Morgan McSweeney: 'The most powerful man in politics you've probably never heard of'
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From winning political battles in local campaigns to securing Keir Starmer’s place in Downing Street, what do we know about the Prime Minister’s right-hand man?
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In brief…
- Morgan McSweeney has replaced Sue Gray as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff
- The successful Irish political campaigner is “steeped in politics”, but is somewhat unknown outside of the Labour Party.
- Lewis Goodall speaks to Aggie Chambre, Patrick Maguire, and Josh Simons to find out what he’s really like.
‘There is no Keir Starmer without Morgan McSweeney’
What’s the story?
Keir Starmer has spent under 100 days as Prime Minister, but he is already shaking things up inside Number 10.
You may have heard of Sue Gray, Starmer’s former chief of staff who resigned last week amid tensions inside Downing Street.
When it came to replacing her, some say there was only ever one man for the job.
And that is Morgan McSweeney, the “most powerful man in politics you’ve probably never heard of”, says Lewis.
So how did this unassuming, bespectacled redhead from County Cork reach the pinnacle of politics?
And what else do we know about Starmer’s top aide?
How did McSweeney’s political career begin?
The softly spoken, enigmatic Irishman has been a political campaigner virtually his entire career.
He has had a “remarkable journey via the foothills of British politics”, through some of the most unglamorous roles in the profession to running a country he’d “still say is not his own”.
That’s according to Patrick Maguire, Labour Party chronicler and journalist at The Times.
McSweeney began his journey working for Lambeth Council in the mid 1990s.
Maguire says: “It was the archetypal ‘looney left’ Council, as The Sun would have called it at the time.”
He worked alongside Steve Reed, now the Environment Secretary, and the pair “focused relentlessly on what mattered to voters” at ground level.
“Broken street lamps, potholes, graffiti, that sort of thing. That might not be inspiring tothe Labour movement, but it works with voters”, Maguire says.
It was here where he honed his craft of fighting battles in local campaigns.
Maguire tells Lewis: “He’s a very successful campaigner, steeped in politics, very interested in how parties of the centre-left win and govern as insurgents and keep in touch with the voter.”
But McSweeney has had his failures too, and in 2015, failed to secure Blairite candidate Liz Kendall as party leader.
Behind the scenes, he has also been a key figure in internal Labour politics.
McSweeney became head of Labour Together in 2017, an influential think tank dubbed “the provisional wing of Starmerism” and “Morgan McSweeney’s Wagner group”.
The organisation is seen as playing a major role in driving Labour’s shift to the centre and regaining control of the party machinery following the departure of Jeremy Corbyn.
What is his relationship with Starmer like?
McSweeney did not officially begin working with Starmer until 2020, but he is believed to have largely assisted in his rise to power.
Maguire goes as far as saying there would be no Starmer without McSweeney.
“There is no Starmer project. It is the Starmer-McSweeney project”, he says.
McSweeney helped Starmer with his Labour leadership bid and was later officially brought in to be chief of staff in the leader of the opposition’s office.
LBC’s political correspondent Aggie Chambre tells Lewis: “He wasn't that successful the first time he was chief of staff when Keir Starmer first entered parliament.
“It's been described to me that there was this scorched earth after Corbyn. He had a lot to do and didn't do a very good job for various different reasons. It didn't really work out.
“I think that’s because Keir Starmer wasn't very good at politics. He didn't really like meeting MPs. He still doesn't.”
In 2021, McSweeney adopted a slightly different role as Starmer’s director of campaigns.
His next task was to help get Labour into power.
To do so, MsSweeney pioneered a change in the Labour Party, Maguire says, shifting it towards a “harder and faster, more confrontational approach to the left” alongside a “big departure from unity, which was the watchword of his first year.”
McSweeney then became head of political strategy after Labour’s election win.
“Starmer has put his faith in Morgan McSweeney to deliver, and, by the skin of his teeth on occasions, he has delivered them”, Maguire says.
And that is why it is no surprise that when Gray resigned last week, it was only ever going to be McSweeney stepping up to replace her.
Why did McSweeeney and Gray clash?
Alongside Gray, reports suggest there was only room for one.
Aggie tells Lewis: “The moment that Sue Gray was brought in, there was always this power struggle between the two of them because she was essentially above him.”
But the pair, she says, could have worked well side by side.
“The whole thing about Sue Gray is that she wasn't very political. She really understood Whitehall, really understood government, but she wasn’t political.
“The whole thing about Morgan McSweeney, if you speak to people, is he is so political, he properly gets politics and so they could have worked really well together.”
It wasn’t to be.
How will he take on his new role?
Maguire says Labour are now “in a position where they have to succeed, and there is nobody else to blame if they don't succeed.”
And that’s why, according to Aggie, McSweeney “will try out any strategy that he thinks might work”.
Josh Simons, the new MP for Makerfield, is an old ally of McSweeney’s from his time at Labour Together.
He tells Lewis that McSweeney has a set of political and organisational skills that are quite different to that of a senior civil servant.
McSweeney, he says, offers ” a different approach to governing “, bringing a sense of “insurgency” and impatience.
To Simons, it may not even matter at all that McSweeney’s talents lie more so in campaigning, with bureaucratic and administrative skills perhaps not being as important as many might presume.
Running a government, he argues, instead “requires something that's much more like campaigning and insurgency, and a willingness to change things.”
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