This fascinating book*, full of revelations, is the story of two men who seized control of the Labour Party from the left after Jeremy Corbyn’s general election defeat at the hands of Boris Johnson in 2019. One is the current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, a London lawyer and former Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), and the other the backroom power broker who enabled him to do it, who remains in the Downing Street shadows, unknown to millions of voters but still a power in the land: an intense and publicly self-effacing Irishman called Morgan McSweeney.
Starmer: the search for power without purpose
The authors** paint in Starmer a portrait of a man ambitious to win the leadership of the party and the country but without knowing how, or what to do with power when he achieved it. He wasn’t really much interested in politics and had no vision. His only ideologies were change and professionalism.
The only consistent view of Starmer shared by the many interviewees for their book, say the authors, is that he wanted more than anything to win. “He is a completely hard bastard,” said one interviewee. “He plays to the edge of the rules, really hard,” according to another.
Starmer comes across as someone who was surprisingly detached from the nitty-gritty of party management and the actions being taken to secure his position. He was content to delegate to subordinates and sometimes would just disappear, leaving important decisions to others – a practice virtually impossible in Whitehall since the invention of pagers.
He wanted party unity and to be friends with everyone, including the Corbynites. But in the end, when that did not work out, he purged them and others “unhelpful” to the party with unprecedented vigour, say the authors. Every principle he said he held dear in 2020 has been ritually disavowed if he judged it necessary to win.
Maguire and Pogrund’s story is a blow-by-blow account of the backroom deals, the furious and sometimes nasty rows of the years between Labour’s defeat in 2019 under Corbyn and its stunning landslide election victory under Starmer in 2024. Most of the players are not MPs but unelected party officials, advisers and trade union leaders. It says a lot about where power lies in British democracy.
Morgan McSweeney: the man behind the throne
It wasn’t really Starmer’s own work that brought him to the leadership of the party in 2020 and the party to the leadership of the country in 2024; it was that of an unelected party official who had worked his way to a position at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy and is the book’s other central character.
Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s kingmaker, is a sort of Labour equivalent of the Tories’ Dominic Cummings. Born in the Republic of Ireland, far from Starmer’s north London base, he cut his political teeth knocking on the doorsteps of Lambeth and Dagenham.
That experience shaped him and led him to shape the Labour Party. He came to believe that the voter is always right and that the Brexit-backing voters he met on London’s council estates would never support the left-wing party of Corbyn.
So as McSweeney rose through the party hierarchy he set about secretly and deviously destroying the Corbynite Labour Party from within in order to rebuild it into one that he believed could win back the white working classes he had met knocking on the doors of poorer parts of London.
He did it by laboriously winning control of the party machinery vote by vote in constituencies up and down the land, however inconsequential they seemed, ousting the left, the woke and the “librarians” – comfortable and lazy – and replacing them with his favoured candidates. Today he is Downing Street Chief of Staff.
McSweeney had to fight many battles within the party but also had allies. One – of interest to North East readers – was Luke Akehurst, who was elected Labour MP for North Durham in 2024. As this book reveals, he was one of just four members of a WhatsApp group set up to get Labour to focus on what they believed the country, not party activists, wanted.
One of McSweeney’s victims may well have been Jamie Driscoll, metro mayor of the former North of Tyne Combined Authority and a leading member of Momentum, a left-wing pressure group within the party. For a reason that has never been clearly stated, Driscoll was omitted from the short list to stand for the new position of North East Mayor in 2024. He resigned from the party, fought the election as an Independent and lost. Job done.
Labour Party members in Stockton thought of themselves as McSweeney’s victims too, in a very different way. He banned them from canvassing in safe areas because it wasn’t efficient, and their general committee passed a motion condemning him personally. The calculating Irishman wore it as a badge of honour.
Hartlepool by-election shock
The North East is too far away from the central drama of internal party rows and backroom intrigues – which unfolds primarily, as the authors say, in Westminster, Starmer’s home turf of Kentish Town, and the various corners of central London where Labour has been headquartered since 2019 – to get much attention.
But there is one exception – one occasion when the North East did dominate the thoughts of Starmer and his team: 6 May 2021, described by the authors as the most fateful day of his leadership and by a senior Labour official in terms unrepeatable here. That was when the party lost a by-election in Hartlepool, the former seat of Peter Mandelson, by 6,940 votes.
A few weeks earlier the Labour MP for the Brexit-backing town had resigned over sexual misconduct. Labour’s campaign was a disaster, partly as a result of party mismanagement. The local party was presented with a shortlist of one from which to choose a candidate and Angela Rayner, deputy leader and Labour’s best-known northern woman, was kept out.
Factors outside Starmer’s control contributed too. As a senior Labour official put it: “In the context of Covid, can you campaign? You can’t really campaign. And the national political headwinds were nationalistic: Captain Tom, Boris.”
Labour officials in Hartlepool kept warning Starmer that Labour would lose but the leader, back home in London for most of the time, complacently thought otherwise. When the result came through he seriously considered resigning.
