t tempted to believe in an enigmatic Rasputin, the political éminence grise to which we have recently become so accustomed? Bumbling Boris lacked political consistency, but Dominic Cummings would provide operational rigor, as well as an overarching vision: a lean state, shorn of the constraints of European law and recalcitrant bureaucracy, using science and technology to facilitate post-Brexit growth.

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McSweeney was supposed to be cut from similar cloth — the consummate political fixer and wily operator on whom the PM relied for his organizational, political and ideological moorings. But in the cold light of Emily Thornberry’s camp, incredulous questioning, he wilted. Here was a diminutive, shy Cork man whose answers to the committee were anodyne deflections and polite, sometimes flustered, denials. He began with a profuse apology for recommending Mandelson as ambassador. At one point in the proceedings he had to correct himself after initially seeming to claim that he had always doubted the Prince of Darkness’s answers to questions posed in his vetting. “In September I realized I didn’t get the truth back”, said McSweeney. “At the time I thought I got the truth back. I might have mumbled my words. I got the answers back to him. I thought he was telling the truth. I thought he answered truthfully”. Clear as day.

On display was none of the panache, the charm or even the quiet menace that we might have associated with an ultra-effective operator, Labour’s backroom svengali. That isn’t to say that the dark arts of political skulduggery and intense factionalism haven’t taken place on McSweeney’s watch and at his behest. They have. The Irishman’s rise to the top is a story of furtive dinners, calculated untruths, strategic sleights of hand and discreet inner-party campaigns whose funding broke electoral law. But it’s all been done in a way that mirrors the political project that he and Starmer personify. The essence of that project is inner-party, internecine factional warfare carried out by people without any idea of their ultimate political purpose, without any conception of their ideal Britain.

With Cummings, there was an ethos behind the mythos. Whatever one thought of the Vote Leave guru, he had a theory of change, and a set of coherent, radical proposals that he had concluded would work in the national interest. His was a move-fast-and-break-things approach, to be delivered by small, accountable teams full of “weirdos and misfits” and Leninist fervor, committed to a Whitehall package reversing the influential reforms of Northcote-Trevelyan report. In contrast, McSweeney’s philosophy seems to have lacked substantive weight. What were his efforts in service of? Five ditched missions that nobody vaguely normal can recite? Or was it the six milestones, or three foundations?

Perhaps the paucity of ideas reflects McSweeney’s familial politics in the mother country. The McSweeneys are a Macroom clan of Fine Gael supporters. His aunt was Fine Gael councillor, and his cousin has been an advisor to two recent Fine Gael Taoiseachs. This kind of grounding in the anti-revolutionary, pro-Treaty traditions of one of Ireland’s conservative parties lends itself not to grand narrative or transformative agendas, but to quiet pragmatism in the service of established institutions. From rural Ireland to London, McSweeney is the college dropout who found purpose in Labour’s backroom. There, around the turn of the millennium, he punched information on New Labour’s political enemies into a primitive database, “Excalibur”, for use in Mandelson’s own Blair-era machinations. It was then that McSweeney learned the tricks of the trade, under the tutelage of the epoch’s factional enforcers.

But his emphasis on discipline outmatched anything that came before him. McSweeney oversaw a Stalinist approach to party management. He purged political rivals and suspected malcontents; he was all too willing to remove the party whip from recalcitrant MPs. But this is Stalinism without the five-year plans. It’s authoritarianism for authority’s sake. Dirty tricks must be employed, power must be exercised and maintained, simply to stop the Corbynites, to “rescue the party” from all the parasitic tendencies of the loony Left. But there was no vision for the country. Pure means, with no ends, beyond sinecures for your allies, what Thornberry called “jobs for the boys”.

In Starmer’s image, a new Parliamentary Labour Party has been created. Out of the 403, not a single one of them represents a plausible alternative Prime Minister. This is the only thing that keeps Starmer in place, in spite of his unprecedented unpopularity, itself about to collide with a coming recession and inflationary spiral. McSweeneyism, in pursuit of political professionalization, has produced a Labour-dominated House of Commons packed with legislators whose chief achievements center not around representing workers, rising through the ranks of trade unions in a variety of sectors, and sit still less upon building organizations or creating successful institutions with national impact. Instead, it is a hollowed-out parliament of junior managers armed with humanities degrees, specializing in internal slideshows for corporate public affairs departments or the third sector. Gone are the organizers, the rabble-rousers, the barnstorming autodidacts, and in are the dull young things, delivering speeches in the manner of weekly updates on Microsoft Teams. Once it was a party of labour; today it is a party of LinkedIn.

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And now, languishing in the polls, mired in scandal, hit by economic crises, and about to lose Wales and much of London to insurgent parties, even the LinkedIn PLP is restive. The putative footsoldiers of Starmerism are unmoved by claims that they owe their jobs to the Irishman. A No. 10 insider texts to say that “everyone says he’s a genius” but that McSweeney was “just a kinda sensible pair of hands… no real narrative, just data-driven.” The insider concludes: “That’s fine for winning but not for leading the country”. McSweeney’s construction of a historic majority rests on the thinnest of margins of support. This was the shallowest of victories — winning by appearing as a default option, as simply “not Tories” after the years of Partygate, Trussonomics and stagnant living standards. For all the clever vote-to-seat efficiency, it’s likely that any leader of the Labour party, a team of monkeys in red rosettes, would have fought a hard campaign against a hapless Rishi Sunak. McSweeney and Starmer’s efforts in 2024 garnered fewer votes than a Hamas and IRA-adjacent old hippy-dippy Leftist could muster in Labour’s 2019 wipeout, and significantly less than the same bearded radical won in 2017.

Without McSweeney, Starmer is less anchored. He has burned through all his goodwill and political capital. There will be no recovery. A timetable for his exit, imposed on the Prime Minister by his own Cabinet, is not out of the question. In January, Starmer blocked Andy Burnham from contesting a Denton and Gorton by-election; this time, the Prime Minister will be too weak to repeat the trick. If Starmer is given an exit timetable, Burnham will have time to gain a seat and to launch a challenge in time for party conferences in September. Among many MPs who previously gave Starmer the benefit of the doubt, the general feeling that the PM is a good man doing a bad job has given way to near-universal contempt for him on a personal level. He has shifted blame and thrown colleagues under the bus rather than take responsibility. Operation Save Keir could yet claim more scalps.

For all the fawning goodbyes crediting McSweeney’s “genius” with saving Labour “from the brink of destruction”, it may all be too late in any case. If trends continue, his legacy won’t be saving Labour, but overseeing its slow self-destruction. He may have proved adept at conquering a party machine, but far less capable of maintaining the political coalition that the machine was meant to serve — an electoral bloc currently being torn apart by competing populisms of Left and Right. McSweeneyism treated power as the destination rather than the instrument, and a party and a Prime Minister that forgets the difference rarely survives for long.

I have disliked almost every Starmer policy to date. Given that, you might expect me to be on my seat cheering at the spectacle of Keith on the ropes, visibly fighting for his premiership after the resignations of Morgan McSweeney, his all-important Chief of Staff, and Tim Allan. But I’m not cheering. And nor should you, for this reason: have you seen what the rest of his party is like?

The nominal ground for McSweeney’s resignation is the role he played in Mandelgate: the furor over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador in the light of revelations about his friendship with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But really the knives have been out for McSweeney much longer, thanks to the role he played in purging the party’s madder Left factions ahead of Starmer’s electoral campaign.

McSweeney, we now know, masterminded this work by all manner of skulduggery, including funding campaign groups to taint the Corbynite faction with antisemitism, then expelling the ringleaders from the party and marginalizing their followers. But as the Americans discovered in Afghanistan, military occupation and peace aren’t quite the same thing. Only weeks into Starmer’s premiership, as street protests erupted nationwide in the wake of the Southport atrocity, muffled thumps and squeaks were emanating from Westminster as well.

These clarified into reports of intensifying rivalry between McSweeney and Sue Gray, Starmer’s then-chief of staff. The briefing wars had already begun, only to be won by McSweeney. After Gray resigned in October 2024, McSweeney took her place. But the noises off never really stopped. The Left first drew blood when they forced Starmer’s humiliating U-turn on ending pensioners’ winter fuel payment in May 2025, and then again on changing the criteria for PIP disability assessments the following month: signs of a party nowhere near as harmonized and sensible as the image presented by Starmer in his electoral pitch.

Having made enemies in Gray’s faction as well as the rump Corbynistas, McSweeney did well to survive more than a year. It’s clear now, though, that his many haters spotted their chance with Mandelgate and have duly pounced. Now, one haunting question remains: what will Starmer do, or indeed be, without him?

