The key to the Keir Starmer puzzle: bonus with How To Win An Election

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1:05Hugo Rifkind: Welcome to this bonus episode. It's a crossover between how to win an election and the state of it. Sort of like if Spider-Man turned up in the X-Men. If you don't listen to one of us already, what are you doing? Take a long, hard look at yourself. I'm Hugo Rifkind from How to Win an Election, and I'm talking to the state of it's Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrand about the new edition of their book Get In, the definitive behind-the-scenes account of how Morgan McSweeney propelled Keir Starmer to power and then watched it all unravel at remarkable speed.

1:43Gabriel Pogrund: Brian, Bernice, sir. Morgan McSweeney is in the central part of my team. He helped me change the Labour Party and win an election.

1:49Patrick Maguire: Of course I have confidence in him. We're getting notification that number 10 has confirmed that Morgan McSweeney has resigned as the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff.

2:06Patrick Maguire: We spoke to dozens of people, both for the book and for this update. And one of the things we wanted to get a sense of was, you know, what does Keir Starmer do all day? How does this government work? and you know several people made very similar remarks which was remarks the effect of um it's not a premiership where boris johnson bottles around the building or you've got gordon brown sending furious emails at 4am in in capital letters 17 point font font bolded up saying you know i've just read this amazing book by a harvard economist we must do something on you know supply chain finance. It's not even Rishi Sunak pouring over everything available to him and shouting at officials saying, the graph in this appendix is wrongly formatted and I want these statistics bottomed out and here are 17 action points and then we'll meet again next week.

3:01Patrick Maguire: One person told us, Keir Summer spends a lot of time reading. Reading time is how it was put to us by one senior official. After snack time comes reading time yeah he sits there reading and reading a nice life yeah yeah indeed as if as if eventually a bit like if you're a barrister you the right answer the solution will present itself to you if you work hard enough at it but it sort of mystified people and and that that phrase the passive premiership it's an oddly passive premiership someone said to us and that i think it was the key that unlocked a lot of a lot of our understanding of how this first year has unfolded

3:37Hugo Rifkind: Especially because despite all that reading, the answer doesn't always come. You're describing in quite remarkable detail what happened in April when MPs had to pass emergency legislation to allow the government to take control of the Scunthorpe steel plant to stop it from closing. And Starmer himself just had no opinion at all about whether he needed to do that.

3:54Gabriel Pogrund: that's right um the business secretary at the time johnny reynolds um was contemplating uh invoking the civil contingencies act to um where he was going to there was some conversation about recalling parliament uh nationalizing british steel and engaging in uh essentially you know throwing the kitchen sink at keeping the blast furnaces on and uh you know it was one of those moments where the blast furnaces if uh if they are permitted to go off that's it they can't come back on um and melt down yeah and in the event you know starmer faced with a number of options and obstacles um seemed overwhelmed by the gravity of the decision and was routinely uh riposting to reynolds and those in the room by saying well what's the correct answer and it was one of those moments where actually prime minister that's that's that's on you that's on you yeah and i think i suppose you know the the thomas cromwell um of our of our book the anti-hero the protagonist uh was is morgan mcsweeney and um i think the thesis which kind of emerges from our postscript is that perhaps it was a category error for the labor party uh certainly the mass ranks of the spad class and a number of ministers too uh to assume that as well as transforming the party engaging in all the internal organizing and reform he could separately govern there's this lovely moment where he um i think shortly after the government's u-turn on winter fuel um told two people over dinner um i need help i'm drowning this was a man who essentially felt like he was like atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders and he could not single-handedly overcome some of the personality flaws or defects that lay in starmer as prime minister and in the end um we did say our sort of final sentence of the book amounted to the idea that starmer's mcsweeney's project had had failed he hadn't in actual fact left but i think by the time we wrote it it was an inevitability that he would well let's go back to those first months in power

6:05Hugo Rifkind: when the government's, the honeymoon period, as it were, seemed to just be wasted on a war between McSweeney and Sue Gray. And we've often asked, everyone's often asked, how it can be that they weren't prepared for power having anticipated it so keenly. Looking back now, was that Sue Gray? Was it McSweeney? Was it Starmer himself and his lack of interest in anything other than, well, anything?

