The Founding Myth of Morgan McSweeney

Reports of Keir Starmer's chief adviser's supposed campaigning genius do not appear to match up with the facts

If you’ve read anything about Keir Starmer’s chief adviser Morgan McSweeney over recent years, you’ve probably read about his supposedly critical role in ousting the BNP in Barking and Dagenham.

This story has been repeated so often in the coverage of McSweeney that it has become a central part of how both he, and the entire Starmer project, is now seen.

Nowhere is this more the case than during the Government’s recent turn towards Reform-style anti-migrant populism.

If Morgan can beat the BNP in Barking, goes the argument, then surely he can do the same for Reform in Britain too.

Yet in all the coverage of McSweeney’s supposedly unique ability to slay the far right, through deploying tough messages on crime and immigration, almost nobody has actually bothered to check whether it’s true.

So is it?

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‘Getting In’

It’s not entirely clear where the story of McSweeney’s supposed role as Nick Griffin slayer began, but the first reference I could find to it is in this piece by Rachel Wearmouth in the New Statesman in 2022.

In the piece Wearmouth quotes McSweeney’s friend and former MP Jon Cruddas, who credits him with Labour’s campaign to oust the BNP’s 12 councillors in Barking and Dagenham in 2010, telling the magazine that, “He was the real unsung hero of the whole thing.”

This quote is then repeated a year later in the Times by the journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, who again credit him with “focusing [Labour’s] campaigning efforts on patriotism and crime” in order to win “the Battle of Barking”

By this point, his role in the Barking campaign had become a firm part of McSweeney lore, and it is picked up again in Pogrund’s own defining book on the McSweeney-Starmer project “Get In”.

“After Lambeth, he went to Dagenham, east London, where the British National Party was on the march,” Pogrund and his co-author Patrick Maguire write in their book.

“The far right had exploited white working-class concern over migration, winning 12 of 13 council seats. McSweeney again adopted a laser-focus on local issues and by 2010 had routed the BNP. That same election, under Gordon Brown, the party lost its 13-year grip on power.”

According to Maguire and Pogrund this represented “one of the most successful campaigns in British political history”.

“McSweeney had won again. Elsewhere in England, Labour lost,” they insist.

But is this actually true?

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McSwindle

Now looking at the local election results in 2010, it’s certainly the case that Labour did relatively well in Barking and Dagenham, compared to the national picture, increasing their share of the vote by six points from the previous elections in 2006.

This resulted in the BNP losing all of their 12 seats on the council.

Yet the extent to which this can be credited on McSweeney, or anything the rest of Barking and Dagenham Labour did during that election campaign is far less certain when you actually bother to look at the record.

Because for all the talk of McSweeney singlehandedly turning voters away from the BNP, the record actually shows that the BNP vote *went up* in the borough compared to the previous election.

That’s right, the amount and proportion of voters backing the BNP in Barking and Dagenham in 2010 actually rose compared to where it had been in 2006, before McSweeney came to the borough.

Now it’s also true to say that Labour’s vote went up by more than the BNP’s in 2010 (a six point rise, compared to a 0.6 point rise for Nick Griffin’s party). However, it’s unclear what, if anything, this had to do with McSweeney’s activities given that this rise was actually significantly less than the rise seen for Labour in other neighbouring boroughs.

For example, in neighbouring Redbridge, Labour’s vote went up by eight points and in neighbouring Newham it went up by a whopping 19 points (thanks largely to a collapse in support for the minor party Respect) all without the help of McSweeney and his “laser-focus” on crime and immigration.

The comparison becomes even less impressive for McSweeney when you consider that while the BNP’s vote actually went up in Barking and Dagenham in 2010, it went down by two points in Redbridge at the same election, again without any help from Starmer’s campaigning maestro.

Indeed looking right across London in 2010, you can see a similar trend, with rises in support for Labour leading to them picking up more seats, at the expense of smaller parties.

That this should happen is unsurprising once you look at when the previous elections were actually held in London. Because whereas in 2010, the London local elections were held on the same day as a general election, in 2006 they were not.

This is important because when this happens at local elections, support for smaller parties on average tends to retreat, while support for the big two parties tends to go up.

Except in the case of Barking and Dagenham, support for the much smaller BNP actually didn’t go down. It went up. It’s just that there were more Labour voters bothering to head to the polls due to the general election, than there were in 2006.

Now this is not to discredit whatever community work and campaigning McSweeney did in Barking and Dagenham prior to the 2010 elections. No doubt it was valuable in its own terms and may well have helped swing some votes in the borough.

However, the mythology about McSweeney somehow singlehandedly massively bucking the broader trend with “one of the most successful campaigns in British political history” just doesn’t seem to stack up when you actually look at the numbers.