Even with McSweeney in post, it didn’t take long for the brittle authoritarianism of Starmer’s Southport response to slacken into something eerily passive, or perhaps more accurately “emergent”, rather than ordered by any very substantive vision. I recently called him Keith-GPT, and the Large Language Model (LLM) analogy is apt in the sense that Starmer’s program since Southport really does feel like the product of a pattern-recognition engine: one designed to calculate the average of views across all groups deemed politically important, but incapable at any point of applying human judgment. It’s the Keith-GPT Labour Leadership Model.

The great selling-point of Morgan McSweeney was that he was supposed to calibrate this emergent policy-formation engine ruthlessly to the median voter. Perhaps this explains the sense of constant, amorphous triangulation not just in relation to his own party factions, but also in relation to public reaction, in the form of yet more U-turns. Here, winter fuel and PIP were soon joined by further U-turns driven by public pressure, on holding a grooming gang inquiry, on making digital ID mandatory, yet another on farmers’ inheritance tax and also recently on business rates for pubs.

At the risk of over-stretching the robot analogy, then, we might describe Morgan McSweeney as the engineer that was supposed to ensure “alignment” with generally accepted public mores. And whatever else you want to say about him, he did at least seem to grasp that the general British public does not want a far-Left government, and successfully produced a convincing enough appearance of not being that to have enthused my family, among many others. All the bloodshed was aimed thus: at steering the PM and the Labour Party as a whole toward the “middle ground”.

Now, along with the interpersonal enmities and factional struggles, his departure reflects the fundamental, structural problem of all contemporary politics: that this isn’t actually possible, because the “middle ground” is no longer there — and anyone hewing to that supposed middle will find the country ungovernable on those terms. I was into my thirties before I’d lived through six prime ministers. My daughter is not into double digits yet, and she has lived through six already. Each of these has followed the same, now wearily familiar pattern. A leader is installed, tries (usually) to tack to this “middle ground”, and is promptly tripped up by a mix of incompetence, venality, infighting, fiscal constraint, insoluble policy paradoxes, media vultures, and an increasingly sullen and radicalized electorate.

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This has already done for the Conservatives. All the evidence so far is that it’s doing for Labour too. In this vein, the question of how long Starmer would last has been in the air since the Southport riots. I can’t remember the last time I read an article about the man that did not, at some point, mention the fact that he is the most unpopular prime minster since polling began. But again: the central structural issue is that neither of the traditional electoral coalitions makes sense any more, nor even agrees internally on anything much.

As things stand, the Parliamentary Labour Party is a monstrous hybrid, in which Blairites struggle to coexist with race-baiters, those advocating for the interests of their specific ethnic bloc, and (somehow, still) a tattered rump of the historic white working-class Labour movement. Then there’s the trade unions, now reinvented in the post-industrial age as public-sector tin-rattlers and trans activists. There’s the impossible dilemma of how Labour should respond to public disquiet about mass immigration, and, in its wake, the problem of inter-ethnic gang violence in majority-minority areas such as Leicester, without falling foul of the ethnic blocs now advancing their political interests either with or adjacent to the party.

What, ultimately, is Starmer to do? He can’t cut taxes without angering those of his MPs who represent the (now majority) of voters who are net welfare recipients. He can’t raise them without enraging those who want growth, and further immiserating the rump of net contributors. He can’t tax high earners any more without them leaving for Dubai. He can’t let more migrants in without angering part of his caucus, but also can’t keep them out or deport them without triggering another. The less said about Net Zero, the better.

The party has so many internal disagreements on so many of these issues that the only way they could be held even superficially in balance was via the kind of ferocious political maneuvering at which Morgan McSweeney clearly excelled. His dark arts managed to sustain an illusion of internal coherence within this incoherent and fissiparous party, at the expense of every faction and its pet projects. No wonder they all wanted him gone. But also no wonder that Starmer’s efforts to find the mathematical midpoint of so many mutually exclusive ideologies have grown increasingly strained and implausible. Even his face has taken on an uncanny quality, as though he could glitch and freeze at any moment.

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But uncanny though it has been to watch Starmer try and bridge these unbridgeable differences, with McSweeney’s aid, the prospect of the Prime Minister’s seemingly judgment-free consensus engine attempting to take the average of his party’s policies unaided was far worse. To borrow the AI analogy again, recall the brief episode during which Elon Musk opted to discard all constraints of civility and political correctness on his Grok AI, with the result that the pattern-recognition machine immediately began posting grossly offensive antisemitic content, at one point even calling itself “MechaHitler”.

We have to hope that Starmer has fractionally more human judgment than Grok, and that removing McSweeney’s guardrails would thus not necessarily result in Labour resiling like Grok did into instant antisemitism (though it’s not totally impossible). But inasmuch as his politics are emergent and driven only by consensus, removing the one individual capable of subduing the mad factions and pursuing the normie voter can only mean emboldening the nutjobs.

There was, alas, a conservative case for keeping Morgan McSweeney in situ. Thanks to Westminster’s bloodthirsty court press, and the vengeful hunger of Labour’s backbenchers, that case is trampled in the mud. Now, having lost his alignment engineer, what will Starmer settle on as the most plausible cocktail of policy options to inflict on the British public? It is, frankly, anybody’s guess. But we can assume nothing is now off the table, however deranged or factional, provided someone can convince him that this is the burning issue closest to the heart of the party or the electorate. We can also assume that every faction is already making as much noise as possible, to fool the Labour Leadership Model into identifying their pet issue as the one thing that will “reset” this ailing regime.

At the time of writing, Starmer hangs in the balance. The order has reportedly gone out to tweet messages of support, an event that usually signals it’s actually already over. But should he fall on his sword, no one who hated his policies should rejoice. Robotic and lacking in vision as he is, with McSweeney’s aid Starmer did at least manage to hold the madder daydreams of his party in check. Without even this fig-leaf of unity, we face the prospect of three years of Left-wing factions brawling for control of a parliamentary majority they only won by pretending to have foresworn factionalism. God help us all.

Instead, British politics over the last decade has seen the rise of the celebrity adviser — staff who have been visible shapers of the government agenda and essential to the party leader or Prime Minister. When I was in Downing Street working for Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Chief of Staff was the former mandarin Jonathan Powell, a calm, long-serving presence who focused on the critical issues of Northern Ireland and defense and security. Personalities vary, but the elevation of Chief of Staff started with Dominic Cummings, who worked for Boris Johnson as Chief Adviser. As a named and known figure, Cummings had his own reputation as a political player, having successfully led Vote Leave to victory in the Brexit referendum, and maintained his own links with the media when inside No 10. He continued to narrate his own theory of the case to selected journalists even through the national crisis of Covid, culminating in the infamous press conference held in the Downing Street garden.

Cummings established a set of behaviors and assumptions that have continued to define the Chief of Staff role. Blaming the civil service. Attempting to strengthen the center of government. Concentrating flows of information. Briefing journalists. Suspending the whip from MPs. This, sadly, became a model for Keir Starmer’s No 10 operation. 

The obvious flaw in the Cummings model is captured by that former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short’s description of special advisers as “people who live in the dark”. She meant it as an attack on spin doctors,  but it was also good advice. The iron law of staffing is that you must not become the story. And when you do — whether you are Alastair Campbell, Dominic Cummings, or Morgan McSweeney — you will have to go. Each fell in different ways: Alastair went to war with the media, finally turning up on screen; Dom lost an internal Downing Street power struggle; Morgan took responsibility for his closeness to Peter Mandelson. Yet each had become a household name — the very opposite of lurking in the shadows. 

The less obvious structural problem is that, over the past decade, the job of Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been held by 14 different people. This, too, is part of the Cummings legacy. The reason is Brexit. That was the ultimate project of change without a plan, and it has set the template for UK politics. A profound rejection of “things as they are” to which politicians repeatedly failed to respond. Theresa May — no plan, just a hard Brexit with a “dementia tax” and restoration of hunting. Boris Johnson — no plan, and he was not saved by his swift response to the global crisis of Covid. Rishi Sunak — no plan but some spreadsheets and some welcome but insufficient incremental changes. Keir Starmer — no plan, not even a plan to make a plan.

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For a decade, voters have demanded change, whether opting for Brexit, surging to Corbyn, or delivering landslides in turn to Johnson and Starmer. What to change from is obvious: the status quo. What to change to is far more opaque, not least because neoliberal governance, or the “Treasury view”, as it is commonly known, is the paradigm within which government politicians live and think. The bond vigilantes have been beseeched to attack Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to support the government’s Budget, and now to quell backbench Labour unease. Just look at how easily the current Labour leadership turns to the bond markets for support in party management. 