6:23Patrick Maguire: Look, it was all three. And I think, Gabriel used the phrase category error. There was a definite category error. Comes back to how Starmer conceives of his job, does his job, conceives of politics itself. the idea that you could neatly divide okay some of the guys do politics over there I do the administration and someone will prepare a programme for government and I'll work really hard at that and then the political guys I'll say any other business what's the politics of this and then the orchestra will swell and Labour are re-elected politics clearly doesn't work like that because you have to apply political judgement to everything that happens comes back to the Johnny Reynolds point It's not like sort of, Kirsten was saying, well, hang on, can we trigger the civil contingencies ad?

7:07Patrick Maguire: To which Johnny Reynolds said, well, it doesn't really matter if we can or not. If you want to save virgin steelmaking in the UK, you tell us that. That is the political judgment you have to make and then we'll find a way to do it. It's not a sort of like, can we do this legal processology thing? Yes, no. He wants a multiple choice question. Yeah, exactly. And it doesn't help that the civil service often submit their submissions with the options in that format. But the question you ask, I think, is the crucial one, right? Clearly, and I think everyone admits this now, not enough serious preparation for government, coordinated preparation for government was done.

7:43Patrick Maguire: A lot of that was down to Sue Gray's management, leadership style, how closely she hoarded things, became a bottleneck, etc. But let's not pretend that Sue Gray being over there, engrossed in that sort of stuff didn't suit people like Morgan McSweeney because it meant they had their fiefdom, they controlled the politics and there were lots of people who basically as soon as Sue Gray arrived thought this isn't going to work, how do we basically constructively dismiss her? And the prep for government going badly or the first weeks of government going badly made the case that she had to go. But who set up that weird double headed hydra uh of you know political administration it was it was kia starmer so everybody bears a share of the blame but the book stops with the principle ultimately tell me a bit about the

8:36Hugo Rifkind: relationship between uh between starmer and and rachel reeves because i mean there were there were there are in some extent a double act like blair brown or cameron and osborne but they they

8:45Gabriel Pogrund: seem to sort of come up quite short against both of those uh i think they do come up short um for straightforward reason that theirs was purely a partnership born of circumstance and of mutual benefit it's not like for instance um you know the ultimate template for these relationships in Labour's contemporary history is between Blair and Brown and they shared a parliamentary office and um you know Brown schooled Blair in the history of the party and in the traditions of the Labour movement and they were a kind of intellectual and political double act that is so distinct um in starmer's instance um you know he initially appointed annalise dodds remember her as his uh shadow chancellor after they shared a convivial car journey during the 2020 leadership campaign and he alighted on reeves because she had endeared herself not to starmer himself per se but certainly to a number of people in his parliamentary office because she had the political foresight and wherewithal to whip the parliamentary party into voting for boris johnson's brexit deal after the 2019 election so starmer on that basis was content to appoint her as shallow chancellor but i suppose what are the preconditions for a relationship of depth and substance between the occupants of number 10 and 11 well one you would say would be a shared political project nobody could accuse i mean some people don't think starmer himself has a political project not least now i think shawn and mcsweeney so they don't have that they don't have much history together um there was a solidity to their dynamic before the general election um i think what's so remarkable now is uh reeves has for so long been in office but not in power obviously starmer finds himself in that predicament too but you know reeves as patrick was saying on our podcast a few moments ago appeared at the dispatch box twice over the last fortnight that is a record by recent times the extent to which her political standing has been diminished in such a short space of time means it's quite hard to reach for any parallel in terms of the dynamic between them but i suppose you know the big thing um i suppose the the thesis that animates our book which uh you know we don't claim to be particularly prescient because it is obvious to anybody who studies him in detail but it ends up being the key to answering any question is that obviously starmer himself isn't gripped by a big idea or any sense of political economy because

11:06Patrick Maguire: that's the problem. The Blair-Brown relationship was tempestuous because it was defined by mutual challenge. You would have number 10 coming back to the Treasury and saying, we're not sure that tax change is progressive, or we want to do this. And you had number 11 coming back and saying, no, that's mental. We have to do this instead, or we can't possibly raise tax on this or levy this change or that change. There's a vignette in the book about what's the original sin of this government? It's the winter fuel allowance cut. That just goes to Keir Starmer, he looks at it and goes, okay, that's the problem.

