UK

A one-sided view of the rise of Keir Starmer and his courtiers

Mike Phipps reviews Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, published by Bodley Head.

Journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund have a reputation for being quick off the mark with these Labour ‘inside stories’. Their Left Out was the first in a slew of diverse assessments of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Party, but of course, first does not always mean best. This reviewer was left singularly unimpressed by the authors’ credulity for the propaganda put out by Corbyn’s opponents and the book’s “sniggering gossip-column vibe.” Would Get In be any better?

Polishing the lacklustre

Once you get beyond the same irritating, breathless style that pervades the book, certain things become clear. One is the central importance of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, also recognised in Anushka Asthana’s fatally shallow book, Taken As Red, which narrowly beat Get In into print. Like Asthana, Maguire and Pogrund have a tendency to see McSweeney as wise, far-sighted and infallible.

Before 2019, McSweeney had worked doggedly to undermine the Corbyn movement, caricatured here as being awash with antisemitic conspiracists. Were that the case, a secretly masterminded operation would hardly have been necessary to overthrow it. But such inconsistencies don’t worry our authors, whose view seems to chime with McSweeney’s line that Corbyn’s supporters, were a “hate factory”, as the Sunday Times headlined in April 2018.

Starmer’s rise to the Labour leadership, as told here, reads like the outcome of a brilliantly plotted strategy. The reality is far more banal: the wannabes who ran for the leadership after the 2019 general election debacle were a pretty lacklustre bunch, Starmer perhaps slightly less than the rest.  

Of Starmer they write: “Having promised unity with the left, he proceeded to purge the Labour Party with unprecedented vigour. Every principle he said he held dear in 2020 has been ritually disavowed.” That at least is accurate.

However, his first Shadow Cabinet was not dominated by the mainstays of the Labour right who run the show today: the shift in that direction would take a couple of years. The version here is that Starmer preached unity, while behind the scenes McSweeney practised division and retribution against the left, pushing hard to get David Evans appointed as General Secretary.

The rightward lurch

Different theories have circulated about Starmer’s lurch rightwards. Some suggest he deliberately lied during his leadership campaign to win grassroots votes, always intending to move to the right. Others contend that he was more clueless and that his lack of progress in 2020 in 2021, including losing the Hartlepool by-election, led him to panic and bring in the hatchet-men of the Labour right that Peter Mandelson recommended. What’s incontestable is McSweeney’s influence over Starmer even before this process began: “the mastermind of a deception without precedent in British politics,” as Maguire and Pogrund floridly put it.

And so we revisit each step of this grim process. Yet for all its claims to be an exposé, the book is often curiously ‘on message’, repeatedly presenting the leadership view, for example, Starmer as decisive, with a clear understanding of right and wrong, as when he sacked Rebecca Long Bailey for tweeting in support of Maxine Peake in June 2020, the authors even insinuating that she deliberately chose to get fired.

In fairness, Maguire and Pogrund are a bit more even-handed over Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension, pointing out that his declaration that antisemitism had been “deliberately overstated for political reasons by our opponents” was “little more than a statement of the obvious.” The story here seems to be that Starmer’s aides were determined to trap and victimise Corbyn – which they duly did. Strenuous efforts by allies of both Starmer and Corbyn to get a clarifying statement from the latter succeeded in lifting his suspension – whereupon Starmer, under pressure from right wing parliamentary colleagues, reneged on his pitch for unity by denying Corbyn the parliamentary whip.

The Hartlepool by-election of May 2021 was indeed a turning point and the detail Maguire and Pogrund unearth on this is shocking. Following this disastrous loss, Starmer was convinced he should quit as Labour leader. “Don’t do anything until Morgan gets here,” he was told.

McSweeney of course saw the crisis as an opportunity – to declare all-out war on the left, bury the idea of Party unity and move the Shadow Cabinet firmly rightwards. “Plans for this moment of truth had been in train for months,” say the authors.

Yet the ensuing reshuffle was damagingly botched. A furious Deputy Leader Angela Rayner learned of her removal as campaign coordinator from the media, before Starmer had the chance to speak to her and offer her another job. At that point, some of her aides reckoned she could have, with union backing, launched a successful challenge against Starmer’s leadership.

But they are not called the ‘soft left’ for nothing! Rayner calmed down and eventually accepted a job in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet – which in other respects moved decisively to the right.

The Batley and Spen by-election followed Hartlepool. So terrified of losing were Labour’s campaign managers that they put out arguably sectarian leaflets to appeal to Muslim voters and even pushed – unsuccessfully, of course – for the whip to be restored to Jeremy Corbyn, such was his enduring popularity among voters. In the event, Labour held the seat by a whisker.

Meanwhile, McSweeney continued to scheme. It was he who plotted – even behind the backs of Starmer’s colleagues – to make it more difficult for future would-be Party leaders to get themselves nominated, and pushed it through the 2021 Labour Conference. Yet, more than anything McSweeney or any other Labour official did, it was Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’ unfitness for office that helped Starmer on the way to Number Ten.

Palestine

Even as late as October 2023, Starmer’s aides seem motivated above all by a need to define themselves against the demons of the left, no matter how marginalised they now were. There are several pages here about how a minute’s silence was arranged at that that month’s Party Conference in response to the Hamas attack in Israel and how any leftist disruption of it might be dealt with – as if that were remotely likely.