There is a desperate need for Labour to break with the current political frame, which for a decade has ensured virtually no growth in wages and living standards. Yet there is stasis within the Labour party at the moment — apart from the call by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who himself admitted he has no rule in changing the UK leader, for Starmer to resign. Sure, there is a structural problem: the possible candidates are waiting for the result of inquiries. Angela Rayner hasn’t had resolution of an HMRC inquiry; others await the full publication of correspondence between Peter Mandelson and ministers. Burnham, the single most popular figure in Labour politics, is marooned outside the House of Commons having been barred from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in McSweeney’s last backroom move to protect his boss. Burnham’s candidacy in that contest would have given a voice to voters and a potential vehicle for change for the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). So this is currently a Mexican stand-off in which no-one can pull a trigger.

Yet, as the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn used to say, what matters most are not personalities but issues. The real question for anyone who wants to replace Starmer is what policy platform would restore Labour’s popularity to 25% — which would make it competitive with Reform UK. In reality, there are two options: focus on delivery or focus on change. The first of these, currently being pursued by the Starmer government as the “cost-of-living agenda”, is a cul-de-sac. Sadly, it is the path and error of the technocrat. It is more a tactic than a strategy, and it rests on making a series of small, incremental changes in the hope that those will accumulate into a meaningful difference. 

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The problem is that the cost of living never goes down, not least because, since the Thirties, politicians and economists have been conscious of the massive danger of deflation. So, if prices won’t go down, what to do? The Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has popularized the term “Affordability”. The concept brings increased spending power into the calculation — with more of that then things are more affordable. The record rise in the minimum wage is part of that, as is the reality of rent controls coming in through strengthening renters’ rights in England.

That’s why Labour’s second option — focusing on change, rather than delivery — is the real contest. Just look at the rise of insurgent parties in the UK. On the Left, there are the Greens, and on the Right there is Reform UK — both fueled by voters who distrust big business, believe the system isn’t working, and have lost trust in the traditional parties. 

Given these circumstances, the Labour Party needs a new political economy. Without a theory of how to allocate revenue and capital fairly, who the winners and losers are, and who their enemy is, changing leaders is pointless. That new political economy requires obeying the first law of politics — the voters are never wrong, so act on their worries. Yes, they complain about the cost of living, but the biggest element of that is housing — and housebuilding has fallen catastrophically. The only entity that can build at speed and scale is the government — so it is time for half a million council houses built on government land. The biggest existential fear for workers is the advance of AI, while for parents it’s the impact of Big Teach on their kids’ futures. For Labour, the natural party of intervention, that means swift and tough regulation.

Above all else, the party must apologize. Admit that Labour lost its way. None of its mistakes — the reasons it has lost support — were in the manifesto. Cutting winter fuel payments, attacking social security for people with disabilities, appointing the wrong ambassador — those were all done in government. Return to the manifesto and build a plan to implement big changes that will be visible and will be felt day by day, month by month, over the remaining years of the parliament. That landslide majority could still come in handy, if Labour can find a true social democratic purpose. Then there may be a Chief of Staff in Downing Street whose name we don’t need to know.

But Morgan McSweeney was meant to be different. His driving motivation was to pursue a relentless courtship with the median voter. It was a strategy, though, that won him plenty of enemies, not least within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Labour MPs, in the main, did not get into politics to cut welfare, or to legislate punitive measures against migrants. If the old-fashioned class struggle has long ago ebbed, it has been replaced within Labour by a stalwart commitment to redistribution via post-hoc benefit payments, combined with a liberal-progressive social outlook. McSweeney’s project cut directly against this, and they hated him for it. This is, after all, an organization crowded with heady idealists who see any modicum of compromise as betrayal. And after enduring 18 months of uncertainty, U-turns and attempts at appeasement, they got what they wanted. The Mandelson Affair was their coup de grâce.

The Prime Minister remains, for now. But without the architect of his political ascent by his side, Starmer finds himself hamstrung at a moment of great political danger. The Intelligence and Security Committee is set to release yet more correspondence; who knows who will be compromised. The Gorton and Denton by-election is around the corner; it risks being catastrophic. And then there will inevitably be a Labour wipeout in the May locals. The PLP is restive and mutinous; rivals are gathering. Angela Rayner is coiffed and poised, waiting for closure on her tax affairs from HMRC; Andy Burnham is watching from the sidelines, nursing his grievance and ambition. Starmer, a process man by instinct, might even fall on his sword in mortification. However, it wouldn’t take much to see him off: just some well-timed ministerial resignations, or a solemn, plaintive visit from cabinet colleagues: “Thank you, Keir, but it’s time to go.”

In any case, with his personal polling in as dire a state as Liz Truss’s, a leadership battle sooner or later is near-inevitable. The question is when, not if. Starmer’s dwindling band of allies may be furiously briefing that the ever-orthodox and fiscally moderate Prime Minister is the only thing preventing financial cataclysm — a Labourite update of “après moi, le déluge”. But make no mistake, they will soon be the ancien régime.

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For now, though, he clings on, an uncharismatic, unpopular Prime Minister tethered to a thin and uncertain policy agenda. And when a government cannot articulate a clear purpose, it relinquishes political momentum, battered by storms and scandal, without the respite of a driving agenda to return to in times of calm. As a result, a two-pronged populist insurgency is drawing in voters from the Left to Zack Polanski’s Greens, and from the Right to the Faragists. So much for Starmerism, which was meant to restore common sense to the forefront of politics. It was meant to “tread a little lighter on people’s lives”, eschewing ideology for pragmatism. The Sensibles were back in charge, and McSweeney would maintain his voter coalition by breaking all the party’s taboos on the issues of the day — appealing steadfastly to voters rather than to the concerns of the progressive activist class. But instead, it fatally ignored the complications and deeper tensions within Labour’s electoral coalition.

McSweeney, then, spent his time in Downing Street dragging Labour away from its comfort zones: here was an iconoclast, determined to smash all the right-on pieties and shibboleths come-what-may. The intended audience wasn’t Westminster’s bleeding hearts, the Polly Toynbees, or Europhile citizens of anywhere. McSweeney focused on the “hero voters” of the UK’s marginals — those who had backed Boris and Leave, perhaps, but who had swung behind a changed Labour Party in 2024. Or so the theory went. Keir Starmer owed him his election victory, and if he had allowed McSweeney to set the electoral strategy, then why not allow him to define the governing strategy, too?

It has been a disaster. Once in power, Labour immediately started to shed support. The policy mix has been scattered, the rhetorical framing fitful. Cumulatively, titbits of ad-hoc, piecemeal reforms, many of them abandoned after public or parliamentary backlash, appear less as well-planned, median-voter catnip, more like policy calibrated to alienate every disparate section of the electorate. The harsher, anti-migrant rhetoric repulses the activistocracy, while doing nothing to attract Reform voters who can watch footage of small boat arrivals and asylum hotel protests every lunchtime on TikTok; the Net Zero project pushes away the populist Right without keeping on board the younger, green-tinged demographic, many of whom believe the Labour leadership is now complicit in the Gaza genocide; an asylum and migration crackdown horrifies the migrant communities and Labour-voting cosmopolitan professionals, but reassures few if any of McSweeney’s hallowed “hero voters”, who will never be convinced by the superficial patriotism of a leadership so viscerally associated with metropolitan liberalism.

To govern is to choose — and lacking a guiding philosophy, Starmer has instead established policy inquiries, committees, reviews and taskforces, to avoid decision-making. He recoils at political conversation and regards ideological chatter with disdain. He thought he could leave the politics to his chief of staff, but it was only a certain type of politics that the Irishman excelled in: McSweeney is the consummate party machine man, an expert bureaucratic fixer and internal faction fighter who knows how to read polls and interpret. The ruthless efficiency with which Labour translated its relatively meager vote share into Commons seats in 2024 is testament to that.

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While his knack for internal machinations and for the nitty-gritty of political praxis is certain, McSweeney lacked the ability to define his project (and it was his project, more than Starmer’s) when he entered Downing Street. He had a plan to win control of the Labour Party, and even the country, without ever having a clear sense of what he would do with power. His tenuous Blue Labour association was based on little more than his obvious appreciation for that tendency’s potential as an electoral tactic — attracting the Reform-curious — rather than being a considered, moral driving force which could underpin a coherent policy agenda.

Starmerism’s attempts to appeal to this nostalgic, romantic idea of “Labour’s people” — the traditional working-class voters of the post-industrial towns and smaller cities — increasingly resemble a jilted lover begging for reconciliation. The electorate has moved on and found a new partner. His name is Nigel.

The disciplined “Ming vase” courtship that secured victory in 2024, has, in government, produced an administration defined less by caution than paralysis. In power, McSweeney seems to have masterminded a project with little motivating it beyond survival. It is becoming “no things to no men”. And with an eye on the polls, its final defenders are beginning to morph into their former nemeses: those hard Left militants and unreconstructed Corbynites who agitated against any compromise with the electorate, whose politics spoke not to the country but to their own narrow clique.

