The story of how Keir Starmer’s chief adviser hoodwinked Labour party members tells us a lot about how power really works.
The book Get In, about Keir Starmer’s rise to power, has been sitting on my bookshelf since it was first published back in February. I had avoided reading it in part because I pretty much knew the story of how Starmer became party leader and then Prime Minister, and partly because I didn’t want to be reminded about how events between 2017 and 2024 unfolded. It was painful. As ever with Labour, I was a bit-part player, but that small part taught me important lessons in why and how you win power.
The central character in Get In is not of course Starmer but Morgan McSweeney, now his Chief of Staff, then the person who ran Labour Together, the shadowy organisation that was to change the face of the party and the country.
Between 2017 and 2020 Morgan was a regular visitor to my flat and to Compass events. I gave advice on how to set up Labour Together and I attended its strategy sessions at Warwick University and went to their private London dinners.
I know that for some any critique of ‘Saint Jeremy’ is a critique too much. Of course, there were people in the Parliamentary Labour Party and the mainstream media who wanted to destroy him and would go to any length to do so. But Jeremy was an accidental ‘leader’. He didn’t want the post, it was just his turn to stand and wave the red flag. He wasn’t ready to lead in the sense of having a strategy to govern the party let alone the country. None of that takes away from the fact that his campaign in 2017 struck a chord with so many. That’s why Morgan sounded authentic when he was offering to keep the content but ditch the culture.
But that, as we now know, isn’t what Morgan really had planned. Instead, he sucked up the language of the left so that he could destroy it. His well-funded polling of the party, as Get In demonstrates, showed that the vast majority of party members were idealists not ideologues. Morgan just needed a candidate who could look like continuity Corbynism but was malleable enough to be shifted as soon as the leadership was secured.
Starmer, who had little to do with Labour Together, was that candidate. He had stayed in the Shadow Cabinet and become the liberal left’s darling through his demand for a second referendum. He looked and sounded prime ministerial. His name was Keir for god’s sake. With his ten Corbynite pledges on public ownership, dropping tuition fees and the rest, wrapped inside an envelope that had ‘integrity contained inside’ printed across it – he won with ease.
And then the war on the left started. And not just the hard left but the centre left, who were seen as gatekeepers to any possible return of Corbyn style politics. This much we broadly know. But it’s the implications of victory through deceit that are now important to unpick – especially for progressives.
Because the right and the far left can win on a lie. For them means are justified by ends. Theirs is the politics of the vanguard. Small cabals with big plans to seize control of the state and wield it for purposes they believe to be virtuous. Labour Together was a modern-day version of the Militant Tendency, a party within a party, masquerading as something it wasn’t, lying to people about its purpose and then biting the hand that had fed it.
Does Morgan or any of the people who benefited from the duplicity care? Of course not, why would they? They’re sitting in high office, pulling levers from that high perch. For them it worked perfectly. As such the Labour Together story reminds me of the story of the neo-liverals, who in 1947 gathered another small cabal at the height of big state communism and social democracy. Against all the odds they won. In 2017 Morgan and his backers faced a seemingly impossible job of taking on the overwhelming mood of Corbynism and the power of Momentum. What odds victory?
But this isn’t how progressives change the world – and change is what people demanded in 2016 when they voted for Brexit, in 2019 when they voted for Boris and in 2024 when Starmer promised that change is what he would deliver.
For progressives change has to be inclusive and participative. The challenges we face are simply too complex for a tiny slither of people to contemplate, let alone influence. And these reactionary forces are too powerful to be overcome through elite plots and plans. Instead, we need a popular left prepared to galvanise a broad and deep alliance across civil society to both shape that change and make it happen. And to do that, the project of a popular left has to be open and honest.
So, to finish the latest stage of the story. Having ransacked Compass and the centre left for content and connections, Morgan pulled Starmer’s strings and hoodwinked the party into backing his Trojan Horse. By 2019 I’d seen enough and backed the short-lived Clive Lewis campaign for leadership Transform to Win. Everything that was in that campaign is what Labour needs now – a critique of capital, an adherence to deepening democracy, putting the environment and nature at the front and centre of everything, and through pluralism make Labour the biggest tent in a progressive campsite that could start the process of changing our world. It wasn’t Clive’s moment. But who knows what’s round the corner?
Morgan McSweeney shows what’s possible with quite extraordinary levels of determination and guile. If that purpose could be welded to a politics of pluralism and participation then everything becomes possible.
But for now we live with the consequences of vanguardism. Sure, the power of the state can be used to do some good, but there is no rhyme and very little reason, no sense of purpose or direction. Just people who want to impose their will and not negotiate a better future. Progressives can’t win on a lie. And vanguardism is always a short cut to the darkest of places. Means always shape end. I’m glad I finally picked up the book to remind me of that eternal truth.
This article was originally published in the Byline Times on 17th June 2025.