Morgan McSweeney’s 0% Strategy

The plot to block Andy Burnham's return to Westminster tells you everything you need to know about how Keir Starmer's Government got itself into this mess

Under Keir Starmer, Labour has pursued a strategy of focusing relentlessly on what his Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney calls “hero voters”.

These socially Conservative, Brexit-supporting voters, backed Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, before switching over to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

At the last general election the party poured huge resources into winning over this group.

Yet despite their best efforts, analysis of the result shows that McSweeney’s strategy was incredibly ineffective.

Far from forming a new coalition of voters, Labour’s support base in 2024 remained largely identical to the mostly younger, more educated, Remain voting coalition that they secured in 2019.

Despite this, Starmer’s advisers have continued to focus on their beloved ‘hero voters’ through pushing a series of ever tougher anti-migrant policies, while resisting anything that might in any way please Labour’s supposedly non-heroic voting base.

So has McSweeney’s strategy worked? The answer, contained in some new data published this week, is pretty extraordinary.