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Reckoning with the possibility of catastrophe tested LOTO’s sanity as much as their resolve. Days before the by-election, a shadow cabinet adviser had crossed paths with McSweeney.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Great. I’m just on my way to sit outside the office with a sword and shield in case we lose and John McDonnell comes and launches an assault.’
Ward had written two scripts, one for each outcome. Three days earlier, on Monday 28 June, McSweeney had told colleagues how the lines to be delivered in the event of a loss ought to read: ‘Stick to the strategy. Change, change, change.’ Together with McGinn and Ward he had prepared a ninety-six-hour grid of announcements in the expectation of ‘people suddenly doing something stupid’, with its final entry Starmer’s arrival back to his home in Kentish Town – still leader of the Labour Party. Starmer hated mess. He thought most politicians were stupid. It was all inimical to his sense of self – not just as a politician, but as a man. But he did not blink. He had stared into the abyss only weeks earlier and turned back. His flirtation with political oblivion was over. He wanted to be leader of the Labour Party for as long as it would let him lead it.
He endured a long night before he knew that was possible. Mahmood held the fort in Batley while McGinn ran the show at Labour HQ, arriving well refreshed after a long day in a hospitality tent at Wimbledon. Starmer, as ever, had placed himself at a degree’s remove from the business of his own future. He retreated to the safety of Kentish Town. For once, home and family offered no respite from politics. At 4 a.m. he called the pollster Deborah Mattinson, who was soon to join his office. ‘I’ve worn a hole in my carpet pacing up and down.’ At Southside his staff readied themselves for four days of frenetic activity. They would not sue for peace with the left. Starmer and Reeves would go unbowed into the television studios, address the PLP – Starmer would even do what he hated more than anything, and spend Monday evening drinking with the PLP. The message to country and party: ‘We haven’t changed enough. We’re not ready.’ To the challengers using defeat at the hands of ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway as a pretext for rebellion, condemnation. ‘Galloway ran a homophobic, divisive and hateful campaign,’ explains a party strategist. ‘I thought we’d use it to enhance our strategy.’ Said another of the script’s authors: ‘We would have said that Kim would have won if it hadn’t been for George Galloway – the plan would have been to park it on him and his behaviour.’ The invitation to Rayner, or whoever else, was to side with the populist over the Labour Party. For his part, McSweeney was particularly dismayed by the friendly fire directed at Mahmood and her campaign. He moaned to friends that her only crime was to have attempted to win by uniting the white voters of the red wall with their Muslim neighbours.
None of it mattered. George Galloway won 8,264 votes. Ryan Stephenson, the Conservative candidate whose name has since passed into obscurity, won 12,973. At 5.41 a.m., Kim Leadbeater learned she had won 323 more and assumed the office her elder sister had never intended to vacate. The margin was tiny; the result enormous. On a conference call, McGinn sang Barbra Streisand: ‘Happy days are here again.’ Rayner was listening.
That afternoon Starmer went to Batley and stood before a small crowd of activists holding placards that declared it was time for a winner. He celebrated as if he had become prime minister with a landslide. His smiling face appeared only briefly on the bulletins, between anticipatory coverage of England’s quarter-final in the European Championships. That context was camouflage for what was to come. He quoted Blair.
‘Labour is back!’ he shouted. ‘Labour is coming home.’
What did that mean? Really the last remaining links between Starmer’s politics and his home – the private world of friends and old colleagues he so jealously guarded – would soon be severed without ceremony. His project was at once unmoored from its own past and cast back into a history that belonged to other people. New Labour was coming home.
11
Reconstruction
Morgan McSweeney called them ‘The Librarians’. Too many colleagues seemed drawn to the quiet life: prepared to bank the win, then revert to the unity approach and the defeat it portended. He spoke contemptuously of its members. Librarian Labour were the people who had been ‘terrified of the Corbyn machine’: ‘First they went along with it, and then they realised now he’s gone, and all they want is quiet.’ Said one person: ‘Morgan had concluded that too many people around Keir simply had the party as their reference point: comfort, keep everyone together, as opposed to Labour having to change to win.’ McSweeney himself put it more caustically. He told friends: ‘Labour was so good at losing, we had options for how we could lose. You could follow Neil Kinnock, so you change the party but you hand over to Tony Blair. Or you could do a ten-year strategy. Or you could get all these other losers together and see how that works.’ In this respect, Kinnock was just as dangerous as Corbyn. In their different ways, neither man accepted that their task was winning power in a single term.
