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Good morning. Morgan McSweeney is out as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Will it save Starmer? I’m not going to speculate because as George Eliot wrote, “among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous”. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
Starmer is unusually reliant on advisers and aides because he is not a natural politician. If he — and Labour — are very lucky, then his post-McSweeney phase will be like Theresa May’s post-2017 phase, where, with Gavin Barwell as her chief of staff and David Lidington as her de facto deputy prime minister, she was able to govern pretty effectively and help pave the way for the Conservatives to be re-elected in 2019.
If he is unlucky, then this will be like when Boris Johnson dispensed with Dominic Cummings in 2020 — his government never really found its feet without Cummings and the Conservatives, of course, went down to a record-breaking defeat in 2024.
For now, I wanted to talk about the case for and against McSweeney and the two camps in Labour on that issue.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Bluesky and Georgina on Bluesky. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
The two-child limit exposes Labour’s strategy flaw
At the 30th anniversary dinner for the Blairite pressure group Progress a few weeks ago, speakers repeatedly returned to two themes: how good it is that Labour is back in government and how good it is that the Labour government has scrapped the two-child benefit limit, lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.
The former is the achievement that Morgan McSweeney’s supporters in government and the wider Labour Party talk up. The latter is something McSweeney had to be dragged, kicking and screaming into doing.
The case for McSweeney’s defence is the 2024 general election result. Yes, of course, it helps if your opponents do damn fool things like make Liz Truss prime minister, but by making Labour so non-threatening, by eliminating essentially any promise or position that might have scared the horses, McSweeney set Labour up perfectly to benefit.
Whatever you feel about the two-child limit, that affair is a pretty good case for the prosecution. Labour in opposition made a promise that could not be met without scrapping the two-child limit. All that McSweeney — and Rachel Reeves, who was its other biggest opponent — achieved in fighting it was wasting taxpayers’ money on policies with a limited evidence base, such as universal free breakfast clubs, in an obviously doomed attempt to mollify the Parliamentary Labour Party into retaining the benefit cap.
Along the way, the heavy-handed and openly contemptuous approach to managing the parliamentary party created a situation where the 2024 intake — the product of the most controlled and micromanaged set of parliamentary selections in British history — is now mutinous and hard to manage. Securing support for any radical change from this parliament now looks very difficult indeed.
I’m not going to pretend that this is an even-handed presentation of the two cases, because I don’t think this is a case that a jury would have to spend much time over. The problem with the Starmer/McSweeney approach was that it eliminated ideas that were good but unpopular.
But lots of popular ideas are bad! While Labour’s “nationalise it, then magic will happen and the railways will just get better” plans are popular, in the real world it may mean that the government bequeaths a worse set of railways to its successor, whoever that may be, than the ones it inherited. “Equalising the minimum wage for under-21s” is popular but it may well be contributing to the growing number of young people who are Neet (not in education, employment or training).
And then measures such as scrapping the cliff edge in our tax system if you earn more than £100,000 or regulating to benefit our areas of strength in financial services and pharmaceuticals are, in my view, good but unpopular.
Neither David Cameron nor Tony Blair just looked across at the other side and went “what are they doing that is popular?” They asked “what about them is better than what we have to offer?” Labour under Starmer and McSweeney was only ever superficially interested in learning from what the party that defeated them was doing right, and that superficial interest is why Labour’s polling is that of a party on the brink of death. It may be that, with a new chief of staff, Starmer can find a seriousness that has thus far eluded him, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Now try this
As some of you may have guessed from the quote at the top of the email, having spent more than half my lifetime pretending to have read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I have finally started reading Middlemarch. The good news is that it is every bit as good as I have been pretending I thought it was. If you haven’t read it, start today!
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Mandelson’s payout pending | The Foreign Office is reviewing a payout of up to £40,000 to Lord Peter Mandelson after he was sacked as UK ambassador to the US last year, as the scandal over the peer’s links to Jeffrey Epstein deepens.
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Battle for survival | Today Keir Starmer will attempt to regain the initiative, as the threat of electoral losses looms. Allies say the prime minister has “instructed officials to move at pace to deliver change”. People close to Starmer said they were worried that Morgan McSweeney, a Peter Mandelson protégé, would incur more damage in the coming days with the release of documents relating to the peer’s stint as US envoy last year.
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Protecting academics | UK universities have been told by the government to step up their defences against intimidation and censorship from China and other states, as the security services launch an advisory scheme for threatened researchers.
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Nothing to see here | The Ministry of Justice is ordering the deletion of a large archive of court records, raising open justice concerns, the Times reports. Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, has been ordered by the government to delete its archive, which provides a crucial tool for journalists covering the justice system.