11:39Hugo Rifkind: Yeah, because there's no ideology there. There's no heft. There's no guns he can bring to that fight. Look, I want to talk about another episode that illustrates his lack of curiosity, which was the appointment of a man not unknown to this very studio, which was Peter Mandelson. You say McSweeney was in constant contact with Mandelson for years, had been for years, but the Prime Minister didn't speak to him either before or after his appointment as US ambassador.

12:06Patrick Maguire: That's astonishing. The first comment Peter Mandelson, Keir Stommen makes, you know, directly to or about Peter Mandelson that Peter Mandelson is aware of during that process is the quote in the press release that says, Peter Mandelson, great guy, great to have him as ambassador.

12:24Hugo Rifkind: They don't have a chat. They don't have a kind of, hey, Peter, we're thinking about you for this job. Come and have a chat about it.

12:30Patrick Maguire: by you know in from our reporting that did that did not happen which is which is pretty remarkable isn't it but again is you know is revealing of the way the project is set up right you know you have whole swathes of people who don't never deal with the principle don't know the principle but come to be doing incredibly important and in this case a consequential and um not this tenure as ambassador was destructive but you know the aftermath has been pretty destructive for the government. And they're not close to Keir Starmer. They don't like Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer, you know, quite openly doesn't like them.

13:03Patrick Maguire: But yet, all of a sudden, they are at the centre of the whole setup.

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13:41Gabriel Pogrund: You know, I think we should say just in terms of the kind of personal stories at the heart of this, it is the darkest irony that mcsweeney's path into politics was at the town hall level in lambeth which um he dragooned back from a lib con coalition but which at one point had been in the hands of the far left and the essence of mcsweeney's politics was that under the far left under the leadership of ted knight a bit of a bogeyman of the tabloid press in his day there had been this child abuse scandal that had ravaged the lives in particular of young black children in social services uh within the precincts of uh this london borough and on that basis he said the exoticism and ideal ideology of the left blinds its advocates to what is going on on the ground and it is remarkable that in the end um you know the seeds of mcsweeney's departure possibly starmer's long-term destruction was sown in relation to the appointment of mandelton obviously starmer appoints mcsweeney in order to see around corners he couldn't see around that corner possibly because of the depth of his personal relationship with mandelson who by the way in our first book um i think is one of the first times mcsweeney's name was uh mentioned in public he said i don't know who uh created uh morgan mcsweeney but whoever they are has their place in heaven something along those lines i mean it was a proper uh relate a relationship defined by personal and political uh mutual admiration and in any event starmer was the one who because of mcsweeney's relationship had to be able to see around that corner and insofar as he didn't have a single conversation with the man in question it is possibly inevitable that he didn't do so should

15:21Hugo Rifkind: we assume that if mcsweeney was still there today the release of all the mannison emails would put

15:26Gabriel Pogrund: paid to that i think that um don't just look at the departure of morgan mcsweeney look also at the self-defenestration of tim allen starmer's short-lived director of communications i think there are a number of people who probably concluded it just wasn't worth waiting for the inevitable where streeting made the same determination when he proactively divulged his correspondence um you know it is one of those things where you know the pendulum has swung so dramatically in terms of uh the mood in westminster on mandelson but you cannot overstate uh the centrality and significance of his role especially in a kind of embryonic starmer project a lot of the dog days of corbyn's leadership and the early days of starmer's leadership were spent huddled around the kitchen table of Lord Liddle, Mandelson's former flatmate and co-conspirator.

16:13Gabriel Pogrund: And, you know, it was around those tables that McSweeney, Matthew Doyle, Otis Stammer, Director of Communications, were streeting. A number of people broke bread and contemplated whether it was possible to save the Labour Party. So, I mean, the fact that...

16:28Patrick Maguire: And also for Keir Stammer to... Whether Keir Stammer was any good or not, actually,

16:30Gabriel Pogrund: is the other thing. The conclusion tended to be not really.

