'A tale of fixes and factionalism': Jon Cruddas reviews 'Get In'

23 July 2024: Prime Minister Keir Starmer outside No 10 | Image by: SOPA Images Limited / Alamy Stock Photo

Jon Cruddas

@JonCruddas_1

This is an extraordinary story, brilliantly told. The authors erect a stage where numerous sharp-elbowed advisers, often consumed by hubris, re-enact their personal contribution to Labour’s landslide. It’s a drama played out through leaked WhatsApp conversations, texts and emails that detail internal carve-ups, drive-by shootings, fixes, fiddling and factionalism; one awash with personal animus and vicious vendettas. A story of relentless caucusing and clandestine meetings, one full of nasty press briefings and fuelled throughout by duplicity and doublespeak.

At one level, it’s great fun. But as you rattle through, it quickly becomes apparent that amongst the many immediate casualties are the politicians themselves; barely tolerated bit part players, marginal figures in Labour’s ascent, including the Prime Minister himself. Why politicians tolerate such diminishment by their own staff is baffling.

It is certainly a revealing book, although not in the way the advisers might once have assumed. Eight months on, with a government seemingly adrift and tanking in the polls, this book indicts those responsible for Labour’s sadly predictable decline.

Journalists love this book. Quite rightly. It is no small achievement

So, in their follow-up tome, the authors might invite the same interviewees – before they drift off into corporate lobbying – to accept some responsibility for Labour’s post-election cratering and the wreckage left behind. I doubt it, though – the fall guys will be the politicians.

Journalists love this book. Quite rightly. It is no small achievement. Through sweating their sources Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund have popped the bonnet of a political party and exposed what lies beneath – much of it shoddy and ethically questionable. It dissects a party running on empty while quite brilliantly gaming the electoral system. As we experience the collateral damage of such a strategy, we might enquire what was it all for.

This “Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer” is bereft when it comes to questions of ideological renewal. Policy barely features; only discussed when being ditched. Such omissions unconsciously provide a tragic undertow to the book. In exposing the hidden wiring, we find a party unable to answer the “why us?” question, the title of a depressing Chapter 16. It begins with the positive case for Keir Starmer’s ‘missions’, and the thoughtful thinking behind them, yet after a couple of pages shifts into a story of press briefings against the very architects of this approach before descending into a tale of discarded policies and concluding that “no principle was too sacred for Starmer”. To repeat, how any of this helps the Prime Minister and the government is beyond me.

The Attlee, Wilson and Blair administrations were each foreshadowed by years of intense intellectual revisionism; the heavy lifting required to chisel out the enduring achievements of each successful Labour government. Yet our authors mention more than once how Starmer declared there is “no such thing as Starmerism and never will be”. 

On the Downing Street steps he said his administration will be “unburdened by doctrine”. This approach comes with a deep downside. Without a belief system, how will this government resist the forces literally upending western liberal democracy? 

The book is a great Beltway tale – yet one played out as Rome burns.

Jon Cruddas is former Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham

Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer
By: Patrick Maguire & Gabriel Pogrund
Publisher: Bodley Head

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