Only Morgan McSweeney can save Labour from oblivion

Yahoo

07-05-2025

It's almost as if Morgan McSweeney never existed. There has been much excited and optimistic talk of Keir Starmer's chief of staff at Number 10, and how his pugilistic political instincts have led the Prime Minister to a more robust approach towards his political opponents, particularly those within the Labour Party.
'Blue Labour', more of a philosophy than a think tank or a distinctive tribe within the party, is the vehicle by which McSweeney was expected to transform Labour's culture, policy offer and electoral prospects. But as last Thursday proved, there remains much work to be done to persuade sceptical voters that the party is on their side, or even the country's.
In the era of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, the latter is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of a disgruntled electorate, with Labour – the party of government, the party of the establishment – looking bewildered, anxious and hesitant.
McSweeney's influence over Starmer and the wider party cannot be overstated; it was he who injected some iron into the party leader's soul and encouraged Starmer to take the fight to his party's hard Left, whom McSweeney believes (with justification) are a drag on the party's electoral prospects.
Hence Starmer's inelegant but decisive 180 degree turn away from the ten Corbynite pledges on which he campaigned for the leadership, and the denial of Corbyn himself of the privilege of standing again as a Labour candidate.
Yet if Blue Labour's philosophy is to be socially conservative but economically Left-wing, then its influence looks to have been distinctly limited in Government. Which might explain the party's poor performance at the ballot box last week. A truly socially conservative Labour Party would do more than talk a tough game when it comes to immigration and asylum.
All indicators are that this administration is hardly an improvement on what we saw before under Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson. The small boats keep coming, and in record numbers, while official immigration, while expected to reduce from its absurd high of nearly one million net arrivals in 2023, is not about to fall significantly in the short term.
On cultural issues which might be thought to be covered by the term 'socially conservative', Labour has, for the most part, gone along with trans ideology, with cabinet members going to great lengths to avoid answering the question, 'what is a woman?' Only the intervention of the Supreme Court offered the Government a way by which ministers and MPs could start talking plain English again when it came to gender.
Blue Labour, with its working-class credentials displayed prominently on its sleeve, would not have hesitated to take sides against those in authority, in towns right across the country, who turned a blind eye to the mass rape and abuse of white working-class girls at the hands of organised Pakistani gangs.
Surely there can be no more perfect campaign for any organisation to focus on than holding to account, and perhaps even prosecuting, the police officers, council officials and politicians who prioritised 'community relations' ahead of the safety and dignity of the young victims.
But instead of taking their lead from the likes of McSweeney and Jonathan Rutherford, a former communist and now advocate of Blue Labour working as an adviser in Number 10, ministers are so determined not to investigate the scandal or even talk about the issue that they are prepared to accuse anyone raising it of racist dog whistles.
This is not how it was supposed to go. Labour in office is behaving more like Ed Miliband's party from 2010 to 2015, when it courted whatever popular middle class band wagon that happened to be attracting the most headlines at the time, than a revitalised, re-energised organisation committed to acting on working people's priorities.
Today's opinion poll by YouGov, giving Reform a seven point lead over Labour (and a 12-point lead over the Conservatives) is probably down to the post-polling day excitement generated by Reform's impressive performance last Thursday, and the figures might well even out in the medium term, back to an even three-way split among the three main parties.
But even this would be potentially disastrous for Labour. Polls can change, but as things stand today Labour cannot count on holding on to its overall Commons majority unless it can break out of its current political and philosophical malaise.
What is the point of Blue Labour, or even McSweeney himself, if they prove unable to broaden Starmer's effectiveness in combatting the hard Left to the party's other, external threats? What is the point of a 'socially conservative' mission that talks a good game but which has no impact on policy until the peculiar circumstances in which the country's Supreme Court gives ministers permission to show leadership?
McSweeney has been a positive force in Number 10. But unless he can shape a path to a reversal in the party's fortunes, he could yet suffer the same fate as his predecessor as chief of staff, the former civil servant, Sue Gray. And without his éminence grise, Starmer himself would have to concede his own days at Number 10 were numbered.
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