Inside Number 10: Can Starmer survive?

0:02Niall:Sky News, the full story first.

0:08Lord Barwell:Coming up, number 10 in crisis mode. How does government function when the knives are out?

0:17Niall:Let me bring you some breaking news now. Morgan McSweeney, Downing Street Chief of Staff, has just resigned.

0:26Lord Barwell:Keir Starmer's right-hand man has gone, closely followed by Director of Communications Tim Allen. Rumour has it the Cabinet Secretary will be next out the Downing Street revolving door. Number 10 is in crisis, but this Prime Minister certainly isn't the first to govern under pressure.

0:43Niall:But with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.

0:51Lord Barwell:Theresa May stepped down back in 2019 after months of will she, won't she. Watching on as she fought back the tears, her chief of staff, who's been monitoring recent events with a degree of déjà vu.

1:03Niall:Yeah, it's kind of like post-traumatic stress disorder, I think. It was obviously a painful period that we went through for the last maybe four or five months of Theresa's premiership.

1:12Lord Barwell:So how does Downing Street function when backs are against the wall? Gavin Barwell, now Lord Barwell, was Theresa May's chief of staff from 2017 to 2019.

1:21Niall:If you remember the history, her opponents maybe moved a bit too quickly and called a vote of no confidence in her, which she actually managed to win, so that sort of restored her authority a bit for a few months. But then certainly the last six or seven weeks were an incredibly difficult period.

1:36Lord Barwell:What is it like working inside that famous building, the seat of government, in a time of crisis? What's the mood behind the door?

1:43Niall:I think the biggest danger is you get into a kind of bunker mentality, because you're obviously very frustrated that people in your own party are making what is anyway a very, very difficult job, even more difficult. I suppose it can fluctuate from sort of defiance and a determination to fight on and get through the political difficulties you've got. And then you reach a point where you realise that's not possible. And then it's the last few weeks can be very, very gloomy when you realise that the Prime Minister's time is up. we then had a kind of strange final two months once teresa had announced that she was standing down as leader of the party she carried on as prime minister for a couple of months while the leadership election was going on and actually she was hugely impressively determined to use those two months to the maximum effect and get as much done as she could before she left the building

2:29Lord Barwell:just look back in those final days i mean it must have been for yourself and of course for the Prime Minister, a traumatic time, an upsetting time, a crazy time, no doubt, in moments. When you think about those final few days, what does your mind go to?

2:42Niall:First of all, on a personal level, I felt I had failed. I mean, there isn't a job description for the role of Prime Minister's Chief of Staff. But if there were one, the number one task would be keep the Prime Minister in number 10. So on a personal level, I kind of felt I'd let the Prime Minister down by not being able to help her find a way through it. I was enormously proud of the way that she conducted herself through all of that and proud of what we'd been able to achieve over the two-year period that I was working for her. On the day that we actually left, the last job a Chief of Staff has to do is the Prime Minister goes off to Buckingham Palace to hand in their resignation to the monarch.

3:22Niall:And the last job the Chief of Staff has is to clear all of the political advisers out of the building in order that the political advisors of the new team can come in and be ready to greet the new prime minister when they arrive. So I feel like I was the last person from the Theresa May regime to leave the building. And I was wandering away down Whitehall with a guy called James Marshall, who had been the director of the number 10 policy unit. He said it was a little bit like leaving Narnia at the end of one of C.S. Lewis's books, in the sense that you didn't know who was leaving for the last time and who might have a chance at some future point to come back again.

3:55Lord Barwell:And of course, that will have been a function that Morgan McSweeney would not be able to perform for Sir Keir Starmer. Just in terms of his departure, though, how damaging is it to a prime minister, a sitting prime minister, for the right hand man or woman to go in this fashion?

4:10Niall:It can be helpful or damaging. It depends on the circumstances. If the Prime Minister is able to kind of use it as a reset of their government and to win over some of their internal critics, then maybe that can help them make some progress. If you think about the situation in which I became Chief of Staff, my predecessors, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, had shared the job for nearly the first year of Theresa's premiership, and they'd had to resign after the 2017 election went spectacularly wrong. And the change of chief of staff arguably helped Theresa sort of reassert her authority after that election defeat.

