ALBA - Unofficial Forum

I apologise for opening this piece with a profanity since it will give you an incorrect sense of what it’s going to be like; it is not a diatribe. It’s just that the polite English vocabulary I need to use to be acceptable in politics feels incapable of capturing how patently obviously piss-poor Morgan McSweeney is at this job.

In case you don’t know me, I’m a professional political strategist. After a short career as a journalist I was press officer for the then-leader of the Scottish Labour Party in 1995-96, based in Westminster. Since then I’ve worked in political strategy in the environmental movement, two think tanks and, for 12 years, I was head of political strategy for all of Scotland’s universities.

I tell you this because, despite the fact that Morgan McSweeney lives only 12 miles from me (as a result of having rigged the local candidate selection so that his wife is the MP in my neighbouring constituency), I’ve never met him. The point is that I don’t need to meet him – in the way that I assume an off-duty chef eating out doesn’t need to meet the chef of where he is eating to know if he’s any good or not.

I’ll need to compress this – if I was systematically to go through McSweeney’s actions and their outcomes it would form a six-month postgrad course on how not to do your job if you ever get a gig as a political strategist.

Two other quick caveats. First, since Keir Starmer is clearly McSweeney’s proxy rather than McSweeney being Starmer’s adviser, and since in any case I would be amazed if every strategic decision coming from Cabinet isn’t run past him, I’m assuming he is at the very least comfortable with all Labour’s positioning and, much more likely, the author of all of it.

Second, if you don’t know the following you should; political strategy is the forlorn and quite silly belief that you can ‘control the future’. You can’t. You can give yourself the best possible chance of being able to deal with whatever happens in the future, but you’re never controlling it. To use a football metaphor, all you can do is put the ball in the box and then respond to what comes next.

So the primary skillset of a professional PR guy is to persuade you that, whatever happened, it’s down to their genius. If the car makes it to the destination, it’s because you’re the best mechanic ever. If one of the wheels falls off, you make clear that it is only because of your intervention that all the wheels didn’t fall off. It’s silly, but it is what we all do. We don’t ever know what ‘the other future’ was going to be, but we claim to.

Thus I’ve spent about five years reading in the Guardian how McSweeney is a ‘genius’. While I take that kind of talk with a pinch of salt, I didn’t have a reason to disbelieve it until about a year before the General Election. I don’t need to agree with your politics to recognise you have some skill – I rated Dominic Cummings pretty highly. But you’ve really got to deliver to sustain such a reputation.

Right, that all out the way, how do I know he’s bad? Oh, count the ways. But let me lead with this; when I’m telling someone about a new administration I’ll tell them two things. First, watch for the administration’s first relaunch. You get only one of these in power that has a chance of being meaningful. Second, watch for the first time they claim a relaunch isn’t a relaunch.

The former of those always marks the point at which an administration has lost control of its immediate environment. At that point you must work out why you’ve lost control, and your relaunch better be mostly about regaining control through direction change. If you hold a relaunch and then do the same thing you were doing before, you’ve blown your one chance.

After that you have to say ‘it’s not a relaunch’. That’s the point at which you know the last relaunch didn’t work, or that you realise you’re in trouble but don’t have a coherent relaunch in you. Oh, also, a relaunch probably shouldn’t be the opposite of the previous strategy or it isn’t a relaunch, it’s an admission of guilt.

Once you get past the ‘it’s not a relaunch’ stage, mostly all that remains is ambient noise. No-one ever turned around a crisis by talking about it, and so if your relaunch is to persuade the media that you have a plan and you don’t have a plan, you’re going to be doing it again really soon, and they’re not going to listen. This is really basic stuff.

Now you’re well on your road to the terminus, the end of the line. You’ll know you’re there because you’re own people are no longer willing to entertain your nonsense and so you utter the phrase ‘the problem is we’ve failed to communicate our success’.

That’s it. End of game. If you’ve not communicated your success, you don’t have any. It’s got to be show and tell, and if they’re not working in cohort you have no success. A successful strategy shows itself and tells its own story, because telling the story is part of the strategy – but not the only part.

The time-cycle of all this is usually pretty consistent. If you’re running a government you definitely don’t want a first relaunch before some point towards the second half of a first political term and hopefully you get into the first half of your second term. If you’re claiming ‘it’s not a relaunch’ inside your first term you should be getting very nervous. If you ever do have to find yourself saying ‘we’ve not communicated our success’, pray it is not earlier than the end of your second term.

McSweeney has taken Labour through all this in about nine or ten months, and it’s all been enacted with ham-fisted amateurism. The disaster kicks off when Starmer is standing next to roses telling us we’re all doomed for five or ten years, and then quickly becomes farce a few weeks later when Rachel Reeves is doing weird, forced smiles at her party conference while telling everyone how great the future is.

I’d have advised against the former – don’t say ‘change’ to win and then say ‘perhaps one day’ immediately you do. I’d have shot someone for the latter. If you absolutely have to disown a strategy you launched very loudly a few weeks earlier, think it through. If you’ve thought it through and concluded you can smile the problem away, you are frankly a serious problem.

I think it was within the first six or seven months in office I read the words ‘Labour is claiming it isn’t a relaunch, but…’. Thing is, that doesn’t even include the relaunches that they clearly tried out but didn’t work. I think I counted about seven significant narrative swings before Easter.

