‘A Political Mastermind’

Over the last few years, a cult of personality has been assiduously cultivated around McSweeney in the British media. Indeed, it is difficult to find an outlet which hasn’t published an in-depth profile stuffed with glowing praise for this ‘political mastermind’ — a man apparently in possession of — as one report put it — a ‘messianic ability to understand voters and what they want from a political party’.

McSweeney, so the story goes, is a man willing to speak hard truths to the Labour Party: to upset its progressive-metropolitan instincts, reconnect it with heartlands lost under Corbyn and — as a result — win. As a young Labour Party organiser, he ‘learned his politics street by street’ and not in ‘the corridors of power’, according to Maguire and Pogrund. By focusing on everyday issues like potholes and bin collections instead of left-wing self-indulgences, McSweeney secured impressive victories against the odds, first in Lambeth in 2006, and then, famously, in Barking in 2010, where Labour defeated a surging BNP. In the process, he drew closer to the Blue Labour tendency, which is ostensibly socially conservative and economically interventionist.

Eventually, McSweeney would apply his genius to Labour at national level. After winning Starmer the Labour leadership through a polling-driven strategy developed in secrecy behind the front of Labour Together, McSweeney masterminded Starmer’s successful journey back into government. From his laser focus on the groups Labour needed to win came the successful wooing of the ‘hero voters’, voters who had backed Brexit then the Tories in 2019, and were disproportionately based in the ‘Red Wall’.

Self-indulgent middle-class socialists and their make-believe politics, electoral ‘bribes’ like abolishing tuition fees, shibboleths like scrapping the two-child benefit cap, lily-heartedness on immigration — all were cast aside in favour of a resolutely pro-NATO, economically ‘cautious’ platform. Through a ruthlessly re-engineered electoral coalition, McSweeney secured the party’s biggest election win since 1997. With it came a clear message: Labour wins from the centre ground, ideally with a ‘genius Svengali’ like McSweeney at the helm.

What Do You Mean, ‘Normal Men’?

On closer inspection, however, this story falls apart quicker than you can say ‘ten pledges’. Far from being a ‘serial winner’, McSweeney’s record is decidedly mixed. In his early years, alongside victories in Lambeth and Barking, there were defeats too — and of course there was the humiliating defeat of Liz Kendall’s 2015 campaign for the Labour Leadership, which McSweeney ran. In Lambeth, a Labour contemporary describes McSweeney as a ‘cog in the machine rather than the engineer’. What’s more, the myth around McSweeney’s Barking campaign — breathlessly described by Pogrund and Maguire as ‘one of the most successful campaigns in British political history’ — has been effectively debunked by journalist Adam Bienkov, who pointed out both that the BNP’s vote share actually rose, and that Labour’s vote share rose less than in neighbouring boroughs.

McSweeney’s magnum opus — the 2024 general election — can be told in a different light still. It featured the lowest vote share for a majority government on record, a stumbling campaign which saw Labour’s support fall by around 10 percent, and, above all, lost votes compared to 2019 (let alone 2017). It was arguably only the split in the Right following the Tories’ implosion and the fateful decision of Nigel Farage to re-enter the political fray that secured this ‘sandcastle majority’.

As ever with McSweeney, present success incurred future cost. Just as Starmer’s mendacious ten pledges laid the groundwork for his perception as duplicitous and shifty, so too did a promise of change on a programme of none sow the seeds for disaster in government.

And yet there is a grain of truth to McSweeney’s arguments. Labour did achieve a more balanced electoral coalition, crucial to victory under First Past the Post. A minimal programme did minimise space for Tory attacks and media opposition, denying a flailing Sunak the chance to reunite an electoral coalition on a ‘stop socialism’ basis. Is McSweeneyism therefore a flawed but necessary tendency?

The Voter is Never Wrong

Thankfully not. Core to McSweeneyism is the belief that ‘The Voter is never wrong’. Yet for a man so intent on listening to the public, McSweeney in fact seems to have selective hearing. The super-majorities in the country for left-wing economic policies like renationalisation of public services and wealth taxes go unheeded by him, even though ‘hero voters’ tend to be strong supporters of such policies. Indeed, he steadfastly opposes them and characterised them as part of a left-wing fantasia. The mantra of ‘deliverism’ has been reduced to recent Starmer policies like promising to alleviate roadworks on bank holidays, rather than anything that might rein-in runaway bills. A soft-left cabinet minister who pursued a bolder path, promising to renationalise rail and democratising Britain’s buses, was quickly forced out, reportedly at McSweeney’s hands.

In reality, ‘The Voter’ is of course an ideological construction — one created by a bunch of wealthy right-wingers in London. Just as Liz Kendall claimed to embody the British people by doubling down on a neoliberal programme in 2015 — in a country already tiring of austerity — so too do McSweeney and his Blue Labour ilk (led by Maurice Glasman, an academic from Hackney) ventriloquise voters to justify their own right-wing instincts. The result is a caricature — McSweeney was reportedly a driving force behind disability cuts, which were apparently viewed as essential to chase Reform voters, yet these very same voters overwhelmingly reject the cuts as unfair.

