GET IN: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund
We Brits, being rather slow on the uptake, may not yet realise the country has been taken over by Irishmen. Their leader, according to Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, is Morgan McSweeney, who set up a group called Labour Together, which induced the Left “to abandon Corbynism without them ever realising”, and to install a new leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who does as he is told by “the Irishman”, now serving as the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff.
McSweeney was born in Macroom, a small town west of Cork:
“Family lore stated that Morgan’s grandfather had been an IRA courier as Michael Collins led the fight for independence, bearing messages from Dublin to Cork, evading the Black and Tans. When Collins was martyred after proposing compromise with the British, he stayed loyal. Subterfuge ran in the family.”
At the age of 17, McSweeney boarded a Slatterys coach to London, where he stayed with an aunt, worked on building sites, did not much like labouring, tried university instead and dropped out. He went to California where he stayed with an uncle who was a priest, and then to Israel, where he worked in a factory run by Czech Jews and acquired a work ethic.
On returning to London he joined the Labour Party, inspired, this book says, by the peace brokered in Northern Ireland by the Blair government. McSweeney enrolled at Middlesex University to read politics and marketing, and was sent on a placement to Labour’s headquarters in Millbank Tower.
A few days before the 2001 general election, the receptionist at Labour HQ dropped a vase on her foot, and McSweeney was asked to step in:
“McSweeney manned the entrance through which the aristocracy of New Labour walked. They never said hello. Mandelson does not remember the boy behind the desk. Not once did he look at the young man who one day was to change Labour twice as fast and twice as hard as he had. Members of Blair’s cabinet are still bewildered by McSweeney’s rise.”
This could be the prelude to a comedy like Being There, the film in which Peter Sellers, a simple-minded gardener whose remarks about how to grow plants are taken for profound political insights, is lined up to become President of the United States.
Or it could be the start of a spy story, in which an Irish agent steps off the bus from Cork and infiltrates the British Establishment by way of the reception desk at Labour HQ.
One could even make it the story of a group of Irishmen who take over the British state: McSweeney himself; Pat McFadden, now the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, whose Gaelic-speaking parents are from Falcarragh in Donegal; Matthew Doyle, the Downing Street Director of Communications, who used to run the Labour Irish Society and whose grandparents are from Sligo.
These latter details are not in the book, but were supplied by a knowledgeable Irishman, who remarked that Sue Gray, Starmer’s first Head of Staff, ought also to be on the list, as should her son, Liam Conlon, who now runs the Labour Irish Society, and is MP for Beckenham and Penge.
But Starmer, having gone to great trouble to recruit Gray as his Chief of Staff, sacked her when she turned out to be useless, and replaced her with McSweeney: a row of which there is a detailed account towards the end of this book.
So it would be ridiculous to suggest that Labour politicians with Irish roots necessarily agree with each other. The theme of Maguire and Pogrund’s book is the power struggle within the Labour Party in which McSweeney and his allies out-organised and out-manoeuvred the Corbynites.
McSweeney cut his teeth as a Labour organiser in Lambeth and then in Dagenham. He knew how to fight street by street, house by house, for votes, and how to win elections even in years when Labour was doing badly, by finding out what the voters wanted, not what the Left said the voters ought to want.
He knew the Left was leading Labour to perdition, and worked out how to win the hard procedural battles which broke its power. He did so after Starmer had won the Labour leadership in 2020 by making Ten Pledges which suggested, indeed promised, that he represented the continuation, not the repudiation, of Corbynism: Starmer too was going to impose higher taxes on the rich, pursue a dovish foreign policy and take a liberal approach to immigration.
There is no better account than this book of how Corbyn and his allies were smashed. McSweeney and his team studied Labour Party members carefully, and discovered the existence of a large number of “idealists” who shared Corbyn’s aspirations, without the character flaws found in the Hard Left.
By joining Facebook groups full of thousands of Corbyn fans, including Corbyn’s own staff, McSweeney established:
“They hated Labour MPs. They hated the Rothschilds. They hated Israel. One of the most voluble posters, Ian Love, an organiser for the Corbynite campaign group Momentum, declared that Tony Blair was ‘Jewish to the core’. Here, in full view of the leadership of the Labour Party, the Left spoke the conspiratorial, hateful language of the Far Right. This was the army McSweeney would have to overcome.”
Maguire and Pogrund have excellent sources in this world of advisers and apparatchiks, and have cast much new light on what happened, and on the admirable toughness of the Irishman’s analysis:
“McSweeney came to believe that the empowerment of party members was Labour’s original sin…a party democracy that obliged elected representatives to put members before voters was the real elitism. Too many of the changes Starmer had wanted to make were vetoed in the name of membership unity. McSweeney believed unity was a euphemism for political cowardice.”
These observations apply to any party, including the Conservatives, attempting to frame a popular programme rather than one which enshrines its activists’ enthusiasms.
The drawback of having excellent sources among advisers and apparatchiks is that their role may assume a greater prominence than it deserves. Few advisers who are willing to talk can resist the temptation to talk about themselves.
Starmer finds it difficult to talk about himself. This is in some ways a limitation: we feel ourselves excluded from his confidence. He is described here as “unclubbable”, “stolid and managerial”, “Delphic”, “opaque”, “unknowable”.
But as I read this account, I could not help admiring the way in which, amid intense scrutiny, he has guarded his privacy, and that of his family.
His advisers sometimes look down on him, wonder “whether Keir realises he is a pawn in a chess game”, note with condescension how he has abandoned the programme he laid out in his leadership campaign in the early months of 2020:
“So much of what has unfolded under Starmer’s leadership departs so dramatically from what he has said publicly and privately at any given point in these five years that even the people who have worked at his right hand in opposition and government question whether he can truly be described as a leader.”
But these pages can also be read as a story of pragmatism triumphant. Starmer adjusts his position in the light of circumstances. He does not attempt some perilous reform until he is reasonably certain of success.
Like a certain kind of traditional Tory, he is not burdened with the ideological certainties which ignorant onlookers attribute to him. How easily the words “pious North London human rights lawyer” are spoken or typed.
On the evidence of this book, they are inadequate as a description of him. He wants above all to succeed, and to do that he must carry the country with him. He realises the country would rather spend money on defence than aid, and changes policy accordingly.
He is ruthless: he sacked most of his early team of advisers because they were not up to it. So too some of his shadow ministers. Latterly he sacked Gray because she too was not up to it.
Is he up to it himself? Even he may not be sure about that. But as a lawyer, he has generally found that if he works hard enough at a case, he can establish what solid ground there is, take his stand upon it, and reach a better outcome than his client feared.
His client now is the British people, and we won’t be satisfied with pious remarks about human rights.
When the three girls were murdered in Southport, and riots erupted, Starmer wanted a tough judicial response, as he did in London in 2011, and according to an official quoted here, said: “We’re not getting into excuses, these people are breaking the law, we need a criminal justice response, and it needs to be tough and it needs to be swift.”
In 2015, when Corbyn was elected leader on the first ballot with the support of 60 per cent of Labour members, McSweeney, this book reminds us, ran Liz Kendall’s campaign, and she came last with 4.5 per cent.
Ten years later she is Work and Pensions Secretary. What reforms will she make to working age benefits in order to force the inactive but able to return to work? It occurs to me that it would make sense for her to come up with measures as tough as any Tory would dare to propose, and for Starmer and McSweeney to back her to the hilt.