16:33Hugo Rifkind: Turning to now, right now, with all those people having gone, you know mcxweeney having gone with uh and with starmer having no no strategy of his own that anyone can discern what happens now can the government survive with that strategy just being sort of bouncing from one crisis to another one u-turn to another well look we'll find out in may

16:50Patrick Maguire: i mean one of my i think we share the view that one of the the funniest and most but both it's great quote in that it's both funny and illuminating uh in in this uh in this new postscript to the book is a description of where power now lies in the Labour Party. And in our first book, an acolyte of Margaret Sweeney, one of Keir Starmer's advisors, said, you know, Keir Starmer thinks he's driving the train, but we've sat him at the front of the DLR, which, as listeners who are not in London may not know, is a driverless train that winds its way through the doctrines of East London. And it can be a lot of fun sitting at the front of the DLR.

17:25Patrick Maguire: Yeah, exactly. And pretend. Yeah, indeed. And pretending to drive. And, you know, we, I think, get a text every fortnight from a random person saying, look, I'm Keir Starmer. I'm on the front of the DLR. But as somebody said to us, you know, Lucy Powell, deputy leader of the Labour Party, great organiser of Labour's sort of soft left, of the dispossessed and never possessed of Starmerism, sat from the cabinet. You know, wrongly, if you wanted to survive your Keir Starmer, I think, in my view, it's clear now. You know, somebody said Lucy Powell has replaced Morgan as the controller of the DLR train.

17:53Patrick Maguire: and while there are many other people who ought to be mentioned in that sense I think the essential dynamic is right you know a different group of people is now taking the view that Keir Starmer surviving, Keir Starmer being in charge is the best way to prosecute their version of Labour politics and all that dynamic hasn't changed, Keir Starmer's style hasn't changed the emphasis and substance of what he's saying might change but the dynamic that the politics are coming from elsewhere and Keir Starmer is a cipher for them is the thing that's changed and that will persist until this group of people decides, okay, this ain't going to work because they're the people who are keeping him in power now.

18:29Hugo Rifkind: News keeps happening. History keeps happening. Even since you finished this new chapter to the book, there's a war. And the relationship that Keir Starmer has with Donald Trump seems to have changed, perhaps irrevocably, perhaps not, because one never knows. But does that give Starmer a new sense of, could that give Starmer a new sense of purpose, the kind of the national leader in that kind of time of crisis?

18:51Gabriel Pogrund: So I'd say at the outset, I spoke to one of Starmer's strategists at Labour Party conference last year, and their position at that point was that Starmer's public standing had sort of calcified the early Sleaze scandal, the winter fuel, the U-turn after U-turn. You know, essentially, the public's perception of him had frozen. It was unlikely to change until something big came along. If that thing didn't happen to happen, then Starmer's standing would remain unchanged. But there are those moments from time to time. Ukraine, for a brief period, provided a reprieve to Boris Johnson. The Second Lebanon War actually did for Tony Blair in terms of his relationship with the Parliamentary Labour Party.

19:32Gabriel Pogrund: But events, especially in the Middle East, can lead to a politician being recast, both in a popular imagination and possibly within their own party. Starmer has, notwithstanding all the criticism of not being sufficiently fleet-footed when it came to defending British interests, he has found himself broadly on the right side of public opinion in that the perception, at least so far, seems to be that it is a war of choice and it's not a choice that much of the British public would have made. What it does do as well is it totally upends every calculation that had previously underpinned his approach towards a special relationship.

20:07Gabriel Pogrund: Previously, he had understood that his own political fortunes were bound up with his ability to foster a good relationship with Donald Trump. When he actually extracted an exemption from Trump's tariffs, starmer headed straight to the jaguar land rover factory in solihull in order to illustrate through his own presence what that relationship meant now we're in a weird world where starmer is possibly able to revert to you know whoever whoever the real kirk starmer is we assume he's a guy who isn't much keen on donald trump and that may now bear fruit for him politically no we've got to

20:39Hugo Rifkind: leave it there but get in is available to order at the time order at the times bookshop where times Times Plus members can get a 20 % discount. Just visit timesbookshop.co.uk. Patrick McGuire, Gabriel Pogrand, thank you very much indeed. And anyone who hasn't bought it yet, lucky you, you get to buy it now. And it's cheaper in paperback as well, so... Well, there you go.

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