Soon, the initiative will pass to the soft Left, who will attempt to chart a different course, perhaps wooing back prodigal sons and daughters from the Liberals and the Greens, ostensibly to unite the Left-wing vote against a divided Right. Yet the danger is that Labour retreats once more to its instinctual comfort zones; it may not be enough to forge that progressive alliance from a fragmented electoral map, but the soft Left MPs can at least assuage their consciences, mouthing that old refrain: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

That is owing to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Once, McSweeney was called a “Blairite”: it was he, after all, who had steered Liz Kendall’s ill-fated 2015 attempt at a New Labour restoration. He remains aligned with Kendall; both have spent the last week under extreme pressure from backbenchers over the welfare reform bill. He has however found that the Blue Labour outfit, at least as far as the rhetoric is concerned, fits him better than the Blairite one: Alasdair MacIntyre beats Alastair Campbell. Maurice Glasman has described him as “one of ours”.

The outfit does have the tactical advantage of being amorphous, of revelling in “the politics of paradox”. It is rhetoric as much as ideology. Sometimes it presents itself merely as a strategy for winning back the “Red Wall”; other times it is a fully-fledged philosophy, which promises to defend the dignity of man against commodification and atomization, those wretched hallmarks of modernity. Blue Labour is, broadly speaking, anti-woke, anti-euthanasia, anti-austerity; it is pro-union, pro-nationalization, pro-“Levelling Up”. Its adherents can usually be spotted by their watchwords: “work”, “community”, “tradition”, “faith”, “flag”, “family”. If these sound ubiquitous and banal, that’s partly the point.

It is best understood as the peculiarly British variant of “postliberalism”. American postliberalism tends to carry a reactionary flavor. Many of its adherents are Roman Catholics, more often by conversion than birth, aiming more or less openly at Catholic integralism. There is a Right-wing postliberalism in Britain, too, represented in Parliament by the Conservative MPs Nick Timothy and Danny Kruger. But in Britain’s postliberal scene the Left has the upper hand. The academic Adrian Pabst, who co-edited one of the “Blue Labour” books, wrote the book on postliberalism in 2021; and John Gray can usually be found banging the drum in the Left-wing New Statesman. Britain exported its finest postliberal, Alasdair MacIntyre, to the United States; but although he swam the Tiber, as American postliberals are wont to do, his thought remained much infused by his earlier dabblings in Marxism.

When the British postliberals cast around for an illustrious, indigenous pedigree, they find one on the Left, inhaling the fumes of an old, patriotic socialism. Unlike in America, Catholics do not hold a monopoly on postliberalism in Britain: there is a strong Dissenting element here. The British postliberals can take their cues from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), the most widely read history book in interwar Britain. They can conscript to their squadrons the “guild socialism” of G.D.H. Cole, the Romanticism of William Morris, even the half-crazed rantings of Thomas Carlyle. They can tap into the Englishman’s radical historical memory: Blue Labour is surely the only political force in modern Britain which trades seriously in the language of the “ancient constitution” and the “Norman Yoke”. In its mixture of high-minded intellectualism and the robust common sense of the working man, Blue Labour calls forth the proud tradition of working-class autodidacticism, now largely lost.

Related to all this is the Blue Labour version of Labour Party history, which rejects any notion that the Labour Party was the inheritor of 19th-century Liberalism. This is a heresy which Glasman ascribes to Anthony Crosland — a pernicious turn in Labour’s sense of itself, laying down the foundations for its Blairite hijacking and subversion. No matter that Keir Hardie (for example) started life as a Gladstonian Liberal: Blue Labour is true Labour, promising salvation after prolonged apostasy.

As Blue Labour and postliberalism have risen in recent years, so too has a standard line of attack. Its locus classicus is a brilliant 2023 article by one J. Sorel. It argues, in effect, that the postliberals have already won: that Britain, at least since 1997, has been dominated by the “community” at the expense of the “individual”. Sorel’s is a fair objection. After all, lockdown was sold to a compliant public precisely by making reference to “social bonds”, “responsibilities”, and “community”. Markets were shut down for “the common good”: behold the postliberals’ ultimate victory.

Already in 2022 Glasman was writing about the lockdown with a certain nostalgia. Furlough gave a “substantive role” to the state “in support of the workers”, as he had always dreamed of. The pandemic reminded us all of the quiet dignity of labour: “Pakistani nurses, Nigerian cleaners, Portuguese carers and Bolton lorry drivers all risk their lives to keep things going.” The pandemic focused “the importance of place, of neighbours, of mutual aid and community”.

The Blue Labour sense of being stalked by the phantom of “individualism”, contrary to so much recent experience, quite clearly bears the imprint of the Eighties. For postliberalism is every bit as much an ideology of the Eighties as, say, Thatcherism. It owes much to the critique of Thatcher by the Tory Wets, and to a widespread disgust at the excesses of capitalism as represented by crude caricatures of “neoliberalism”, such as “Loadsamoney” and Gordon Gekko. Britain’s Left-wing postliberalism then formed part of a wider reaction against the liberalism that emerged triumphant out of the Cold War: Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”, so often made to stand for this moment’s hubris, appears as the punching-bag in every book in the postliberal canon.

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While the wildest dreams of the liberals were being realized, the British postliberals had all their hopes betrayed. Glasman’s doctoral thesis, co-supervised by John Gray, praised the West German social market, and asked why other countries had not implemented its model. Poland might have; the labor movement Solidarnosc had inclined in that direction under communism. But once communism fell, once Solidarnosc had attained power, it succumbed immediately, on Glasman’s telling, to the forces of Western capital. The intervention of Western “free-market fanatics” was to blame; and those same fanatics were responsible for much “unnecessary suffering” in Britain, too.

The doyen of the Polish economists, Tadeusz Kowalik, wrote a rejoinder in the New Left Review, criticizing Glasman for overplaying the extent of “individualism” in Nineties Poland. Glasman’s portrayal of Poland’s “libertarian atomisation” bore no resemblance to reality. Rent and heating were still subsidized; “there is no basis to Glasman’s later statement that there has been ‘a virtual abolition of welfare’”.

These shortcomings could be described as an early instance of the “Blue Labour fallacy”: the assumption that all social ills owe their existence to the excesses of “liberal individualism”. A good example of it can be found when, while dipping his toe into Blue Labour in 2015, David Lammy described the 2011 riots as “the product of a ‘me-first’, ‘take-what-you-can’ culture” — individualism run amok. Gangs are communities of a sort, so their part in the lawlessness had to be brushed aside.

There is, as Sorel observed, also a distinctive postliberal style, characterized by new terms for the various dichotomies and cleavages of modern society. Take David Goodhart’s “Somewheres and Anywheres”, or Danny Kruger’s lesser-known “The Order and the Idea”. Glasman’s 2022 book has “Mercurians” and “Apollonians”, which map more or less onto the Goodhart formula. Mercury is the Anywhere god, the god of commerce and capital and all those who do not till the land. Apollo is the Somewhere god, the god of (to use a postliberal cliché) that sense of place. When Glasman reached for this terminology, as his footnotes make plain, he was — quite strikingly — referring to Yuri Slezkine’s ingenious and controversial book, The Jewish Century (2004).

In that book, Slezkine argued that, in medieval and early-modern Europe, the Jews were “Mercurians” par excellence, “service nomads” who filled a social and economic niche. But Mercury fast became the presiding god of all modernity: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate… modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.” Zionism was one response to this. Whereas America, the destination of many European Jews, stood for “unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism”, the Zionist project stood for “unrelenting Apollonianism”. It promised to return “the world’s most proficient service nomads” to the land; to transform Mercurians into Apollonians, or “rootless cosmopolitans” into hardened sabras.

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Israel is now the world’s finest exemplar of the “Apollonian” postliberal state: it places enormous obligations on the shoulders of its citizens (such as military service); it sanctifies community and family life; it is robustly “civic-nationalist”; and it reaps the rewards, as postliberals would have it, in its high fertility rate and few deaths of despair. It can draw on a proud socialist, communitarian heritage, too, with the kibbutz standing in for the British cooperative. When Glasman decided to take his signal inspiration from Slezkine — rather than falling back on Goodhart’s terminology, as he might have done — he was setting out what might be described as a kind of Anglo-Zionism. Labour, in his telling, has too often exalted the Mercurian way of life over the Apollonian; Britain today, thanks to the depredations of liberalism and capitalism, is too Mercurian. To restore Labour to the Apollonians, to Make Britain Apollonian Again, is the central mission of the Blue Labour project. It is, much as Zionism was for the Jewish diaspora in the 20th century, a matter of restoring to an emasculated nation its manhood.

