The secretive fixer and “real power behind the throne” is a recurring figure in British politics. From Dominic Cummings to Alastair Campbell and Keith Joseph, every prime minister has their éminence grise. Now Keir Starmer’s svengali, Downing Street Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, is facing pressure from Labour MPs in the wake of separate scandals which led to the departures of Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson. Yesterday’s resignation of a senior adviser, Paul Ovenden, has only deepened those woes.

Scandal is part of politics: those occupying positions of power are liable to err. But what’s especially notable about the rising tide of controversy engulfing the Prime Minister and his most senior aide is how much of it was self-inflicted. Nobody compelled Number 10 to appoint Mandelson, but McSweeney is reported to have pushed for it.

Starmer now maintains he was unaware of the extent of Mandelson’s misdeeds. That is ridiculous: it was common knowledge that he appointed a man who counted among his close friends the world’s most infamous pedophile. It’s just that he thought he could get away with it.

Ovenden, meanwhile, has acknowledged sending offensive messages about former Labour MP Diane Abbott in a private group chat eight years ago. But similar revelations about other Labour staffers were well documented in reporting around the “Labour leaks” in 2020. Back then, Starmer asked Martin Forde QC to undertake an investigation before promptly ignoring its findings. In other words, senior Number 10 advisers knew this was a problem, but allowed it to escalate to a point of crisis.

None of these scandals reflect well on McSweeney, so the question is: why has he lasted so long? The answer is partly about the Cork man’s ideology, or lack thereof. Formerly director of the think tank Labour Together, which was founded in 2015 to challenge Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, McSweeney has worked closely with the Blue Labour group, associated with social conservatism and support of workers. Yet this philosophy has not been transposed to Starmer’s messaging in government.

McSweeney has failed to articulate any coherent vision for the party. On most major policy areas, Labour has offered little of substance — and where it did, this generally changed every few months. On the biggest question, namely Britain’s misfiring economic model, the answer to two “lost decades” was almost non-existent. It’s remarkable to reflect on now, but Starmer’s plan for a G7 nation boiled down to “I would simply grow the economy.” Through a mix of planning reform, “stability”, and a new national wealth fund, 17 years of historically low productivity growth would end. To underscore how absurd such thinking was consider this: since its launch last October, the National Wealth Fund has committed £2.5 billion of investment to various projects. That’s around 0.08% of GDP.

In less than 18 months, Starmer’s political project has collapsed. It is only a matter of time before the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, and the man himself, follow Mandelson and Ovenden. McSweeney’s fingerprints are on every major misstep — from the indulgence of Mandelson to the inertia on economic policy. His value to Starmer was always supposed to be his tactical nous, his ability to keep the Labour project tightly disciplined and free of the self-sabotage that doomed earlier leaders. Instead, he has become the architect of its fragility: indulging in short-term fixes, shielding Starmer from hard choices, and mistaking the suppression of dissent for genuine authority.

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Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media, and the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. 

AaronBastani

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