In the days after Batley, one of Starmer’s younger aides, never away from his side in Westminster, reported that the leader was ‘mightily relieved’ to have been given a stay of execution. He had a ‘spring in his step’. Morgan McSweeney did not. The by-election may have been a victory for Starmer, but the pendulum was still swinging away from Labour: the party’s share of the vote had fallen substantially. Its majority, of 323 votes, flattered to deceive. The Irishman was determined that the party should not over-interpret – or misinterpret – the results. They still pointed to a general election defeat. If he had one aim for Labour, it was to cure it of its culture. As he surveyed the leader’s office and shadow cabinet, he detected a party comfortable with the prospect of losing.
At times, McSweeney wondered if even Starmer was a Librarian. To a tiny circle of friends he confided his fears that his principal might be too timid. The leader was prepared to work with people who either did not understand the urgency of the change required, or appeared inclined to sabotage it. He told one friend in the summer of 2020: ‘Keir’s very bright and picks things up very fast. He’s not completely unpolitical. He has some sense of skulduggery. But not like these people. Angela is political all the time, she manipulates people … all of her people come from Unite. Keir doesn’t realise these are people he cannot do business with.’ To another, he was openly fatalistic, questioning his lack of politics: ‘Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader. What’s the point of circling the wagons if you can’t last?’
In this one respect, McSweeney was wrong. Starmer was far more spooked by his party’s predicament, and his public opinion, than he let on. He knew voters were not listening. Those who remained were unconvinced. Focus groups damned him. Was Starmer not a posh London lawyer – an aristocrat who had inherited his title? Was he not a lefty lawyer who had served under Corbyn? Did he stand for anything at all? After watching an online focus group from the comfort of his home, he confided in a friend: ‘I thought at the beginning of this I’d have a glass of wine, but I seem to have drunk a bottle.’ He knew self-medication was only a temporary reprieve. His resolve had been hardened by wizened friends. Over the summer, Charlie Falconer and Ed Miliband were even moved to visit his home. Starmer was unlike any other Labour leader they had ever known. To Falconer, his old flatmate Blair had stood for the modernisation of Britain. Miliband knew Brown’s lodestar was the eradication of poverty, as far as prudence with the public finances permitted him to do so. Summarising Starmer in a similar sentence this way felt impossible. As one person present for the discussion recalled, the basic questions the leader had not yet answered, even in private, were: ‘Are you left? Are you right? Are you middle? Why should we be in power? What are we for at the moment? We’re not really for anything.’ Impatient, Falconer advised Starmer to adopt a pet cause: social care, childcare, or crime. Miliband urged him to seize the green agenda. Both feared Starmer had yet to grasp what George H. W. Bush so memorably called ‘the vision thing’. Their concerns were representative of countless discussions in that month, as the party’s politicians struggled to reconcile themselves to the realisation that they worked for a leader who did not much like politics. ‘There’s not a culture of political discussion with Keir,’ the aide said. ‘He doesn’t do group discussion … he doesn’t let people know if they are performing, or disappointing him. He’s completely unreadable.’ Starmer appeared to have retreated to the comfort of bureaucratic routine. ‘Keir doesn’t work like a leader,’ they went on. ‘Morgan does try to draw out the politics and debate it, but there’s a massive problem with Keir’s time and diary … Monday to Wednesday, he has eight-hour meetings every day, and then he’s on the road [until] Friday. There’s no time to talk politics unless there’s an emergency; even then, it’s very fragmented.’ Most damningly: ‘Keir doesn’t engage in the political process. He got this far by not expressing any political opinions. You don’t get to be Labour leader without being political. He’s good with people, but he doesn’t debate big ideas. He’s curious about ideas, but doesn’t engage with political discussion about them.’
In fact, Starmer had grasped the urgency of the situation far more than he let on. Privately, he concluded permanent change was the only option: not just of his shadow cabinet, but his tight-knit circle of advisers. Until then, Starmer’s Labour had always been the political equivalent of a family firm. What few friends the boss had made in Westminster worked for him. Together they had built the leader of the opposition from nothing. Over the space of a few short weeks every one of them would leave: some voluntarily, others at gunpoint – mates dispatched with the same ruthlessness he had shown Corbyn. For a time, even McSweeney’s fate was uncertain.