This last metaphor ought to be taken seriously. In an earlier outing of Blue Labour ideas, in the aftermath of New Labour’s downfall in 2010, Glasman made essentially the same point, though with a more familiar dichotomy than “Apollonian vs Mercurian”. Labour then, in Glasman’s analogy, was a strained marriage between a university-educated, progressive Mum and a salt-of-the-earth, traditionalist Dad. The story of the Labour Party was the story of Mum taking over; under Blair and Brown, “the Dad might as well have left home”. One Labour MP, Helen Goodman, was not pleased with the gender politics at play: “it looks more like something suitable for the psychotherapist’s couch than a political tract.” Perhaps this is why Glasman chose to abandon it for “Mercurian” and “Apollonian”.

Blue Labour prides itself on its sense for British history, but here it is selective and superficial. It privileges the rural over the urban, the agrarian over the commercial, the “Apollonian” over the “Mercurian”. Its national feeling tends towards the twee parochialism of Morris dancers and Maypoles. It abhors aspects of our history for which many feel some affection: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of enterprise and free trade. “Commerce” means at least as much in Britain as “community”. In excoriating the vice of “individualism”, Blue Labour dispenses with one of the most precious parts of Britain’s cultural inheritance. Blue Labour dislikes “modernity”, but Britain fared rather well in modernity; modernity is in a sense our creation. A certain “rootlessness”, a devotion to Mercury, is an inevitable characteristic among a people with a diaspora as large as ours. One might go so far as to say that Britain — more like America than Israel — is a Mercurian nation.

But do the British people yearn for more social obligations? After the lockdown they might have had their fill. Do they want higher taxes, as the ideal Blue Labour programme would likely entail? It’s unlikely; the tax burden is already the highest it’s been since the Second World War. Do they want more power in the hands of “local communities”? Perhaps — though they are hardly impressed by devolution in its current form, and might prefer a centralized state which can actually do things. Are they much roused by talk of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Rerum novarum? Even the heartiest Blue Labourite will surely admit that they are not. Blue Labour, in short, is based on a series of misapprehensions about the country it wishes to govern and reform. Britannia is not whispering about “the common good” and “that sense of place”; instead she shouts four rather familiar words, “lower taxation, lower immigration”. The future now belongs to whoever listens.

Rearranging his team may provide Sir Keir with a comforting sense that a corner is being turned, but the fact that he has been forced into a reset just 100 days into his premiership tells us much about his own poor judgement. Nothing encapsulates this core political defect more than Starmer’s mishandling of the donors issue. The smug and dismissive attitude with which he and his Cabinet attempted to downplay and dismiss the accusations as they began making headlines ahead of the Labour Party conference a fortnight ago was truly a sight to behold. The brazen attempt to recast their freeloading as somehow virtuous, and the growing anger as misplaced tittle-tattle, offered clear signs that power had already begun its corruptive process. And the story of politics being awash with private wealth won’t go away no matter how much Morgan McSweeney wants it to, because this is the story of politics in Britain — and it has been for decades.

The idea that moguls and big business expect nothing in return for their “kindness” is an insult to the intelligence of any reasonable person. Aristotle warned us about this long ago. The ancient practice of corrupting political hearts with flattering gifts is nothing new, and it is effective precisely because it feels harmless to those being lavished with special attention for the first time. But if donors aren’t in it for a political favour somewhere down the line, then why are nurses, GPs, teachers, police and firefighters — arguably far worthier of such generosity — not permanently inundated with gifts? Surely terminally ill children or destitute single mothers fleeing domestic abuse could do with a night out at a Taylor Swift gig. What is it about people in power which so effortlessly elicits the boundless generosity of the wealthy — if not some form of self-interest?

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The tedious line they have attempted to spin over the course of the scandal — that this conduct falls “within the rules” — is another major insult. There was a time when claiming back the cost of a duck-moat was well within the rules for an MP. Sir Fred Goodwin acted within the rules of the financial sector when he crashed the UK economy from the comfort of his personal scallop kitchen at RBS headquarters in 2008. Indeed, one of the most infuriating aspects of the past 14 years of Tory government has been that almost every moral and ethical crime collectively committed — whether dishing out billions to their pals in contracts, crashing the economy with tax cuts, or immiserating tens of thousands of sick, vulnerable and disabled people through callous welfare reforms — fell well within the rules.

Most politicians don’t just wake up one day and decide to use public office to enrich themselves; entitlement develops incrementally and begins with the seductive idea that you’re a little bit special. One day it’s Taylor Swift concert tickets, the next you’re telling porkies to the Queen. Accepting gifts is not immoral in and of itself, but this is how the culture of corruption (which Sir Keir Starmer claims he sought power to rip out of public life) slowly seduces those of low character. The issue for most people is not whether the behaviour of politicians falls within the rules but that the political class is governed by one set of rules while everyone else is governed by another.

Funnily enough, most other public servants are forbidden from accepting gifts or donations because it is well understood that doing so leaves the system open to abuse. Yet somehow, politicians are ostensibly free to party like it’s 2099 provided they fill out a little form declaring what infuriating hypocrites they are.

Furthermore, government ministers are already some of the highest paid and most powerful people in the country. They already get their food, travel, heating, housing, petrol, pens and paperclips paid for or heavily subsidised. The argument that complimentary hospitality and freebies are a genuine necessity that allow them to do their jobs better is yet more evidence of how endemic corporate influence in politics has become and how adjusted to it politicians in the UK are. The great irony of this scandal is that Starmer’s Cabinet has shown more collective enthusiasm, conviction and clarity of purpose trying to justify their brazen sense of entitlement to corporate welfare than they have on any other issue. Perhaps instead of smugly laughing off legitimate anger at their behaviour, they might better use their energy confronting the moral dissonance which now characterises their young political project.

This dissonance has characterised every one of Starmer’s first 100 days in office. On the Middle East, he seemed more sincere mocking the delegate who spoke up for Palestinian children during his conference speech than he did when calling for an immediate ceasefire. On the riots, he rightly condemned far-Right thuggery and racism before flying out to Italy to copy the immigration homework of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. And given the sheer level of corporate welfare the Labour Cabinet have been helping themselves to, Starmer’s renewed commitment to tackling benefits fraudsters takes on new Iannuccian proportions. It all further demonstrates the ideological contradictions at the core of his “remade” Labour Party. These contradictions are perhaps best typified by his seeming ability to leverage his political privilege for personal gain, while looking the country in the eye and pontificating about the merits of public service.

As centrist dads the country over cling to the delusion that beneath Sir Keir’s floundering political appearance, there lurks a high-minded, icy tactician, the shambles tell a more damning truth about his skills. Evidently, there are some things money can’t buy.

The Prime Minister’s decision to replace Gray so soon into his — and her— time in government is part of a ruthless reordering of his inner circle intended to create a tighter and fundamentally more political team than the one that has overseen the calamity of his first 100 days in charge.

Gray has some reasons to feel hard-done by. She is not the first chief of staff to find the job impossible, accused of hoarding power and blocking access. But the level of animosity towards her from within Downing Street is unique at this stage in a new government. She has fallen out with aides, become the centre of a political storm and failed to protect the Prime Minister from the fall out. “It has been the worst start to any government in recent history with the exception of Liz Truss,” as one senior Labour figure put it to me with exasperation.

Most important of all, however, is the fact that she went for McSweeney and missed — and now he has her job. Instead of ensuring McSweeney was at the centre of everything, as he was in opposition, Gray attempted to sideline his entire political operation in favour of a more technocratic administration that she was in charge of. In doing so, however, she lost control of No.10 and the Government appeared devoid of any purpose or direction. It was a disaster.

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As a result, Gray finds herself dramatically demoted to “the Prime Minister’s envoy for the regions and nations”. McSweeney, meanwhile, has been promoted, with two new deputy chiefs of staff reporting to him — the former political director, Vidhya Alakeson, and director of government relations, Jill Cuthbertson. In another significant move, the former Daily Mirror and Sunday Times journalist, James Lyons, will join to lead a new “strategic communications team”, in what is effectively a demotion for the current director of communications, Matthew Doyle. This is now McSweeney’s No.10.

But this can only be the start of the internal revolution. Starmer must follow it up with a cascade of other appointments, starting with a new cabinet secretary alongside McSweeney, as well as a new principal private secretary, national security adviser and ambassador to Washington. But for this to work, they all need to know what he wants — and this is where McSweeney comes in.

While Starmer claimed yesterday’s changes were made to “strengthen his Downing Street operation ahead of marking his first 100 days in office”, they are an implicit admission that a reset was needed. There cannot be two rival centres of power within Downing Street, working in separate parts of the building, with separate instincts and ideas. Starmer finally realised this.

It may seem trite but the fact that Gray and McSweeney were not even working in the same room is important. Since moving into No.10, Starmer has taken the same office used by most recent prime ministers, a relatively small office at the back of the building accessible through a larger room where all the Prime Minister’s most important officials tend to sit. This in turn is on a corridor which connects Downing Street to the Cabinet Office via something called “the link door”. The reason most prime ministers have worked here is because they can have all their most trusted aides at hand and the cabinet secretary is just a short walk away. But until now, McSweeney sat somewhere else entirely.

