HubMP2012

Dinner table gossip

 March 26, 2025

Bill Bowring reviews Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, published by The Bodley Head.

In her front cover endorsement Laura Kuenssberg says “Stuffed full of scoops…revealing who’s really in charge.” And that is not Sir Keir Starmer KC, former Director of Public Prosecutions, 2008 to 2013, the job, as Chief Prosecutor, in which he was evidently most at home. The authors, a political columnist for The Times, and Whitehall Editor at the Sunday Times respectively, conclude that: “Their political project was predicated on this unpolitical leader doing as he was told.”

Who were “they”?

There is no question that the hero of this book is Morgan McSweeney, Downing Street Chief of Staff since October 2024, and Labour Party campaign manager from November 2022. McSweeney has no fewer than 59 entries in the Index, and appearances on almost every page. Right at the start, McSweeney is introduced, at a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn, no less, at a meeting in April 2019, as “the man from West Cork… the mastermind of a deception without precedent in British politics.”

But even earlier in the book an inanimate hero appears, “a south London dinner table”. This object makes many appearances in the book, and is of particular interest to me.

In 1978, I was elected to Lambeth Council as Councillor for Herne Hill, which included Railton Road, the centre of the first Brixton riots in April 1981. I was encouraged to stand for election by colleagues at the Brixton Advice Centre in Railton Road, where as a recently qualified barrister I volunteered as a housing adviser, and went on to represent squatters in court. This brought me into sharp conflict with the Labour leader Ted Knight, a true Municipal Socialist, although we went on to become comrades and friends. I was elected for a second four-year term in 1982, for Angell Ward, and in 1986 was, with Ted and my other Labour comrades, surcharged £106,000 and banned from holding office for five years, for “wilful misconduct”, resisting Thatcher’s devastating attack on local government. The Greater London Council was abolished by her in the same year.

Why the dinner table?

All is revealed in Chapter 4. “Labour’s strategy was really written by the kitchen cabinet which met in secret on Sunday evenings at the Kennington home of Roger Liddle, a Labour peer and old friend of Peter Mandelson’s from their days as councillors under Ted Knight.” Another key conspirator was Wes Streeting, “the smooth talker all present hoped would one day lead the party.”

Liddle and Mandelson were elected to Lambeth Council with me in 1978, and were close cronies, united in their hatred and contempt for the left in the Lambeth Constituency Labour Parties. Indeed, in 1981, Liddle was a founder member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and left Labour until the SDP was dissolved in 1988. He re-emerged as a Special Adviser to Tony Blair in 1997, and on 19th June 2010 became a Labour Peer as Baron Liddle of Carlisle. He was introduced in the House of Lords by… Lord Mandelson and Lord Rodgers, another founder of the SDP and later Lib Dem peer.

Mandelson did not stand in 1982, did not join Liddle in the SDP, rose in the Labour Party, was close to Blair, and was famously obliged to resign government positions in 2000 (because of a loan which enabled him to buy a house in Notting Hill) and in 2001 (a passport application scandal). He went on to become EU Trade Commissioner, and in 2008 was also created a Baron. Now, as a Starmer crony, he has a really dreadful job, UK Ambassador to Washington.

The next sighting of the dinner table is virtual, an online meeting of Liddle’s supper club on  4th May 2020, in lockdown. Some months later, “over dinner at Roger Liddle’s on 8th March”, McSweeney described the tuition fees pledge as a “bribe”. McSweeney believed that identity politics was an electoral dead end. “Over dinner at Roger Liddle’s his circle had bemoaned the supposed co-option of racial politics by the Corbynite left.”

At the same meeting, McSweeney told “his audience at Roger Liddle’s supper club” that the EHRC inquiry, engineered with help of his work with the Jewish Labour Movement, would be Starmer’s Clause IV moment, “the definitive, irreversible break from the past.”

In October, “over dinner at Roger Liddle’s, [McSweeney] apprised his friends of the political strategy that could – would? – make Starmer prime minister within 5 years.” And in “early December he returned to Roger Liddle’s dining table. He spoke with a new optimism. Corbyn had been humiliated.” Later, in early December 2020, McSweeney again enlightened his friends  at Roger Liddle’s.

Fast forward to May 2021, and “As well as predicting a defeat in Hartlepool, McSweeney had told his friends at Roger Liddle’s dining table that the May elections would ‘test all our systems as if running a general election campaign’.” In the aftermath of Hartlepool, “news of [Angela Rayner’s] supposed ambitions had even reached Roger Liddle’s dining table…” When there was the possibility of Starmer resigning, “Neither Rayner nor Mahmood knew of the Lambeth dinners hosted by Roger Liddle at which Streeting was ever-present.”

Recounting the events of 2024, the authors reveal McSweeney’s hatchet man, “the impish Matthew Faulding, a friend and protégé of McSweeney, and regular attendee of Roger Liddle’s supper clubs.”

The two authors of this gossip-stuffed volume must have a hot line to this table, which acquires a totemic significance for them as the location of the successful plot – which never included Starmer. Or perhaps their source is the ex-SDP Baron himself.

One wonders if one should feel sorry for the pawn, Starmer himself?

Bill Bowring was a Lambeth Labour Councillor from 1978 to 1986.