Let me tell you the stupidest of them. There are two things you need to get about the McSweeny project, both of which are simultaneously fundamental and stupid. Thing one was the belief that the public wanted a boring manager to be prime minister. No, the London political chattering classes wanted a boring manager, everyone else wanted someone who would boldly change Britain’s direction.

The second was when I knew McSweeney was bad. He created an imaginary target audience designed only to discipline the party during his anti-Corbyn coup, a fake target audience best defined as ‘anyone who voted Labour but really, really hates Jeremy Corbyn’.

So far so obvious. What he was really doing was running an internal ideological coup in the Labour Party by positing a ‘scare voter’, an external profile designed to discipline the party. But he was also trying to triangulate the London chattering classes who were convinced they needed an anti-Boris (i.e. a technocrat rather than a populist). And Starmer was the best proxy he could find and he is dull. The default outcome of all of this was the creation of one of the weirdest hybrid voter profiles I’ve ever seen – based on which he then proceeded to run an election strategy.

This means (deep breath), his plan was to target people with rightwing reactionary social views but who think of themselves as Labour by telling them everything will change because Labour is installing a technocrat in government. He might as well have created a strategy based on the saddest happy meat-eating vegetarians.

There are absolutely acres of political strategy analysis right now and they all say that McSweeney’s imaginary voter is an unreconcilable mess. You can reconcile ‘reactionary social views but left economic views’, and you can reconcile ‘left economic views with technocratic government’, but you most certainly can’t reconcile them all. It’s impossible.

So you’re pitching your case to someone who isn’t there solely on the basis that (a) you hate Jeremy Corbyn and (b) Starmer was the only stooge daft enough to be be your puppet and he’s really boring.

The good news is that it worked brilliant. Every single imaginary voter who doesn’t exist for whom this strategy was designed did indeed vote Labour. That’s why, in England and Wales in 2024, Labour got precisely the same vote it did under Corbyn in 2019. Yet the fact that Corbyn in 2019 was the worst it could ever get was the ur text of McSweeneyism.

I don’t have space (or frankly enough of your patience) to keep going with this. Who on god’s green earth thought that getting Starmer to write articles about how much he hates bats and newts was a strategy and not an admission of defeat? How anyone can keep a straight face being briefed by McSweeney?

(On the latter, the following happened over the course of about four weeks. ‘Don’t judge us on toadying to Trump, judge us on escaping from tariffs’. ‘Don’t judge us now we have been tariffed, it’s all about the negotiations’. ‘Don’t judge us on the negotiations, Trump is dead set, but we’re in the priority lane for getting sweeteners’. ‘Don’t judge us on speed of process now we’re in the slow lane, it’s about getting it right’. If I was responsible for that I would grab my ceremonial kimono and katana and disembowel myself in disgrace.)

But before I finish I want to highlight the key moment of ‘this isn’t bad luck, this isn’t the conditions, this isn’t the opposition, this is us’. You cannot cannot cannot reverse a story. The trade negotiations are a case study, but those are peripheral. You can never reverse your core story. Finesse it or adjust it or recalibrate a bit, sure. Reverse it? Can’t be done.

So if you’ve spent five years saying ‘calm, cool, collected administrator who we’ve dubbed Mr Rules’ and dismissing everyone who said ‘you need to be more disruptive because, you know, overwhelming evidence’, you can’t credibly set up a Guardian front page saying new research shows that only disruption is working so now you’re a disruptor.

And that is because (a) you can’t get people to absorb the opposite of a story you’ve been telling for five years fast enough, (b) ‘technocratic change disruptor’ is utterly ludicrous on its own terms and (c) you must be totally shite at your job because this isn’t new research, it’s the whole basis of virtually every analysis of all political strategy since about 2016 and if you don’t know it you should be fired.

I’m way over length and I can feel myself just getting going. Every time I think about this utterly disastrous ten-month cascade of unrelenting fuckwittery I come up with another half dozen examples to prove categorically that Morgan McSweeney gives incompetence a bad name.

But then I remind myself I don’t have to. Go and look at the numbers. They don’t lie. Static electoral vote since ‘the worst Labour defeat ever’ despite the former being against a resurgent Johnstone and the latter being against a dead-on-his-feet Sunak; fastest collapse in confidence in a government I’ve ever seen; fastest collapse in voter approval of a new political leader I’ve ever seen; fastest time to first relaunch in political history; not even a year before the first electoral shitshow. It’s actually quite impressive.

Morgan McSweeney is patently incapable of performing adequately in this job. This isn’t a debating point, it’s a self-evident reality. As best I can tell he is a one-trick pony like Trump is a one-trick pony, a knuckle-dragging thug who ran a campaign of lies and corruption to break the Labour Party and remake it in his image. That isn’t a criticism by the way, at least not in professional terms. He pulled it off.

It’s just that the conditions you needed for that were (a) complacent liberal journalists who hate your predecessor a really lot (b) a demoralised and desperate party, (c) a disjointed opposition and (d) dark money to fund the whole thing. Do you know what other occasion that set of conditions is useful for? None. None at all. They are of no use to you for anything else.

So let’s end with some political reality here. Starmer will not recover and is now a liability; if I was the Daily Star I’d be investing in a new lettuce. If the a new leader is managed by the team who ran this mess so far, it’ll fail again. Either by analysis of the strategy or analysis of the outcomes of the strategy, whoever is creating that strategy for the British Labour Party is failing terrible.

That’s Morgan McSweeney. And he’s clearly shite.