Unlike Gray, who did sit directly outside Starmer’s office, McSweeney and his team worked out of a room at the front of No. 10 near to the front door. To reach McSweeney — Starmer’s longest serving and most important aide — the PM had to walk out of his office, past Gray and her team, down the main corridor of the building and into McSweeney’s office. Such small details matter. As anyone who has ever worked in No.10 understands: proximity is power.

Those inside Starmer’s No.10 liked to argue that proximity mattered less under him because of how he worked. Every week, time was set aside for him and McSweeney to see each other. And besides, Starmer had developed a habit of taking his work upstairs into the Thatcher room, where he would read through Government papers on the sofa. Starmer, then, was a roving Prime Minister who liked to use more of the building than his predecessors, which meant it wasn’t quite so easy to ensure proximity. This was the argument until yesterday; and it was bogus.

It was always clear that the physical incoherence of this operation reflected its wider strategic incoherence. The Starmer government has yet to find its animating purpose; its all-encompassing mission to which all other priorities must, in the end, be subordinated. It has missions — plural — and they are all perfectly reasonable, but they don’t have one organising principle.

The best way to understand the extraordinary disharmony within Starmer’s government, then, is to know that it wasn’t a battle for personalities, but a proxy war for control of the Starmer project; a battle to define what it was that they were elected to do. That job now falls to McSweeney.

To some of his critics, he is a ruthless Machiavelli who conned the Labour Party into electing a leader far to the Right of the one they thought they were getting. To others, he is a genius puppeteer who guided his uncharismatic frontman to a landslide election victory by pulling all the right strings. The fact that he has clearly won his Cold War with Gray will add further colour to the McSweeney myth. It is certainly true that without ever having a cross word with her, he has ensured that he has emerged on top and not her. To achieve this, he bided his time and consulted those he could trust to understand how he could ensure his influence was felt. In the end, though, it is his personal relationship with Starmer which has ensured he triumphed. He has the Prime Minister’s trust..

The truth is McSweeney is not Thomas Cromwell reincarnate. He has obvious weaknesses, especially for someone who must now manage the Whitehall machine. He remains new to national political power and naive to some of Whitehall’s eccentricities (though, evidently, not that naive). Some of his biggest supporters also worry that his quiet, unassuming nature and lack of “natural authority” — read public school bravado — puts him at a disadvantage in a system which still expects such traits. He will need to learn quickly how to impose his authority.

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What McSweeney really offers is a hard-headed, unromantic clarity about Labour’s purpose that is more reminiscent of the party’s tougher social democratic past than its softer liberal present. He — more than Starmer — is someone who would be instantly recognisable to any figure from the old Labour Right, from Ernest Bevin to John Reid but is a rarer sight in Westminster of late. He did not learn his politics at Oxford and the bar, but on council estates working for local government. This experience has given him an instinctive loathing for the kind of badge-wearing politics of virtue the Labour Right has long associated with the middle-class Left.

McSweeney sees the purpose of Labour in straightforward, class terms: to represent in government the interests of ordinary people who are not otherwise looked after by their employers, landlords — or, indeed, politicians. He holds those officials who failed to protect the working-class girls of Rochdale in particular contempt. Unlike many in the party, this idea of purpose also combines with an instinctive sympathy for the attitudes and instincts of their voters and those McSweeney believes should be Labour voters.

The upshot of all this is a naturally blue Labour instinct that borrows the language and feelings of conservatism to pursue an older class-based politics. Rather than being some kind of re-run of Blairism, this is a politics more deeply rooted in Labour’s past. In the run up to the 1979 election, before the Winter of Discontent blew James Callaghan off course, that grand figure of the Tory Right, Maurice Cowling, complained that Margaret Thatcher was losing the political battle against the Labour prime minister because he appeared and sounded in every respect a more reassuring conservative presence than her. The challenge for McSweeney is to convince the Labour Party to follow his lead when it does not feel his politics in the way that he does.

There are two areas in particular where McSweeney and his team’s instinctively conservative understanding of Britain has shone through and will define much of this Government’s record: welfare and immigration. The Labour Party is united in its opposition to the two-child benefit cap based on the straightforwardly moral argument that it increases child poverty. But McSweeney’s team also know that this is the one area where the Labour Party is most at odds with the country overall: there is overwhelming support among every cohort and group based on the entirely different moral principle that you shouldn’t have children if you can’t afford them. It is an important early marker of this government that, when forced to choose, it has decided not to argue with the public.

On the second issue, immigration, there is a clear understanding within the group close to McSweeney in government that only by making the argument for reducing the numbers and being seen to have achieved a significant reduction can they hope to be reelected. That Starmer chose to adopt the language of “love of home”, rather than “hatred of neighbour”, when defending his commitment to reducing migration in his party conference speech is another important signal of the possible future direction of this government should it, over time, start to become more “McSweenyite” in flavour.

Until now, however, the reality is that this government has lacked any real coherent narrative about its purpose, intent, mandate or strategy. It has not been blue Labour in the way Blair’s government remained distinctly new in its opening few years. Fast-tracking assisted dying, freeing prisoners early from their sentences and closing down blast furnaces as part of a green revolution are not the instincts of conservative social democracy — it’s soft Left Fabianism.

Instead, the country has been treated to a mush of different policies and declarations. One day Rachel Reeves declares the Government’s central purpose to balance the books, as if she were George Osborne, while at the same time handing out pay rises across the public sector. But nobody thinks the purpose of the Labour Party is to control public spending. This may be something that has to be done, but only as part of a longer term aspiration to achieve something else.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s central purpose was to save the British economy. This was part of a wider struggle for free markets and liberty — against socialism at home and communism abroad. In 1997, Blair’s central purpose was to save public services by increasing investment and opening them up to the kind of choice he believed would permanently lock in the middle classes. Like Thatcher, this domestic purpose was also tied into a wider “third way” internationalism, in which Britain would lead Europe into its future.

A cynic might point out — reasonably — that neither government was particularly successful in its missions. Thatcher’s economic record is one of solid, if not spectacular, economic growth bookended by two deep recessions. Blair, meanwhile, saw a marked improvement in public services, but one that was ultimately dependent on an economy that, it turned out, was fundamentally broken. Internationally, meanwhile, Thatcher left office as one of the victors of Cold War, but also one who had become an “ineffective brake” trying to stop German unification and the European single currency which flowed from that. Blair, in contrast, left office with two of his wars still raging, the British army effectively beaten in both Basra and Helmand.

Politics, though, is hard and ultimately ends in failure. The point about the premierships of Blair and Thatcher — and, to a certain extent, David Cameron’s — was that they were successful in taking control of the political narrative, offering a diagnosis of what was wrong with the country and showing how they would put it right. In each case, there was a clarity of purpose. Today, there is no such thing, but there needs to be. By sacking Sue Gray Starmer has made the necessary first step. Now he needs to let McSweeney take control. And this time it has to work.

In five years, the Tories have transferred their 80-seat majority to Keir Starmer’s Labour party and then let them double it. No government since the war has been rejected in such a manner. But even this doesn’t do justice to the upheaval. In 1997, the Tories seemed similarly broken, facing an opponent in Tony Blair far more adroit than Starmer. And yet, the party still emerged with 165 seats. In 2001, under the leadership of William Hague, it finished with 166. On both occasions the Tories retained swathes of England considered “safe” from which they could replenish their forces. Theresa May arrived in parliament in the landslide defeat of 1997. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson all followed in 2001. Today, much of that old Tory England lies in ruins, captured by the enemy which is now the national party of Britain, stretched far and wide — if not particularly deeply.

Overnight, the Conservative Party didn’t just lose Penny Mordaunt’s seat in Portsmouth and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s in Somerset, they lost Welwyn Hatfield, Chichester, Cheltenham and worse still: David Cameron’s old seat of Witney, Boris Johnson’s Henley, Margaret Thatcher’s Finchley and, perhaps most symbolically of all, Liz Truss’s in Norfolk. Accepting defeat, Rishi Sunak admitted the British people had delivered “a sobering verdict”. Sobering for the Conservatives perhaps. And it was one delivered with cold, calculated fury too, not some wild act of drunken abandon. This was calculated to hurt.

