The end is Keir / Inside Starmer’s downfall |
Years ago, Peter Mandelson shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney. Reminiscing about his involvement in Labour’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the ‘spray-paint election’. The manifesto was a ‘beautiful technicolour’ document but the tax-and-spend shibboleths of Old Labour remained, along with the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
‘I spray-painted the old Ford Cortina,’ Mandelson told McSweeney, ‘but it was still a Cortina. Policy is at the heart of political communication.’ Only after the election – a second three-figure landslide defeat – did Labour launch a policy review, out of which New Labour emerged. Even then it took another decade to win power.
Fast forward to 2020 and McSweeney helped Keir Starmer to the leadership, seized the levers of party power from the hard left, purged the former leader Jeremy Corbyn and, in 2024, led a ruthless campaign to target voters in key marginal seats, converting 34 per cent of the vote into a landslide just short of Tony Blair’s 1997 victory.
‘How do you build a project around someone who doesn’t have any politics and hates the very idea?’
‘How do you build a project around someone who doesn’t have any politics and hates the very idea?’
Yet after the worst week of Starmer’s leadership, in which McSweeney resigned, leaving the PM’s career hanging by a thread, ask those at the top of government where it all went wrong and the first answer is often: ‘In opposition.’ McSweeney learned half of Mandelson’s lesson – that the party had to modernise – but Starmer foolishly left the preparations for government to Sue Gray, whom he hired as his chief of staff in 2023. He was sowing the seeds of his destruction.
Every single quote in this article is from a Labour source: a minister, MP or party official, and most importantly eight serving and former Starmer aides.
‘Keir travelled very lightly,’ says a former Labour official. ‘He never defined himself, and when he came in, he was defined by events. Mike Tyson said “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” The problem was Keir didn’t have a plan.’ In opposition, Labour tied itself in knots over trans rights rather than debate whether, with money very tight, it was sensible to rule out major tax rises. As a senior figure under Starmer puts it bluntly: ‘We spent more time working out whether chicks could have dicks than on a programme for government.’
The causes of the Keirtastrophe boil down to this: the manner of Starmer’s victory hindered his ability to govern. He, his aides and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, made errors that damaged his relationship with the voters who had elected him to change Britain, then with the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), and finally with his closest aides. Everything flowed from the Prime Minister’s fundamental lack of politics.
The Gray appointment created a structure which many predicted would be a disaster. Tony Blair was one. ‘Everyone was begging Blair to call Keir up and tell him not to appoint Sue,’ says one McSweeney confidant. ‘Tony says, “I’m not going to do that. It would be counterproductive. If he thinks it’s a good idea, the only way he can learn that it’s a terrible idea is by it happening.” Keir thought Sue would create a serious governing vehicle, ready for him to drive off in after the election, and instead he was sent off in a cardboard box which very quickly fell apart.’ Starmer had expected a plan for his first 100 days, and when one did not appear, he sacked Gray after just three months, replacing her with McSweeney.
The hands-off delegation of things he ought to have led is a feature of Starmer’s leadership, though. As Theo Bertram, a former aide to Gordon Brown, says: ‘The absence of a detailed governing plan was not an accident but a feature of Labour’s campaign. Aside from tax, where they ruled out change, Labour avoided boxing itself in… leaving the canvas blank enough for voters to project their hopes onto it. That was electorally effective. It was never compatible with government.’
While Gray respected McSweeney’s genius for winning votes, she thought, rightly, that he was less adept at ‘intra-party politics’, the management and ego-stroking of ministers and MPs. ‘What Sue discovered when she arrived was that there was absolutely no relationship or communication between members of the shadow cabinet and the leader’s office – no attempt to consult on any tricky questions and bind them in.’
Gray’s friends point to Starmer’s equivocal stance on Israel’s incursions into Gaza, an existential issue for many MPs, as an example of McSweeney’s policy errors. ‘There was a disastrous interview,’ one recalls, ‘where Keir suggested it was OK for Israel to turn the water and power off.’
If Gaza unsettled MPs, the first breach was with the electorate, who voted in Starmer to banish the miseries of the Tory years. The government’s original sin, perpetrated by Reeves, was to tell everyone that things were only going to get worse. This was used to justify the decision to slash the winter fuel benefit, a policy which did untold political damage to save the paltry sum of £1.5 billion. She then raised taxes by £40 billion in her first Budget. ‘The Treasury delighted in being continuity Sunak and revived George Osborne’s austerity programme, and defined the government as “life is rubbish”,’ says a Labour strategist. ‘The mandate was for change and the emotional signal was more of the same. From that moment on, voters started shopping for Reform and the Greens.’
When McSweeney took over in October 2024, he tried to devise the plan that had been absent, leading to the publication of the Plan for Change that December. Yet it was a ‘shocking mishmash’ of........