ABC...DE?

'Always Be Campaigning' is all very well as far as it goes. But not when it gets in the way of Delivering Effectively on Labour's values and mission.

I’ve just finished reading Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. It’s a well-written and fascinating book. Though I think it rather wears its sources on its sleeve. By which I mean while being an accurate and engrossing account of very real events, it is also the chronicle of a point of view. The stories – hair-raising at times, mundane at others – build a narrative of the leadership of – well – Morgan McSweeney.

Of course, ostensibly it’s about Keir Starmer, but it’s overtly not that book. It’s about the germination and fruition of McSweeney’s plan to change the Labour Party in order to get it elected in service of the kinds of voters it once took far too much for granted. Keir Starmer being the settled-upon candidate is almost incidental to this narrative.

Unlike many of my readers, I have a certain amount of sympathy with McSweeney’s viewpoint. His diagnosis of the dangerous tunnel vision of a certain way of doing leftism is something I have long shared. The party did need to change. It needed to change a lot. And it needed to change to win.

I am also not averse to a bit of ruthlessness in pursuit of victory. In particular a ruthless focus on the voters over the membership. It is my belief – one I think I share with McSweeney – that it is the voters that matter. That in a democracy you have to meet the voters at least halfway. That to be virtuous and powerless is not the role of a political party. Nor should it ever be satisfied with that.

Throughout the book, there are reasons – good reasons – why McSweeney has been disappointed, disturbed and outright disgusted by the behaviour of the left. Both in the policies they sought to prioritise that have little to do with people’s everyday lives and in the practices they either pursued or ignored. From the child abuse scandals of Lambeth to the Antisemitism crisis, the things that turned McSweeney’s stomach turned mine too.

So in many ways, I am comfortable with much of what was done to bring the Labour Party back into the service of the British people. But one thing that jumps out at me in reading this is that at times McSweeney is just as fanatically obsessed with the hard left as the hard left are with Blairites. And just as likely to gaze inward at the party as those he criticises for doing the same. He has his own brittle tunnel vision which – as I argued during some of the events chronicled in the book – often causes at least as much, if not more damage to the party than that he is seeking to expunge.

All too often the project behind Starmer – and McSweeney in particular – seem not to see this. That poor culture and poor behaviour are poor in and of themselves – not excusable when it’s ‘one of us’ exhibiting it. And the pile of people who are poorly treated or cast aside in this book should worry McSweeney. Not least because somewhere out there will be someone on the other side who will be doing just as he did during the Corbyn years, sitting on the sidelines and plotting what comes next. And if it is as bloody and as brutal – well what argument could be stood up here against that? And so the wheel will turn and the players will churn and the culture will not change at all.

It is also not enough to only seek power without an end. Power is a tool not a goal. So, while ‘protest or power’ is a question I am all too happy to answer by choosing the latter, it is a choice I make between methods – not ends.

So, if the critique I share with McSweeney is that I believe that seeking power is thebetter tool for social change than protest, this book has made me wonder where we diverge in our ambitions.

Having just read this book that runs to about 500 pages, I simply could not tell you what McSweeney believes in. I know what he doesn’t believe. I know what he finds abhorrent. But I have literally no idea what he wants to do with the power he so accurately and purposefully sought. Genuinely none – and I promise I was looking. Because I want Labour to have power and purpose.

I don’t believe everyone working in and around politics has to be a policy wonk. God, I’m not. I understand policy – I work in think tanks comms. But I understand policy like a journalist. I describe my work as translating wonk to human. I can talk about policy on an accessible level. So when I go to parties with people who aren’t in the Party I can explain what I do and what I am working on without baffling people by going deep into the minutia.

If you’re going to have a mission-led government, you have to have a mission. Again, what the policies are that help you achieve that are secondary. Too many in the Labour Party get wedded to concepts rather than outcomes and good politics avoids that (again I think this might be something McSweeney and I agree on). For example, I don’t believe nationalisation is an end in itself. It’s one way of ensuring the national wealth is more fairly shared between citizens. If you find another way to do that – fine. It is the goal that matters. One can be pathway neutral if the destination is clear.

Nowhere in this book do I find an articulation of that destination. Nowhere is there an explanation of what it’s all for beyond winning elections. But – even in politics – winning elections is not everything. Power with a purpose. OK – tell me the purpose.

I may well be wrong about what I am about to type. I don’t believe what I am about to predict to be a given. There is every chance that it won’t come to pass.

But it strikes me that it might be perfectly possible that in a few years time, this book comes to be read less as an excavation of the strategy that – undoubtedly – led to Labour’s stonking electoral success and an examination of the people who delivered it, but instead as a cautionary tale.

There’s a lot of hubris demonstrated on the pages of this book. There are people quoted – anonymous sure, but I bet they’re detectable, not least because part of their pride is in how small they kept their circle. They are not always quoted being particularly flattering about Keir Starmer. If you or I gave a quote to a journalist comparing our boss to someone sat at the front of the DLR thinking that we were the driver, I am not sure you or I would expect to last very long in our jobs.

One of the narratives most pushed about Keir Starmer is how ruthless he is. When he reads this book, he may find the need to demonstrate that again.

And if he doesn’t, that is not the only way this could end badly for McSweeney. He’s Chief of Staff now. If this book is to be believed, he’s the most powerful person in Number 10. Including the Prime Minister. And things haven’t been going brilliantly. McSweeney is – by all accounts – a superlative campaigner. And yes, Labour will want to win elections again and ABC (Always Be Campaigning) is not wrong in an age of 24/7 social media.

But there is also DE (Deliver Effectively). If Labour cannot get beyond the pure campaigning mindset of opposition; If Labour cannot articulate a vision of the journey they want to take this country on; If Labour cannot deliver and show themselves to be delivering on that journey all the internal strongarming in the world won’t help them.

I know plenty of people in the Labour Party who would like to see Morgan McSweeney fail. I am not one of them. Because if he does, the Labour Party fails the British people. Forget factional infighting. Forget which team you’re on. Forget the noise. Failing the people we are elected to serve – be it the children of Lambeth, the working classes of Dagenham or all the people of the UK – that is the most unforgivable sin in politics. It should not be hoped for by anyone.

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