Meanwhile, a new band of cavaliers under the leadership of Nigel Farage has emerged on the scene, slicing through the grinding dullness of the campaign to claim a few small corners of England for itself — and a lot more votes — much as Ed Davey managed for the Liberal Democrats. Despite Davey’s startling success, at least in the number of seats he managed to win from an overall vote share of just 12%, Farage remains the personality who imposed his will on the race, a cavalry showman whose rearguard raids on the Tory backlines helped secure him the parliamentary breakthrough he has craved for so long — and just in time to lead the peasant’s revolt he has been building for decades. The reality this morning is that few people now doubt him when he warns that the result is “just the first step of something which is going to stun all of you”. As recently as 2017, Marine Le Pen’s National Front had just two MPs. Today, she stands on the brink of power, the Gaullist Republicans little more than a shell. For Keir Starmer, a warning — as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron can attest: revolutions have a habit of eating their own.

This in many ways is the most curious of election results. Labour has won a landslide with 34% of the vote — this is less than Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005, David Cameron in 2010 and 2015, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, and Boris Johnson in 2019. Two factors of huge significance secured Labour its landslide. First, the collapse of the Tory vote to just 24% — far less than Jeremy Corbyn in the last election, Gordon Brown in 2010 and even Michael Foot in 1983; a historic rejection of the government. And second, the extraordinary performance of Reform, which won 14% of the vote, but only four MPs — more votes than the Lib Dems for far fewer MPs. Today, however, Farage’s massed forces lie in second places across swathes of England — the new natural opposition to Labour. As Farage was right to point out, this may well prove to be one of the dominating facts in British politics over the next five years. Can you really imagine Labour daring to get too close to the EU given this new vulnerability? Farage may only have three colleagues with him in parliament, but his influence in British politics is about to explode.

Dig a little deeper into the result and there were disconcerting signs for Labour: Jeremy Corbyn winning in Islington, the expelled Faiza Shaheen denying the party another seat in Chingford, Jonathan Ashworth losing in Leicester and Wes Streeting coming close to losing his in Ilford. Yet, overall, such footnotes are just that — footnotes. The victory is Labour’s.

Over the past six weeks, I have travelled across the country speaking to ministers, candidates, party insiders and the campaign generals on both sides to understand what was happening and why, peering deep inside the bellies of both party machines. During this time, I saw a contrast of startling intensity: between one party ruthlessly committed to victory and another which had long ago lost the discipline necessary to govern and therefore even to command the respect of the country.

For Labour, the machine was manned by those entirely focused on one thing: power. These were the men and women who began 2021 on the sodden, boggy land of unpopularity only to suddenly discover their route to higher ground had been cleared by the grotesque incompetence of a Tory party. In contrast, I saw a governing party bewildered by the predicament in which it had found itself, lost to the point that it was unaware of why it was losing so badly; a desperate party playing a desperate hand and failing with every gamble it made, led by a prime minister who managed to be even more arrogant about his political ability than his predecessors. For four general elections in a row, Britain had voted for the Tories to stop something else: Gordon Brown “bankrupting Britain”, Ed Miliband being in the pocket of Alex Salmond, Jeremy Corbyn blocking Brexit. As soon as the Tories stood no chance of defeating anyone or anything, voters deserted them in their droves, their raison d’être having disappeared.

The campaign we have just witnessed was ultimately a battle between a party that was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to attain power, and another which had long ago given up the organising discipline to retain it. It was a campaign launched out of desperation by a prime minister who seemed so disoriented by his own failures in government that he was unable to see the folly of his reckless gamble. Much of the result, then, has to be on Sunak, a man who proved incapable of the task in front of him. But not all of it. The truth is, Sunak inherited a Conservative Party that long ago lost the will for power, and has been shattered as a result.

The day after the election five years ago, Boris Johnson travelled to Sedgefield to declare himself the Lord Servant of the North. Rishi Sunak travels to Buckingham Palace today having lost not only the North, but most of the rest of the country with it. The Tories were once the national party: the party of England and the Union, town and shire. Today, they are a party of national rejection.

***

The Tory calamity is epitomised in the manner of its departure. The Labour Party knew the campaign had begun six hours before Sunak called it at 6pm on 22 May. The previous day, McSweeney had received a text message from a friend who monitors the betting markets and had noticed a flurry of activity from people placing money on a 4 July election. By the time McSweeney arrived in Parliament the next day and bumped into Starmer preparing for Prime Minister’s Questions, speculation was rife that Sunak was about to make his move. But McSweeney felt the sheer volume of bets was enough evidence to begin preparation. When he got back to Labour HQ at around midday, he authorised Labour’s head of digital, Tom Lillywhite, to start buying digital advertising space on YouTube and elsewhere, while also giving the go-ahead to staff to order the party’s “Change” logo to go on the lectern Starmer would speak from later on. As one senior figure put it to me, it never occurred to them that they might try to make some money from the information they had. The Tory rot was already evident.

McSweeney and his closest team had planned the first day of the campaign repeatedly over the previous few months, acutely aware that the most value he could bring was at the beginning. This head start, then, was doubly significant. For Isaac Levido, the battle-hardened campaign veteran entrusted by Sunak with the Tory campaign, the opposite was true. Not only had he lost the element of surprise, he did not know that this was the case, his trust broken by those who had lost their heads. More importantly, Levido was also being asked to fight a campaign from a position he had advised against.

Levido, who had already played a prominent role in the previous three elections, knew that the main benefit of incumbency lies in the ability to call the election at a time of your choosing — and on your terms. Given this, Levido had advised the Prime Minister to wait until the Autumn, arguing that the party’s best — and perhaps only — chance lay in going long. As inflation fell, so the argument went, so too would interest rates, helping to create an environment in which people might, just might, start to feel better about the country’s prospects. In a game where vibes and emotion are as important as facts, waiting was simply the sensible thing to do.

Yet robbed of his strongest message, Sunak had to deliver a different one in the pouring rain outside No. 10. “It might still be hard when you look at your bank balance, but this hard-earned economic stability was only ever meant to be the beginning.” It is hardly the best pitch for re-election. No longer “the plan has worked, don’t risk it” but “the plan will work — trust me”.

Ever since Sunak became prime minister, Levido had been urging the party to stick to its core message to voters: that it had a plan and it was working. Sunak had launched it on 4 January, 2023, just a few months after taking office, setting out five pledges that could be repeated in 13 words: “Halve inflation; grow the economy; reduce debt; cut waiting lists; stop the boats.” Levido had worked with Lynton Crosby in January 2014, when David Cameron had similarly sought to frame the next election with more than a year to go, unveiling his “long-term economic plan”. But after the calamities of Johnson and Truss, voters would no longer accept another slogan, Levido argued. They needed commitments they could be held to. And so the five pledges were born.

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The problem for Sunak was twofold. The first was that the party was no longer disciplined enough to rally around this message — or even appeared capable of delivering it. At a Tory “away day” last year, MPs complained to Levido that they could not be expected to remember all the pledges. Levido was left exasperated.

The bigger problem, however, was that Sunak could not actually deliver on them, falling on all but the first two. And the longer he waited, the worse it got. Not only was he failing to get a grip on the NHS and the small boats crisis, but the country’s prisons were falling over, the flights to Rwanda were unlikely to go anywhere, the junior doctors continued striking and, most alarmingly, the Conservative parliamentary party could simply not be counted on to maintain its discipline over the summer. Sunak had lost faith in his ability to govern.

It was in the face of such failure — and his loss of faith that he could do anything about it — that Sunak faced a choice between a slow death or a suicidal charge. Ignoring Levido’s advice, he chose the latter.

***

Ordered to lead the party into battle, Levido devised a strategy which would open with a blitz of campaign promises targeting potential Reform voters. This would force people to choose between Labour and the Conservatives in a straight fight. From here, Levido hoped the race would tighten and then the party would move to its central message: “Risk, risk, risk.” This, Levido believed, was the best the Tories had available. Denied the “stability” message that going long would have allowed, he was forced to pivot to a beware-Labour “security” message.

While Levido and his team expected a rocky first few days, as MPs raged against the Prime Minister’s recklessness, they did not expect to have to endure an succession of gaffes — Sunak asking a group of Welsh publicans whether they were looking forward to the European championships they had not qualified for; or appearing at the Titanic quarter in Belfast as his own campaign seemed to be sinking. Despite these, the plan showed some tentative signs of life. The announcements promising compulsory national service and a new “quadruple lock” for pensioners successfully differentiated the party from Labour. Tory internal polling showed the party’s favorability ratings starting to pick up. It helped that MPs were no longer at each other’s throats, while Labour was having to deal with a series of candidate selection headaches.

But, then, two catastrophes. First, Nigel Farage announced he was taking over as leader of Reform and contesting the seat in Clacton. And then Sunak went to Normandy and, inexplicably, left before the D-Day commemorations had finished. Back in London, the most senior campaign officials suddenly realised with horror that the leaders of France, Germany and the United States were all there on the beach together — alongside David Cameron, not Sunak. “What the fuck is this?” shouted one senior Tory, looking up at the TV screens. Levido advised the Prime Minister that the only option was to apologise, cauterise the wound and move on, but no-one was under any illusion about how bad it was for the campaign. Any hopes of an early poll tightening vanished.