4:49Niall:But in another sense, obviously, you're losing some of your most kind of trusted aides and supporters. And I think in terms of Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, this relationship goes back a long way. Morgan McSweeney helped him win the leadership of the Labour Party. He was absolutely instrumental in achieving Labour's landslide victory at the 2024 election. And fairly or unfairly, I think a lot of people feel that Keir Starmer is not really a politician, doesn't have particularly strong kind of political instincts and relied on Morgan very heavily for that. So if in one sense, Morgan going might buy him a bit of time with some of his critics, it also, in another sense, leaves him very vulnerable.

5:32Lord Barwell:Bearing in mind the fact that you say there is no job description for the role of Chief of Staff, I wonder if you might have a stab at it for us. Given the fact that, you know, over the years it struck me that there have been different personalities in the role. You, of course, very different from Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy. You, very different to Dominic Cummings, who, of course, entered into the role with Boris Johnson. Fundamentally, what is it you are there to do?

5:57Niall:I think there's two or three things that are kind of core to it, whoever's done the job. I used to compare it to being a kind of human Swiss army knife, that you'd have to turn your hands to all sorts of things that you might never have expected. One of the most difficult things I had to do during my time in the job, which I never would have anticipated at the start, is you might remember that there was a period in Theresa's premiership where the Me Too scandal kind of affected Westminster. And there were a number of stories about the behaviour of senior politicians. and we started getting a number of phone calls from victims into number 10 the number 10 switchboard had no idea where to refer these calls so they got put through to me so i found myself having these very difficult conversations with people who have been victims of really appalling behavior in some cases and trying to work out what it is that i should be doing to to address the concerns that they were raising with me.

6:59Niall:So it's a good illustration maybe of how the job is just completely unpredictable in terms of what it might throw at you on any given day.

7:06Lord Barwell:So how destabilising or indeed debilitating is it to then lose a chief of staff at a time of crisis, to not have the human equivalent of that little thing that gets stones out of horsey's hooves?

7:18Niall:I think particularly for this prime minister at this time, very destabilising because Morgan was kind of his consigliere, right? He was his political operative and the prime minister now is clearly facing a coordinated effort by some people to try and push him out of the job, and he's lost the person who would normally have led the effort to resist that. So you can make a case for how Morgan's resignation helps him in some ways, but it also weakens him.

7:45Lord Barwell:What does it say, though, about Sir Keir Starmer's abilities as a politician and indeed his judgment? This isn't the first chief of staff he's lost. I mean, you think back to the very start of this Labour administration. Sue Gray brought in from the civil service, touted as a safe pair of hands at the heart of government. Blinken, you'll have missed her political career.

8:03Niall:It doesn't say anything good about the Prime Minister in terms of how the Number 10 operation has worked. I know Sue. I worked with her when I was in Number 10. I don't know Morgan, but people I do know speak very highly of him as a political campaigner. But it seems to me what the Prime Minister did is he started off by appointing somebody who was an experienced civil servant who had no political background at all and no knowledge or history of the Labour Party and relations within the Labour Party. And then when that didn't work, he went to completely the opposite end of the extreme and appointed someone as chief of staff who was, you know, an outstanding political campaigner, but had absolutely zero experience of how the government of the country actually works.

8:44Niall:Whereas I would argue that the ideal candidate for a chief of staff would blend those two things.

8:50Lord Barwell:But of course, it's not just his chief of staff that he's lost. The director of communications on top of that. And today we are learning that the cabinet secretary, the most senior civil servant across government is trying to work out his exit. Gavin, it strikes me that this isn't just a ship that is rudderless. It's a ship that's lost its sails, its rudder and its steering wheel.

9:06Niall:So then the million dollar question, I think, is whether you can repair the ship quickly and get new people in place. I think a lot of people were surprised at the appointment of Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary when it was made. So if it is the case that the prime minister has come to the conclusion that that appointment wasn't right, it's better to correct it than carry on. But you are right that this level of churn in senior roles in Downing Street is pretty unprecedented and speaks to the problems the government's got into. And I think that's what mystifies so many people. I'm obviously not a Labour supporter.