*
One by one they went. First Ben Nunn, the only spinner Starmer had ever known, announced his resignation on 18 June. After fourteen months he felt it was his only choice. He had wanted to think strategically about McSweeney’s favourite word – change. Yet events had seldom given him the time or space. His press office was small and staffed by Corbynites. What little thinking he did find the time to do was leaked. When he told Labour staff that the party intended to make more use of the British flag in its communications, they told the Guardian it was tantamount to racism. That he had spent the weekend of his wife’s birthday fielding inquiries about Angela Rayner was the final indignity. He had watched every stage of Starmer’s political career, from meetings of the Constituency Labour Party of Holborn and St Pancras, through Brexit, Corbyn and Hartlepool, but no more. Next was Jenny Chapman, who, like Nunn, belonged to what Labour MPs dismissively called the ‘Camden Clique’ in the leader’s office. On one level that insult was literal. Starmer lived within its precincts in Kentish Town. His leadership bid had been planned at Chapman’s home on Arlington Road or in nearby pubs. But the epithet had an edge. ‘Camden’ denoted detachment from the world which many of her parliamentary colleagues claimed to inhabit. Chapman was from Darlington and until 12 December 2019 had been its MP too, but as political secretary she became a lightning rod for their anger. MPs blamed her for the calamity of the Hartlepool campaign. Rayner loathed her. By June the briefing against her had become unbearable. On the night of the reshuffle her husband had appeared unannounced and emotional at Labour HQ after a libellous allegation about her personal life was published online, a scene pained spectators likened to the denouement of an EastEnders episode. The devastated couple were forced to sue, and were paid damages. Enough was enough. Chapman became a shadow minister instead. Carolyn Harris was the other woman responsible for the leadership’s liaison with MPs. Like Chapman, she had encouraged Starmer to stand for the leadership, long before he had been prepared to admit that he nurtured that ambition. She was sacked without ceremony as his parliamentary private secretary. That should have hurt, but Starmer proceeded without sentiment. He had no firmer friend than Harris, who defended his honour as if she were his mother. Yet in the days of hate that followed Hartlepool she had erred. Outraged by Rayner’s disrespect for his authority, she gossiped to her fellow Welsh MPs, suggesting that Rayner was engaged in an adulterous affair with another shadow cabinet minister. Chris Bryant, the former vicar who sermonised to colleagues from his back-bench pulpit, warned her against spreading untruths. He told the wrongly accused of her rumour-mongering. The shadow cabinet minister complained. With Starmer’s blessing, Harris was gone. That she had responded to media inquiries by blocking lobby reporters on WhatsApp was a tragicomic testament to the siege mentality that now gripped LOTO. The old gang was parting ways with alarming speed.
*
Still, he would always have the Irishman. At least, that had been the plan. Yet over the preceding weeks, one suggestion recurred as Starmer took soundings and unsolicited advice, as recorded in a contemporaneous note of plans for a new regime: ‘Keir being told he needs administrator, executive, civil servant-type chief of staff.’ If one had asked a friend of Morgan McSweeney to describe him in a single word they might have picked from any one of hundreds of admiring adjectives. ‘Organised’ was never one of them. McSweeney himself knew it. He had little interest, still less enough time, to manage Starmer’s private office. ‘Keir thought he needed someone to make the LOTO trains run on time,’ said a friend of McSweeney. ‘Morgan did not see it as his role.’ He fought constantly, on too many fronts. What mattered, if the Corbynites were to be consigned to history, was headquarters and its bureaucracy – not that musty warren of rooms in Norman Shaw North or even the Commons chamber. ‘Keir doesn’t understand Parliament,’ a shadow cabinet minister said. ‘Nor does Morgan. They’ve got all the same blind spots.’ McSweeney spoke of crucial votes as ‘whatever that thing is that’s happening in Parliament tomorrow’. David Evans, his chosen general secretary, had told the shadow cabinet: ‘I just need you out of that place, out there campaigning.’ Labour’s machine mattered to McSweeney above all. The speed with which he had sought to wrench the controls of the Batley campaign from Rayner’s hands was proof of that point. ‘We were trying to get control of the party,’ said one of McSweeney’s allies in LOTO of the reshuffle. ‘Who’s the best person to be in control of the party? Morgan. He couldn’t do that as chief of staff, and one of the things Keir concluded was that because Morgan was spending 90 per cent of his time as acting general secretary, he wasn’t really acting as chief of staff as well.’ It was a conclusion on which both men would agree, and in time profit handsomely. It was also a discussion that was best had privately. Instead it was leaked to the Sunday Times.