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Kendall Myth Cake

The myth of McSweeney’s campaigning prowess becomes even more questionable when you look at his much more central role as campaign chief for Liz Kendall’s 2015 bid for Labour leader.

Now internal Labour elections are obviously very different from elections among the wider public, yet it’s telling that McSweeney’s “laser-focus” on the issues that matter to his electorate actually resulted in a truly dismal 4.5% vote for his right-leaning candidate in that election

Now to be fair to McSweeney, he clearly learnt from that experience and went on to back Starmer at the next Labour leadership election, before winning a thumping victory for the now Prime Minister.

Yet it’s also worth pointing out that he only won that election by running a campaign in which Starmer explicitly promised to continue with almost all of Corbyn’s policies, only for the new Labour leader to unceremoniously dump most of them soon after winning.

As I wrote at the time, Starmer and his close advisers were largely given a free pass for this dishonesty, yet it is a trait that has continued to dog him now that he is Prime Minister.

The fact that Starmer's opponents have been able to spend all week posting old footage of him praising migrants and promising to defend their rights at all costs, shows the limitations of the sorts of politics that are still being pursued by McSweeney.

Indeed the fact that Starmer himself has also been forced to spend all week insisting that he really does believe in his new anti-migrant messages, despite previously spending years saying the complete opposite, and the fact that Starmer’s ratings are now going through the floor, suggests that stories about McSweeney’s supposed political brilliance may have been somewhat over-egged.

Obsessing Over the Left

Of course at this point McSweeney’s defenders will inevitably point to his role in Labour’s landslide general election victory last year.

Now it’s worth stating that the influence of all election campaigns to the final result is hugely overstated. While there are notable exceptions to this rule, it is normally the case that the relative position political parties go into a campaign with, is pretty close to the position they leave it with.

So while it does sometimes happen that a big event or gaffe, or a generally terribly run campaign does fundamentally change the course of electoral history, it normally doesn’t.

I’d suggest that the 2024 campaign would fit into the norm, rather than the exception here. Voters went into that campaign really wanting to get rid of the Conservative party and they left it by really wanting to get rid of the Conservative party. The reality is that the last general election was mostly won, not at Labour HQ by McSweeney in 2024, but inside Downing Street by Liz Truss in 2022.

However, what was notable about that particular campaign is that Labour actually significantly underperformed, in terms of their share of the vote, compared to what pollsters and pundits had predicted. That they ended up with a landslide anyway was more to do with the sheer scale of Conservative collapse, than it was anything to do with massive public enthusiasm for Starmer, or Labour.

That this was the case has only been confirmed by the speed with which support for Starmer and his Government has declined since that election. The public wanted change, but so far they have not been at all enthused by the change that they voted for.

Yet despite this, the mythology about McSweeney’s role as campaigning genius has only continued to grow, with pundits and commentators still praising him for his “laser-focus” on winning that election.

However, while far from being a disaster, Labour’s 2024 campaign was also far from being laser-focused either. Although largely forgotten now, it’s worth remembering that the party leadership actually wasted the first part of the campaign focusing on their own internal battles with the left, while generating a wave of public sympathy for Diane Abbott. There were entire weeks of the early campaign which were dominated by discussions of the Labour internal rulebook which came close to derailing the whole show.

This obsession with fighting the left has only continued after the general election, with McSweeney’s allies immediately launching a campaign to oust Sue Gray from Downing Street, while also attempting to oust Ed Miliband, before succeeding in ousting his ally Lou Haigh.

Far from being “laser-focused” on delivering for the country, McSweeney’s Downing Street has often felt far more focused on delivering for his particular faction of the party. The result is a disjointed political operation that now more closely resembles the dying days of the last Conservative government than it does an assured administration cruising towards “a decade of national renewal”.

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McSwexit?

Despite all of Labour’s current problems, there are still around four years until the likely date of the next election. The continued decline of the Conservative party and the complete unsuitability of Farage for high office means that it should, with everything else being equal, be relatively easy for the Labour party to cling onto Downing Street in 2029. That they are instead making it look so incredibly difficult does not suggest that the political leadership in Number 10 is anything like it should be.

Now the extent to which this can all be laid at McSweeney’s door is debatable. He is, after all, just an adviser and ultimately the buck must stop with the Prime Minister himself. If it was in any way clear what Starmer actually believes in and wants to do with the job, then it would matter far less which advisers he does and doesn’t choose to hire.

Yet given that it is still not at all clear what Starmer actually wants to do, then it does really matter who advises him. And with every week that passes, it becomes clearer that the mythology surrounding Morgan McSweeney and his supposed political brilliance, is grossly out of line with reality.

The way things are going, it’s likely that Starmer will ultimately choose to replace him.

But whether he does so right now, while there is still plenty of time to rebuild his Government, or does so in a moment of crisis a year out from the next general election, will make a big difference to how this all ends.