A pitiful admission from Morgan McSweeney. Sir Keir Starmer’s former right-hand man, and the ex-No 10 chief of staff, who for years was hidden behind the walls of Downing Street, is now speaking to anyone who’ll listen. He’s having lunch with The Financial Times and doing a podcast with the BBC – all presumably in an attempt to establish a public profile in his post-political life. His way of achieving this is to admit to rudimentary errors in political operations as if they were startling insights available only to those with the requisite experience.
McSweeney’s first error – it’s extraordinary that he says these things out loud, really – was that he hadn’t done any real preparation for government. During planning meetings early in 2024, he told the BBC, he “did start to realise that we hadn’t done enough to prepare for government”.
It’s hard to express your frustration with this sort of thing without reaching for colourful language. Everything relied on Starmer and McSweeney getting it right. Their historic responsibility was to prove populism wrong and show that mainstream politics could improve people’s lives. The pair had spent years attacking former Conservative prime ministers Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak for governing like drunken clowns in a restaurant kitchen. But at no point did they ask themselves: What are we doing to make sure we govern in a competent way?