McSweeney, however, believed Sunak’s campaign strategy was always doomed: he maintained it simply was not possible to appeal to Reform voters in this way without making the Tory campaign seem marginal to everyone else. Sunak’s cardinal sin, in McSweeney’s view, was his failure to deal with his Reform problem earlier: he could have tacked Right to crush the party; or he could have defined himself as a strong centrist by publicly taking on the recalcitrant MPs who had supported Liz Truss or were flirting with Farage. By doing neither, Sunak was fatally exposed.

Worse, his party looked out of touch. Why talk about national service to people who were drowning under the expense of their food, energy and childcare bills? They could only afford to make such specific pledges once they had established a strong campaign message, which they were unable to do. “They needed to get the plane off the ground first,” one senior Labour figure told me. But it wasn’t just a case of the policies being counterproductive; in McSweeney’s view, the very fact that Sunak suddenly tried to catch everyone off-guard with his election gamble also reinforced the narrative of Tory chaos.

Privately, I understand Levido is frustrated that his strategy for the start of the election was not successful. It failed, he believes, because, ultimately, voters had just stopped listening to the Tories. They were done. But starting 20 points behind in the polls did demand a riskier strategy than the one available to Labour. Levido was right to believe that closing the polls was the only way he could change the campaign narrative. Indeed, the reality is that from the moment Sunak called the election, the Tory campaign was not about winning, but stemming the scale of the defeat. Still, by mid-June there was still hope within the party that the Conservatives could finish with more than 200 MPs. It finished today relieved that it was the main party of opposition. Unless it gets its house in order quickly it won’t be so lucky next time. Remarkably, this defeat is both a punishment and an act of clementia. There is now an executioner’s blade hanging over the Tory Party.

Where McSweeney and Levido ultimately agree is the fact that much of the Tory problem — and Labour’s success — is because of decisions taken long before the election was called. Today’s Tory failure was baked in long before Sunak stood in the rain outside Downing Street and sealed his fate.

Indeed, those who know both McSweeney and Levido are struck by how similar they are as operators — quiet, softly spoken and no-nonsense. Sunak and Starmer are also remarkably similar in the tasks presented to them as leaders. Both had come into parties which had shown themselves unfit to govern. And both tried, at first, to hold their parties together, rather than take on those who had brought the party to the brink of ruin.

At first, in truth, Starmer and McSweeney had been quite concerned about Sunak. He was young, energetic and seemingly capable in the Covid era. But, then, he showed his essential weakness. In McSweeney’s view, Johnson’s great success in 2019 was persuading voters he was serious about change by purging the MPs standing in his way — including his own brother. Sunak convinced himself he didn’t need to do this or perhaps that he couldn’t. For McSweeney this was his original sin. As one Labour official put it: “He had a tiger at his front door and he had to go out and either shoot it or try to bring it into the house to domesticate it. He did neither and ended up being chased out of his back door.” By 2022, the options for displaying strength were extreme: expel Truss; condemn Johnson; launch a war against Farage. As the unelected head of a divided party, such options were not available to him. Nor was the opposite: inviting Farage to become a Tory. The task of weighing up such options now falls to the next Tory leader whoever that may be.

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Those who have worked with both Sunak and Johnson tell me that the fundamental difference between the pair was one of “animal instinct”. Sunak was serious, decent and good to work for, driven by an optimistic conviction that had stood him well throughout his life: because he is usually smarter than everybody else in the room, he only needed to work harder than everybody else to win. Johnson, meanwhile, appreciated that politics was far more mediaeval: a game of power and theatre in which displays of authority mattered. It was Starmer, though, who learned Johnson’s lesson, not Sunak. And he is unlikely to now repeat Johnson’s mistakes in government, though may quickly find he is just as unpopular for a host of other reasons.

If there were ever any tigers at Starmer’s door, few now doubt McSweeney would have shot them. He knew that the very fact Labour had put forward Jeremy Corbyn for leader risked disqualifying the entire party in the eyes of voters. Given Starmer had served under Corbyn for almost all of his time in government, this was potentially deadly in a campaign. Yet, McSweeney and Starmer moved to deal with this weakness by not only sidelining Corbyn but expelling him from the parliamentary party and stopping him from standing for Labour. McSweeney and those close to him maintain this was a prerequisite of today’s result. He also moved to exile Labour’s Corbynite leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard. Without this other act of ruthlessness, today’s crushing defeat of the SNP would have been impossible, McSweeney believes. The man from Cork who saved the Union — it is some story.

Even after the campaign began, Starmer’s top team showed a ruthlessness in their insistence that any Labour candidate who risked causing them trouble in the future would not be allowed to stand. This has cost them in Islington and Chingford, but it will be seen as a price worth paying. Starmer’s missteps on Gaza — principally that LBC interview — were just as costly. Where this Muslim rage at Labour now goes is another current in British politics which could yet build into something important. But it wasn’t only the decision to rid Labour of its troublesome priests of the Left which showed McSweeney’s ruthlessness. Before the campaign, both he and Starmer’s campaign coordinator Pat McFadden — now nailed on to be one of the very biggest beasts in the incoming government — had also moved to shut down every potential weakness imaginable, not only with Corbyn but on tax, spending, the green energy transition, Brexit, immigration and gender. The party war-gamed all the different campaigns the Tories might try to fight, including the one they eventually did: tax. None of the leading figures strayed from that message. Even the trade unions, unhappy with Labour’s general direction, played their part. Here was a movement determined to seize their moment, the lure of power proving as much of a disciplining force as the weariness of power has proved disabling for the Conservatives.

Brexit will of course remain the defining legacy of the Conservative era. This was a government elected to Get Brexit Done and did so, no matter how dishonourably. Yet the Brexit they delivered is now deeply unpopular, neither close enough to the EU to have avoided the inevitable friction of withdrawal, nor distinctive enough to have proved to voters there was much good gained from all the pain. More importantly, it does not feel like it has worked for many voters whose grievances were not really about the EU so much as the powerlessness they felt over their own government. The twin issues of immigration and the European Court of Human Rights will now step into the hole once filled by the EU, the fuel which will turbocharge Farage’s new army. The irony now is that the challenge of Making Brexit Work now falls to Starmer, the man who tried to stop it. What he does with it is now up to him. The party of England has lost control of its own revolution. In Richard II, John of Gaunt lies dying, lamenting the rule of his King: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” We can say the same of the Conservative Party.

And as it dies, there is little to be gained for the Conservatives, nor the Liberal Democrats or Reform, in claiming Keir Starmer does not have a mandate for revolution because he only won 34% of the vote. They handed him the keys to No 10. In raw power terms, his achievement is more impressive than Clement Attlee’s, Harold Wilson’s or even Tony Blair’s, having required a swing of 1997 proportions simply to become the government. Instead, he turned the biggest Tory majority since 1987 into the biggest Labour majority since 2001. He is now our Puritanical Lord Protector, master of Parliament. With Sue Grey running Whitehall, Starmer controls Westminster in a way Boris Johnson never could. The machine is his.

As Labour leader, Starmer has shown two principal traits, discipline and ruthlessness, which has not been in evidence on the Conservative side since before the last election. Yes, Starmer is now bound by a manifesto of such rigid discipline it will make his life harder in government: he will be forced to manage the same creaking infrastructure, funded by the same creaking economy. But if he is anywhere near as ruthless in the application of power as he was in his pursuit of it, the manifesto won’t bind him for long.

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The scale of his victory is so unique that in some ways it is harder to predict where the challenges to his authority will emerge — from within his cabinet, perhaps? Or from Farage’s new band of Reformers? Maybe even, somehow, from the bloodied corpse of the Conservative Party. All we do know is that the challenges will come. McSweeney and others were sanguine about the danger posed by Reform during this election, correctly calculating that the party damaged the Tories far more than Labour, but they are already conscious of the danger Farage will soon pose in swathes of small-town England which voted Labour this year but left Reform in second place. It is also the case that while Labour has shown discipline on issues where it is not comfortable, it remains vulnerable to any serious political party on the politics of gender, immigration and culture issues in particular.

However disciplined the Labour party has been over the past few years, the moral of this story is ultimately one of crime and punishment; a governing party driven mad by its failures of character, like Raskolnikov, unable to control itself, unable to govern and ultimately, at the death, unable even to think straight and maintain its dignity. The party has been sent into exile, not quite dead, but broken. It will take a long time to live down the dishonour of its defeat. “Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,” John of Gaunt declares, hopefully. No such luck for Sunak, Truss, Johnson and the Conservative Party.

For today is Keir Starmer’s day. And Morgan McSweeney’s. Politics is the pursuit of power and they pursued it better than anyone else. Now they must now wield it. Becoming King is no guarantee of safety after all. Just ask Richard II.