How Morgan McSweeney Got His Big Break

Morgan McSweeney arrives in Downing Street (credit, Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire)

Francis Elliott

elliottengage

Morgan McSweeney was a junior Labour staffer not yet 30 when he arrived at Lambeth council in 2006. He left two years later with a reputation as a winner, a powerful political networker and having won the affection of the woman he was to marry.

McSweeney’s elevation to Keir Starmer’s chief of staff in place of Sue Gray has prompted more myth-making about the 47-year-old Irishman. But those charting his rise from receptionist to No 10 have so far paid little attention to his first big break.

“Morgan definitely had a flirtation with the soft left,” says one former colleague

Contrary to some hagiography McSweeney was not hand-picked by Alan Milburn for combat at the most marginal seats during the 2005 election. Indeed the former health secretary and campaign director says he has no memory of the ginger-haired young staffer at all. 

In truth McSweeney owes his break to Steve Reed, then Lambeth’s council leader now Environment Secretary, who took a chance on him a year later. Reed’s predecessor as Lambeth leader, Jim Dickson, remembers he and others pooled their council allowances to pay for a full-time organiser as part of an effort to win back for Labour what had become a political totem.

Throughout much of the 1980s and into the 1990s Lambeth had become associated with hard-left opposition to and protest against Margaret Thatcher. Figures like Ted Knight were staples of tabloid reporting on the ‘loony left’. Knight and his comrades sometimes made it easy for the right-wing press. They declared Lambeth “a nuclear free zone” and sang the Red Flag in defiance of their disqualification for failing to set rates. The council leader said of the police response to the Brixton riots that  “Lambeth is now under an army of occupation”.

By the mid-90s, Lambeth had emerged as the vanguard of a modernised party, thoroughly purged of ‘the Trots’: Tony Blair called it “more New Labour than New Labour”. Among its stars were Simon Stevens, who was later to become NHS England chief executive.

But Labour lost control of Lambeth in 2002 in a humiliation for the Blairite poster-child that Reed and others were determined to reverse.  Just how far McSweeney was responsible for winning back the key council and for forging a new politics that anticipated the Jeremy Corbyn era and its aftermath is disputed but his political opponents noticed his influence immediately. Peter Truesdale, the Liberal Democrat leader of the council at the time, recalls rumours that the young organiser had been a promised a bonus if Labour won. Dickson says he has no recollection of a bonus but says McSweeney did insert some discipline into the operation. He put Labour councillors on ‘contracts’ setting targets for voter engagement and calling out those that failed to hit them.

“It was very tightly targeted, very disciplined,” agrees Truesdale who says the Lib Dem/Conservative coalition he led was, in any case, tiring and suffered from being incumbents. McSweeney and Reed learned from the Liberal Democrats how to exploit voters’ hyper-local concerns like the state of repairs on council estates. Like the Lib Dems the young organiser went close to the edge. “I remember one campaign saying we were closing Clapham swimming baths,” Truesdale says. “They knew full well it was only because the baths were being refurbished.”

Labour won in Lambeth in 2006 against a trend that saw the party suffer its worst set of results in the capital since 1968. While the Tories racked up successes elsewhere in London and minor parties like Respect and BNP fed on disaffection, Reed and Labour won back the critical prize. Others involved at the time dispute the claim that this impressive victory was mostly down to McSweeney. “Was it bollocks,” says a former colleague. “He was a solid, competent organiser – but a cog in the machine rather than the engineer.”

Reed, however, was impressed and kept McSweeney on as part of his team as new council leader. Dickson says the young aide started to spread his wings and establish his own identity and network at this time. “I remember going to dinner parties and being a bit surprised to see Morgan. He was clearly getting around the local CLPs [Constituency Labour Parties] a bit.”

It was, recalls a friend, a young and sociable scene. Activities included five-a-side football, at which McSweeney was “memorably bad”, as well as numerous romantic entanglements. “There were a lot of relationships.” Yet McSweeney had eyes only for one woman – a Scottish actress turned Stockwell councillor. His pursuit of Imogen Walker, who was elected as Labour MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley in July, was characteristically single-minded. Walker, whose credits included Taggart and as Linda Lovelace in a 2002 Channel 4 documentary about the porn star, finally fell to the McSweeney siege. The two later married and have a young child. 

In the town hall, meanwhile, Reed and McSweeney were developing a political identity that anticipates today’s Labour politics with the concept of ‘co-operative councils’.  Just as he did to help Starmer win the leadership vacated by Corbyn a decade later, McSweeney helped his then boss navigate a path that sought to meet the desire for a more radical offer without abandoning economic orthodoxy.

When the plum parliamentary seat of Streatham became available in 2008, however, Reed learned a hard lesson about the limits of such positioning. He was defeated by the then rising star Chuka Umunna whose allies portrayed the council leader as a Blairite throw-back. “I think that showed sometimes in politics you can’t beat an idea. The idea that Chuka was ‘Britain’s Obama’ was clearly nuts but we couldn’t beat it,” says a Reed ally. (Umunna was later to leave Labour and co-found The Independent Group, later Change UK.)

McSweeney, crucially for his reputation as a serial winner, hadn’t been in charge of Reed’s Streatham campaign but was involved in his friend’s subsequent and successful bid to win the selection for Croydon North seat, together with Walker who coached him on projection.

By the time of the Streatham vote McSweeney was working with a new council leader, Liam Smith at Barking. It was another London borough that deepened his understanding of what Labour needed to do keep its working-class voters in the face of challenges like migration. Both in Lambeth and then in Barking, McSweeney was politically sinuous. He drew close to figures like Jon Cruddas, former MP for Dagenham and Rainham, and others in the Blue Labour movement but also volunteered on Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign.

McSweeney is sometimes portrayed as a factional “Trot-hunter”, determined to root out every last vestige of what was once called the Corbyn ‘project’. But this is to misunderstand his politics – and his pragmatism. “Morgan definitely had a flirtation with the soft left,” says one former colleague. From at least his Lambeth apprenticeship he has also shown a strong interest in seeking to root Labour in the concerns of its traditional voters. One striking difference between Starmer and Blair is the current Prime Minister’s willingness to use class in framing Labour’s mission.

While the extent of McSweeney’s role in winning back Lambeth for Labour and later holding off the BNP in Barking may be disputed, there is no doubt that his experiences in London politics proved invaluable in crafting Starmer’s path to power through the party’s factional jungle. 

This story is a collaboration with The Londoner, a new publication covering the capital, launching this week.

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