Beergate
An incident during the Hartlepool campaign came perilously close to costing Starmer his job a year later. He, Rayner and others were seen enjoying beer and curry at Durham Miners’ Hall after a day’s campaigning and were accused of breaking Covid-19 lockdown rules. The problem seemed to go away when Durham Police investigated and reported they had found nothing wrong.
Later that year the partygate scandal broke over Boris Johnson and the Tory government. This was a much more serious affair involving multiple boisterous, boozy events in Downing Street and elsewhere in Whitehall. Under relentless questioning by Starmer, Johnson repeated time and again that no rules had been broken. Even when more than 100 Whitehall and party officials, including Johnson himself, received fixed penalty notices the Prime Minister was far from conceding that he would resign.
Just when Starmer seemed to have his opponent on the ropes, a potential disaster struck him. A year after the beer and curry meal in Durham, local police announced that in the light of fresh evidence they were re-opening their investigation. The Conservatives and their supporters in the media launched day after day of attacks, accusing Starmer of hypocrisy. Starmer, in contrast to Johnson, who remained in denial, said after much heart-searching that if he was issued with a fixed penalty for breaking lockdown he would resign as leader.
So much was well publicised at the time. What Maguire and Pogrund reveal is the turmoil that these events unleashed at the top of the Labour Party as the left sought somewhat half-heartedly to take advantage of the situation and more than one member of the shadow cabinet went on manoeuvres with a view to taking over the leadership.
In the end though, Durham Police decided there was no case to answer and it was Johnson who was forced out shortly afterwards by multiple resignations by his own ministers. By July (2022) it was Johnson who was gone, brought down by the weight of numerous scandals surrounding him.
The end for Nick Brown
Once Starmer recovered from the shock of the Hartlepool defeat he decided on a reshuffle to create a shadow cabinet more in line with his own plans, guided by McSweeney, for winning the general election to come. Among those forced out was Nick Brown, MP for Newcastle East for 41 years and Chief Whip under five leaders from Blair to Starmer. Only two years earlier at a private meeting in Darlington Brown had encouraged Starmer to stand for the party leadership.
Brown was an old trade unionist with his roots in the shipyards of Wallsend and Walker, and seems to have regarded his job as Chief Whip as a sort of shop steward for the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), working to maintain its solidarity. He refused Starmer’s order to suspend Corbyn, whom he regarded as a harmless old peacenik (according to the authors), during a labyrinthine battle over antisemitism and tried to negotiate terms with the Union of Communications Workers, representing Labour’s left, to keep him in. This eventually led to a furious row with Starmer
One Starmer aide described Brown as agnostic at best, sometimes openly unhelpful. A month after the Hartlepool debacle Starmer sacked him as Chief Whip. In reality he was little more than collateral damage in a shadow cabinet reshuffle of high drama involving bigger fish than him.
Brown’s fate so far can at least be understood in terms of Labour’s internal politics and party management. What happened next remains opaque, even after reading this book, which is so revealing in so many ways. In September 2022 he was suspended from the PLP over a complaint the nature of which has never been disclosed. He resigned from the party in 2023 and retired as an MP at the 2024 general election at the age of 73. He has stated that the internal disciplinary process was “fundamentally, and inexcusably, flawed” and that the allegations against him were “entirely false.”
Both the Brown and Driscoll cases look bad for Starmer, who may be expected to believe that justice should not only be done but be seen to be done. This is to misunderstand what happened. It was not about justice or fairness; it was about politics, winning elections.
Driscoll would probably have won the North East mayoralty anyway if allowed to stand; almost any Labour candidate would. That was not the point either. He would have been a reminder to anyone, anywhere that Labour was still selecting Corbynite candidates for public office. McSweeney could not have that. The Brown case remains a mystery.
Big fish in small pool
If there is a quibble about the book it is that the authors sometimes seem dazzled by the importance of the really rather obscure officials they are reporting on and their closeness to them. How about this description of a party official: “Nothing in the Labour Party moved without her licence: not a pound from its bank accounts, not an activist from one constituency to another”?
Impressed? Neither was I. Never heard of her before and probably never will again. Only four pages later another party employee is called Starmer’s vicar on earth and a third is said to have “bestrode the growing chasm at the heart of the Labour Party like nobody else”. Wow.
It is McSweeney who is the central figure in the story, alongside Starmer, and his importance is plausible, as is that of a few others. But there are too many of them supposed to hold positions of real power and influence in the party to be convincing. This is the metropolitan elite that Nigel Farage loves to hate (and of which he is a member). Outside the Westminster village their self-importance should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Nevertheless, for anyone interested in UK politics this is a gripping book, full of the inside story of the Labour Party’s explosive back-room rows and deals, dominated not by policy disagreements but who’s-in, who’s-out battles, as Starmer rose to the leadership of the party and then the Premiership. It lifts a veil that most of us do not usually see behind.
Starmer did eventually settle on five missions for government which made their way into the Labour Manifesto last year, focusing on economic growth, energy, violent crime, opportunity and the NHS. How committed he really is to all these we should find out soon when he has to decide whether to add a sixth – defence – and if so how to pay for it.
*Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer. By Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. Published by The Bodley Head.
**Maguire is a political columnist for The Times and senior political columnist for Times Radio. Pogrund is Whitehall Editor of The Sunday Times.
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