9:40Niall:But I did think that the last government had kind of run out of steam. It was probably right that there was a change. And when Labour won big at the last election, I thought, well, at least with a big majority, we're now going to get some stability in our politics, which has been lacking really ever since the Brexit referendum. And it is quite incredible to me that a government with a majority of that size has been repeatedly forced into so many U-turns. It really speaks to the lack of a clear plan when they came in and the kind of dysfunction in the number 10 operation that we've been talking about.

10:15Lord Barwell:There has been a hypothesis doing the rounds of late. This is the way that politics just is nowadays. That actually the lesson we can learn from practically the last 10 years of politics, including your time inside number 10, is that the way in which the media cycle works has changed dramatically, that social media and indeed an impatient public mean that if politicians don't get things right at the start or consistently, then they've got a very, very limited shelf life. What do you make of that?

10:41Niall:I think there's some truth in that. I definitely think the job has become harder. The country is more polarised. The media is more aggressive. You know, it's a more diverse media. And I think MPs are less inclined to just loyalty to the leader that's kind of got them elected, essentially. So in a number of ways, the job has got a lot harder. But I don't think I would accept your premise that it's become impossible. I think there was a world where Keir Starmer, if he'd got a clear plan of what he was trying to do, and got a good structure around him in number 10 could have led a very different government to the one we've seen for the last year and a half.

11:16Lord Barwell:Of course, it's not just pressure coming from the public that politicians have to be cognizant of in times of crisis. At moments like this, you've got to expect that Sir Keir Starmer and his team are paying very close attention to those who sit around the cabinet table, but also his colleagues within the broader Labour Party itself. I mean, how does Downing Street manage the troops from the centre in a time of crisis?

11:41Niall:You're going to have advisors who are in charge of kind of party relations. You cannot, I think, understate the importance of the Prime Minister spending time with their own MPs. And that is something probably Keir Starmer under did in his initial time as Prime Minister. He's clearly working hard at it now. The second thing I think he's got to do is take responsibility for this Mandelson mistake. It's no good saying Peter Mandelson lied to me, and it's his fault for lying to me, because there was enough information in the public domain before the appointment to suggest that at the bare minimum, he was taking a significant risk.

12:17Niall:And it's no good blaming the vetting process, because if the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff lets the machine know this is the appointment the Prime Minister wants to make, civil servants are not generally going to stand in the way of that unless there's some overriding reason why it shouldn't be done. So he's got to take responsibility for the mistake.

12:36Lord Barwell:Should he sack Wes Streeting?

12:38Niall:He's got to decide whether or not Streeting is going to be loyal to him or not. I mean, I think if I were in number 10 and we were going to have to release all of the communications with Peter Maddelson and a cabinet minister released them himself without even telling number 10 he was going to do it, that's a pretty hostile act. But at the very least, he needs to sit down with West Streeting and have a conversation with him, I would say.

13:00Lord Barwell:The quality of the free political advice you've just offered to Keir Starmer, notwithstanding, isn't it the case that Keir Starmer is now living on borrowed time? That he is toast. It's just a question of when.

13:12Niall:probably yes you know it could come quickly it could come after the gorton by-election it could come after the elections in may i suspect that most of the people that have an eye on succeeding him a little bit like one of those kind of sci-fi films where the hero sort of holds the body of someone that's already been shot in front of them uses them as a kind of human shield they don't want to take over until the elections are out of the way and the bad news is out of the way but it could come quicker than that but you asked me to set out a case of what i would try and do if I was in his shoes to get back onto the front foot.

13:45Niall:And his only chance is if he can reset number 10, make it feel like a very different operation that is not going to repeat the mistakes that have been made and has a clear agenda about how he rebuilds from where he is.

13:57Lord Barwell:Lord Barwell, pleasure to talk to you again. Thanks for your time.

13:59Niall:My pleasure.