Sam Freedman
Until recently, the prime minister was the most important person in British politics. But when the New Statesman published its annual list of the most powerful people on the left in June last year, with Keir Starmer poised to take office, the number-one spot went not to Starmer, but to his adviser Morgan McSweeney.
This is a ranking corroborated by Get In, an impeccably sourced and enjoyably written history of Labour’s rise to power by two of Westminster’s sharpest young journalists, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. Their protagonist is unquestionably the shadowy Irishman, rather than his nominal boss. Starmer may have ultimate authority, but, the authors argue, he has largely outsourced his political thinking.
The prime minister is presented – accurately, by all accounts – as a man with no fixed ideology and a bureaucrat’s fixation on “what works”, as if that can be identified without any particular vision of what he wants the country to look like. Starmer does care a lot about winning, however, which explains his willingness to adopt whatever positions McSweeney thinks is necessary at any given time, to the point that another adviser is quoted as saying, “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR [the automated Docklands Light Railway]”.
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