On 19 June, little more than a fortnight before the Batley by-election, its front page said: ‘Sir Keir Starmer has removed his chief of staff as part of a reorganisation of his senior team ahead of a second potential by-election defeat in Labour heartlands.’ ‘It’s safe to say it didn’t go down very well. It went down particularly badly given that we’d just spent weeks fighting for the life of the project, and Keir’s leadership,’ said one of the leader’s advisers. And what was their project without McSweeney? Chris Ward, Starmer’s first and longest-standing staffer, posed the question to Starmer directly. Ordinarily placid – and unfailingly deferential to his boss – Ward shouted his objections at Starmer, the first and only occasion on which he would ever raise his voice to his leader and friend. These rancorous scenes would have surprised the PLP. The inner circle no longer felt like a clique. Focused dispassionately on survival, he had abandoned them. Said one member of Starmer’s senior management team: ‘He was talking to people he shouldn’t have done – he asked a lot of grandees their view on what he should do with his office.’ Another adds: ‘It was extraordinary, really, and obviously very destabilising. Lots of us had been brought in by Morgan. There was loyalty to Keir, but a lot of us were very loyal to Morgan … he certainly deserved better than being named in that particular way.’
Starmer did not appreciate being challenged. But to those around him it was born of necessity. His failure to communicate had left those around him to assume the worst. In the event, there was reason to his new-found ruthlessness. Although Starmer rarely narrativised his own actions in real time, he had developed a clear-eyed view of what needed to be done. McSweeney was safe. The leak forced him to reveal what that meant in practice. ‘He always wanted him around – just not in that role,’ a colleague recalled. Starmer knew exactly what he wanted – needed. The Irishman was not an administrator, nor a civil servant. He was a campaigner. Everything in his life was subordinate to winning votes. No anecdote from McSweeney’s past amused Starmer like the first act of the courtship that became his marriage. One of the councillors who delivered McSweeney victory in Lambeth in 2006 was Imogen Walker. Before long that name was indivisible from his. Not then. ‘You just keep calling me Stockwell Five,’ she complained. ‘You don’t know my actual name.’ Even the love of McSweeney’s life was a number on a spreadsheet. Weeks passed before his new role was formalised but the offer was of total control over campaigning. Labour’s political strategy would be his to write.
*
To repopulate his office, Starmer summoned the political undead. Starmer had defined himself against New Labour as much as the hard left. In 2021, New Labour consumed him. His original cast of advisers had been too young to know Blair and Brown as anything other than important men on television screens. The few who did, like McSweeney and Chapman among them, had lurked on the margins of the movement: at local councils, in constituency offices and trade unions. They knew nothing of winning general elections and working in government: Blairites and Brownites did. They were people he did not know, but now had no option but to trust. The suspicion was mutual and the risks considerable – but for the ageing men and women of the party’s last government the opportunity was too good to miss. The first to be summoned was Deborah Mattinson. She was New Labour before New Labour existed – before several of Starmer’s aides had even been born. With other young advertising executives in the 1980s she had introduced an old-fashioned Labour Party to market research and branding exercises its flea-bitten union men regarded with suspicion. With Philip Gould, the adman who invented Blairism, she helped poll the party into winning shape in the 1990s. In the first decade of the new millennium she was Brown’s pollster: measuring his success as chancellor and then his failures as prime minister. Mattinson knew what Labour leaders needed to do in order to win. Arguably more important was her deep understanding why they had lost – who they had lost. Her focus groups in south-eastern seats had informed Southern Discomfort, the influential study of Neil Kinnock’s loss of the aspirational working class in 1992. In two books of her own – Talking to a Brick Wall, published after Brown’s defeat in 2010, and Beyond the Red Wall, a brutally objective analysis of the loss of Labour’s old heartlands – she had laid bare the electorate’s collapsing faith in the party she had taught to win. Labour no longer respected the kind of voter that had abandoned Kinnock in 1992, Brown in 2010, Miliband in 2015, or Corbyn in 2019. It needed not only to engage with them but venerate them. She developed her own coinage to describe them, one she conceded was cringeworthy, if helpfully unambiguous: ‘Hero Voters’.
