How much compromise can Labour MPs stomach?

WILLIAM ATKINSON

Of all the mistakes, professional and personal, that I made last year – paying to see Gladiator II, having that extra G&T at the IEA conference reception, failing to get tickets for the Oval, and so on – far and away the biggest was overestimating Sue Gray and underestimating Morgan McSweeney. Making a pun about him fading to Gray wasn’t worth the embarrassment.

Not for the first time, I’d read too much J’accuse. I believed the hype that Gray was a uniquely deadly Whitehall Machiavel, not an over-promoted HR bod and Irish cultural attaché. I was sceptical of claims of McSweeney’s brilliance whilst being uncritical of hers. His project to change Labour seemed only half-completed. A campaigning genius? They only got 33.7 per cent!

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The unravelling of Gray’s Downing Street tenure should have done enough to disabuse me. But I’ve also been blessed to read Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s new Get In – an indispensable guide to the Keir Starmer project, and McSweeney’s central role to it. On one level, the book confirmed my assumptions about Starmer, none of them good.

He is, in essence, just a slightly podgy late middle-aged man of conventional soft left opinions who quite fancied being Prime Minister as a late career change. But what the book conveys so well is how bizarrely apolitical Starmer is. You will search in vain for the Prime Minister’s vision. Bar winning, he has no real goal. He arrived in Number 10 assuming someone would tell him what to do.

For Starmer, Herbert Morrison’s maxim that “socialism is what a Labour government does” rings true. Yes, he might want to use his time in Number 10 to help a couple of old pals surrender our national interest. But on everything from economics to energy policy, foreign affairs to eyewear, Starmer was and is more than happy to trot along to whatever aides or ministers tell him.

Hence why McSweeney is so vital. He realised, whilst Jeremy Corbyn was still Labour leader, that Starmer was the ideal candidate for his ambition to wrench back his party from the ideologues. He saw in him an empty vessel with impeccable credentials – a leftie lawyerly record to satisfy the idealists, and the establishment success in making him acceptable to both Blairites and voters.

Whilst Starmer is a sphinx without a riddle, McSweeney is an enigma – an Irish émigré turned New Labour-era party bod transformed after a string of failed leadership campaigns and a spell in internal exile into a campaigning wunderkind turned Number 10 Chief of Staff. I scoffed at Labour’s paltry vote share. But McSweeney only cares about that 170-seat majority.

But that again raises the question of what that majority is for. One gets from the book – and from observing Labour’s first eight months in power – that Starmer isn’t sure. He enjoys the trappings of power, wracking up air miles with the same alacrity with which his Energy Secretary aims to jack up household bills. But he has no idea of how he wants to change Britain, except to make it less shit.

So the pace is set by those around him. On growth and public spending, that means Rachel Reeves. If the Treasury spreadsheet says socialism requires spending cuts that would have made George Osborne blush, Starmer is game. Sod abolishing two child-limit; fuck the bats; bye-bye foreign aid. Labour MPs might chafe and wonder what it is all for. But Starmer is unmoved.

But, more broadly, the Prime Minister’s course is set by the man who got him to Downing Street and is now zealously focused on keeping him there. For McSweeney, now ensconced as Chief of Staff, what a Labour government does is unimportant. The only ambition of his party’s first administration in fourteen years is the grubby business of re-election. Nigel Farage’s spectre looms.

So be it if that means taking a knee to Donald Trump to avoid tariffs or upsetting The Guardian by lambasting the Boriswave. Every fight with the Left is a welcome opportunity to prove Starmer is not Corbyn, that Labour has changed, and that for every stumble in those first few months, this is now a government zealously focused on the people’s priorities. Vote Leave look on, enviously.

Of course, I must be careful not to over-hype the same adviser I once so casually dismissed. Even if I’ve come to realise that McSweeney is far cannier than I had one given him credit for, he cannot alone overcome the obvious shortcomings of his government: Starmer’s sluggishness, the bleak fiscal picture, the bonkers pet projects of half the Cabinet, and so on.

Most importantly, the success of the Starmer project depends, quite fundamentally, on Starmer remaining leader. Barring him being hit by a bus tomorrowen route to The Pineapple, forcing the Prime Minister out would either require the usual combination of scandal, exhaustion, and bad polling that triggers a resignation, or for Labour MPs to revolt against him in a nervous pique.

How likely is that? No Labour Prime Minister has ever been toppled whilst in office by a no-confidence vote (neither, technically, has a Tory one). Indeed, there isn’t a formal mechanism for one. Readers may remember Corbyn facing a no-confidence vote from his MPs in the mad summer of 2016, only for him to refuse to go, citing his popularity with the party membership.

Instead, the only way for Labour MPs to initiate a leadership challenge is for a challenger to be nominated by at least 20 per cent of their number. Once the party’s general secretary is satisfied that the threshold of submissions is crossed, a leadership contest is triggered. The sitting leader doesn’t have to acquire nominations and remains on the ballot by default.

For that to happen, one imagines the so-called Starmtroopers that McSweeney worked so hard to install would have to grow backbones. Fortified by month after month of polls showing most were on track to become unemployed, they would have to decide at what point they had reached one compromise too many. Foreign aid, welfare cuts, deportations, Trump – it all stacks up.

But even if a challenger could round up the necessary nominations, for any chance of forcing Starmer out they would still be required to win over the party membership. Hence why any talk of a Wes Streeting coronation is absurd. Barring an uncontested election following Starmer stepping down, his path to power is stifled by the fact so many members hate him for his careerism.

This means the most likely successor is the only other person who has received a mandate from the post-Corbyn Labour membership: prominent Ibiza and housebuilding enthusiast Angela Rayner, Starmer’s deputy as both leader and PM. Je vous ai compris, she could tell the massed ranks of a party disillusioned by the hollow reality of a landslide they had dreamt of for so long.

That’s all a long way off. Perhaps, long before then, McSweeney will become disillusioned with his chief. The pair might fall out. He could imitate Dominic Cummings and launch a campaign that applies the same alacrity to removing his party leader from Number 10 that he once applied to getting him there. Maybe he’ll decide it’s all pointless, and that leaving Ireland was a mistake.

Or perhaps the pair will just continue as they are, trapped in a symbiotic relationship, cursed to lead a left-wing government in a late Britain starved of cash, goodwill, and hope. Perhaps Nigel Farage will implode, and Kemi Badenoch will defy the odds to make it to the next election. A weary electorate, all too aware of what Labour entails, might vote to keep it, in fear of something worse.

Who can say? From my track record, I might not be the best-placed person to pronounce. But I can say that I owe McSweeney an apology – and wished that we possessed someone with a similar ravenousness for changing their party, winning elections, and getting favourable coverage from journalists. He certainly seems to have a better idea of how to tackle Reform than we do.

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This article (How much compromise can Labour MPs stomach?) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author William Atkinson

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