But even here, the authors can’t resist a snipe at Jeremy Corbyn, who supposedly “barked at interviewers” his opposition to atrocities on both sides of the conflict, as though that should somehow be a cause for condemnation. On the other hand, Keir Starmer is seemingly excused for his LBC interview comments that Israel had the right to cut off water to the inhabitants of Gaza – a war crime – because he was “tired”.

When the inevitable furore blew up in response to his words, Starmer’s office consciously decided not to issue a clarification, but instead tried, unsuccessfully, to get the now-viral LBC clip taken off social media. Support for Labour among Muslims went into freefall and prominent Muslim Labour councillors began resigning.

Several Shadow Cabinet members – including Wes Streeting – warned of the danger. But McSweeney was unimpressed. The Labour Muslim Network, he messaged colleagues, “are not an affiliated organisation and are not good faith actors.” Days later, Starmer clarified his comments but neither apologised nor called for a ceasefire – unlike Mayors Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.

In Maguire and Pogrund’s telling, ex-civil servant Sue Gray, who was now Starmer’s Chief of Staff, tried to repair the relationships with elected colleagues that the arrogant boys around the leader were so careless of. But her efforts were undermined by Starmer’s continued refusal to countenance a ceasefire and her attempts at ‘healing’ provoked the ire of the ever-divisive of McSweeney, who would soon engineer her demise.

The influence of the unelected – and more war on the left

Some mainstream reviews of this book have focused on the personal gossip, overlooking more important political details. For example, post-election there was a lot of media coverage of personal donations to Keir Starmer, totalling £500,000, from Lord Waheed Alli, for suits and suchlike. Labour responded to these reports that Alli had never wielded influence over policy. “This was not true,” say the authors. A proposed ban on overseas donations to parties, to be announced by Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, was abandoned, allegedly at his insistence. Once Labour were elected, Alli reportedly vetted appointees to ministerial office and other government posts.

As the general election approached, a new purge of left wing candidates was mounted, although the focus here is less on the attacks on the left and more on the deadbeats from the New Labour era who were discouraged by aides from seeking a second chance. Yet for all the leadership’s supposed meticulous preparation for the big event, the first week of campaigning was dominated by its shabby treatment of Hackney MP Diane Abbott. Thanks to her dogged campaigning, she survived to run for Labour again: others, like Brighton MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle were ruthlessly barred on spurious grounds.

After the election

The general election saw Labour win a landslide of seats, but the lowest share of the popular vote since 1832, on the second lowest turnout in a century. Regarding McSweeney’s quest to “Change Labour, Change Britain”, the authors write: “The first half of the mantra was now fulfilled, but it would be for others to begin the work of government.”

If only! The rapid unravelling of Keir Starmer’s government over the next three months had the fingerprints of the over-reaching and divisive McSweeney all over it. You won’t read that here, however: most of the chapter on Starmer’s first 100 days are devoted to a one-sided account of the rivalry between McSweeney and Sue Gray, until the latter was forced out.

It emerges from this episode just how dysfunctional the Number Ten operation was. Ultimately, one man is to blame for that: Keir Starmer. He is portrayed here as often so aloof as to be politically disengaged, so that even his aides could speak of him as a useful idiot, sitting at the front of a driverless train controlled by others.

“A pack of totally shameless liars”

Owen Jones concluded after perusing this book: “The right-wing faction of the Labour party are some of the most vicious, unpleasant people you are very likely to meet in British politics. And given British politics is a cesspit, that’s quite the bar to surpass.”

That would matter less, were it not for the fact that trust in politics in Britan is at a record low. Worse, faith in democratic institutions, especially among young people, is at its lowest in living memory. Against this backdrop, the cynicism and manipulativeness of people like Morgan McSweeney look increasingly unaffordable in a free society.

Owen Jones’ critique underlines this: “The fact that Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign was an epic political deceit, a pack of lies to con Labour members into voting for their man, is simply treated as a matter-of-fact throwaway comment, too obvious to even bother unpacking. Really? Is it not of wider interest that the people running the country are a pack of totally shameless liars? Is there no sense of just how damaging this is to democracy, not least when an ascendant authoritarian right seeks to exploit growing public disaffection with it?”

The reason such deception is not properly scrutinised is simple: those who dominate the UK media loathe the left, who  “are not seen as legitimate political actors, but an alien toxin to be eliminated from our body politic.”

Keir Starmer has followed the right wing playbook assiduously and his poll ratings continue to plummet. His closest aides may mock him in private now, but they could well turn on him later. Yet, the government’s failings are not really about personality or communication so much as policy: the Labour right simply don’t have the answers to address the cost of living, housing, health and environmental crises. Ruling out higher taxes on the wealthy and betting the whole economic house on growth is a gamble that in a post-Brexit, Trump-tariff world is unlikely to work. And those who voted for ‘change’ will be in no mood to give Labour a second chance.

By then, the mediocrities around Starmer will have moved on to more lucrative careers in the private sector, in all probability. The rest of us will be suffering the consequences of the inevitable backlash to their arrogance and failures for some time to come.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

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