It is unsurprising, then, that McSweeney’s targeting of ‘hero voters’ has drawn limited success at best. If a quarter of 2019 Tory voters switched to Reform last year; only 1 in 10 went to Labour. By some metrics, more died. That another path was possible is demonstrated by the 2017 election, where Labour’s vote surged across the Midlands and North on a left-populist platform, despite a vast Tory Brexit coalition.

A fetishistic view of the working class, meanwhile, leaves the Labour leadership incapable of understanding that putting forward practical and ideological arguments can actually change people’s minds — and that parties can set the political weather, rather than just following it. Where the public respect politicians with principles and authenticity, New New Labour chases the pollsters’ tail, with a leader who contorts to whatever position he thinks most advantageous. The result is, increasingly, widespread derision.

As pollster Luke Tryl has noted, voters elect Labour governments for a reason: mainly their ability to look after the working class, improve public services, and tackle poverty. The same austerity playbook that worked for the Tories won’t work for Labour. No wonder a year of cuts has gone down like a cup of cold sick with a country still struggling to make ends meet.

Nor will the favoured tactic of performative attacks on left-wing groups and causes to please Fleet Street succeed. If McSweeney’s mentor Peter Mandelson once infamously said that working-class voters have ‘nowhere else to go’, McSweeney appears to think the same for progressive-minded voters today. Not even the victory of nine Green and Independent MPs last July appears to have disabused him of the notion. As Muslim, young, and disabled voters continue to desert Labour over the party’s brutal cuts and support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Starmer and McSweeney may yet come to regret their open disdain for the party’s own base.

Back to the Old Guard

So who is the Starmer/McSweeney project really for? Follow the money. McSweeney’s original vehicle, Labour Together, was bankrolled by various multimillionaires, whose donations he largely neglected to report, leading to an Electoral Commission fine. Labour’s mass membership under Corbyn may not have been wholly representative of the country (what is?), but it was far more so than the corporate interests and Westminster hacks who now run the show, with Reeves telling big business that their fingerprints were all over the party’s policies, before a corporate freebies row engulfed the government.

Meanwhile, if McSweeney was widely alleged to have led the stitching up of Labour’s Parliamentary selections, with the help of millionaire donor ally Lord Alli, it was not ordinary folk who were elevated but an assortment of lobbyists, pollsters and professional political class hacks, including McSweeney’s wife.

The essence of McSweeneyism is about restoring Labour not to its core voters, but to elite control — and creating a ‘party of government’ that will not upset the interests of the rich and powerful. It was for them that Starmer declared war on the Left, drove out hundreds of thousands of members, and centralised power in the party. The British people, after all, care far more for the cost of living than the internal machinations of the Labour Party. McSweeneyism’s failure to tackle it has guaranteed the party’s unpopularity and laid the ground for the meteoric rise of Reform. Without a transformational social democratic programme front and centre, a Labour government will be no more than a brief detour on a longer, darker path.

In such a way, McSweeney’s promise to lead an ‘insurgent campaigning government’ was doomed from the outset. For populism is not merely an affect; rather, it represents a real challenge, from Left or Right, to an existing state order, one that a managerialist like Starmer embodies and seeks to protect.

For all its hackneyed talk of the potential of AI, McSweeneyism is largely a backward-looking, restorationist project. It seeks to recreate New Labour’s social compact, with a side order of military Keynesianism and harder borders thrown in. It is anti-Tory and anti-socialist, but it does not want fundamental change. Consequently, it has no answers to a contemporary Britain beset by crises on every front. What few commitments were made in its gestation, like the £28bn green prosperity plan, were sacrificed at the altar of Fleet Street and the bond markets. It is yesterday’s politics for yesterday’s world.

Tough on McSweeney, Tough on the Causes of McSweeney

Today, Emperor McSweeney has no clothes; Keir Starmer has been reduced to desperately pleading for the end of briefings against his right-hand man. Yet if he is maligned, it is in part for his style — his high-handed disdain for the Parliamentary Labour Party and for Westminster.

In truth, the rot runs deeper. The British media and Labour leadership have collaborated to build a cult around Morgan McSweeney because he rationalises their core beliefs into objective political wisdom. As the Telegraph’s Tom Harris helpfully put it: ‘It was McSweeney who was unafraid to tell the truth about British voters: that they will not vote for a party of the Left unless it appeals also to the centre ground.’

The centre ground has once again been blown to smithereens, and it is both incapable and unwilling to rise to the challenge of the political moment. Yet through Labour it dodders on, sustained by an anti-democratic political system. Rescuing the country from permanent decline and the spectre of Reform will require us, once more, to defeat the Labour Right. It is not just McSweeney who must go — it is all those who share his cynical, unprincipled and corrosive politics.