9 October 2024

Morgan McSweeney – the permanent insurgent

As No 10 chief of staff, the Irishman faces his greatest challenge yet.

It was the evening of 24 September. Labour’s party conference in Liverpool was nearing its uneasy denouement, but Morgan McSweeney was calm. Cabinet ministers were struck by the serene demeanour of Keir Starmer’s head of political strategy, smartly attired in a blue suit and tie, despite his party’s many problems. McSweeney, some said, had just been waiting for Starmer to turn to him. He soon would.

Twelve days later, the Prime Minister appointed McSweeney as his chief of staff, removing the embattled Sue Gray. For weeks, No 10 had been defined by its dysfunction: key roles left unfilled, an advisers’ revolt over pay, and a haphazard media grid and communications strategy. Starmer empowered McSweeney, the aide who had been more central to his political project than any other. It was the soft-spoken Irishman who masterminded his selection as Labour leader and who directed the party’s general election campaign. But what does he want now? And can he revive an increasingly unpopular government?

Before the general election there had been speculation that McSweeney would not join Starmer in Downing Street. Rather than entering government, some suggested, he would go in search of his next campaign. But when Starmer walked through the door of No 10, McSweeney was among the first to greet him. His presence, allies said, would ensure that Starmer led an “insurgent government”. Rather than succumbing to political stagnation, Labour would deliver relentlessly on behalf of “working people”.

But there was division from the start. In opposition there had been tensions between McSweeney and Gray, the Whitehall veteran who became Starmer’s chief of staff in September 2023. Labour’s agonised U-turn over its £28bn green investment pledge – which McSweeney regarded as an electoral liability – was blamed on Gray’s involvement. In government, such differences took on a heightened significance.

By ruling that Gray and McSweeney would report separately to him, Starmer guaranteed internal conflict. A political operation existed in permanent tension with a technocratic one. Gray was once heard to remark that she disliked “political couples” (McSweeney’s wife, Imogen Walker, is the newly elected MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley and a parliamentary private secretary to Rachel Reeves). Rather than insurgent, Labour appeared submergent – drowning under waves of negative headlines over government “freebies” and winter fuel payment cuts. That the No 10 media grid was allegedly under the control of Gray rather than the communications team (something denied by her allies) was part of the problem.

McSweeney’s ascension has ended this dual power structure. No 10’s chief of staff is now a political operative and Labour insider rather than a lifelong civil servant. As such, the Starmer project has come full circle. After running the Labour leader’s selection campaign, McSweeney served as his chief of staff from April 2020 to June 2021. In the aftermath of Labour’s defeat in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election – when Starmer contemplated resigning – he was redeployed as campaign director. That move, cast by some as a demotion, was vindicated by Labour’s landslide election victory. Today, as Starmer seeks political recovery, McSweeney is back at the centre.

Morgan McSweeney was born in 1977 in Macroom, County Cork, the son of Tim McSweeney, an accountant, and his wife Carmel. Inspired to join Labour by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, he first worked as a receptionist at the party’s Millbank headquarters in London before the 2001 general election. McSweeney’s politically formative experience came in Lambeth, the south London borough that Labour lost to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2002. It was there that he met Steve Reed, now the Environment Secretary, who would later introduce him to Starmer in 2019. They were also involved in Labour Together, then an informal network and now an influential think tank.

In Lambeth, McSweeney and Reed worked to dispel memories of “Red” Ted Knight, the council’s Trotskyist former leader, and to reassure moderate voters – winning back the local authority for Labour in 2006. It was not only political but moral indignation that drove McSweeney; he blamed far-left sectarianism for enabling the abuse of hundreds of children in the borough’s care homes during the 1980s (a judgement supported by an independent inquiry in 2021).

His outrage at state as well as market failure endures. For McSweeney, the Rotherham abuse scandal – in which 1,400 children were exploited by grooming gangs – is another stain on Labour’s name. A 2014 investigation found that the Labour-led council knew about crimes being perpetrated by men of mostly Pakistani heritage but failed to act.

“What sometimes gets lost in the focus on Morgan as a compulsive winner is that he has a moral purpose: putting politics on the side of working people,” a close friend told me. “That’s why he fights so hard to win elections and to make government work.” The Hillsborough Law, a government bill that will impose a duty of candour on all public bodies, reflects this cause. It was, said Starmer, “a law for the subpostmasters in the Horizon scandal. The victims of infected blood. Windrush. Grenfell Tower… Truth and justice concealed behind the closed ranks of the state.”

As well as a contempt for institutional failure, McSweeney has an appreciation of Labour’s vulnerabilities on welfare and immigration. He recognises, for instance, that the two-child benefit limit is popular among voters (backed by 60 per cent in a YouGov poll in 2023), but not party members. For political, as well as fiscal reasons, Labour has so far refused to abolish it. A case of country first, party second, as Starmer likes to say.

McSweeney, a former building labourer, favours stronger workers’ rights – partly to boost pay – and he believes in a more active state and higher infrastructure investment. That he has been variously described as a Blairite, a member of Labour’s “old right” and a part of the Blue Labour faction suggests someone who eschews easy definition.

In truth, he owes something to all of these groups. McSweeney’s ruthless focus on vote efficiency – which led Labour to win 411 seats on 33.7 per cent of the vote – and polling data is Blairite. His embrace of economic interventionism and working-class patriotism – the flag, the national anthem – recalls James Callaghan and Labour’s old right. And McSweeney’s love of community and family, and disdain for left groupthink, make him a natural ally of Blue Labour.

As chief of staff, McSweeney faces his greatest test yet. Can he succeed? Peter Mandelson praises McSweeney for his “brainpower, political depth, strategic thinking and courage”. He will, the former cabinet minister told me, “bring what is badly needed: a sense of project, political definition and scrupulous attention to good people, good policy and good presentation”.

And yet one ally observed to me: “Morgan has got more enemies than Sue.” As chief of staff, he will need to transcend his factional reputation (some cabinet ministers were unhappy at the treatment of Diane Abbott during the election campaign).

During the Corbyn years, McSweeney refused to accept that the Labour Party could not be reclaimed from the far left as he told guests at the early Labour Together dinners. He was repeatedly told that Starmer could not win office in a single term. He did. As chief of staff, can he defy the sceptics? For now, Morgan McSweeney is insurgent once more.