In Office Politics
Politics is about people. All the people. Including the ones you work with and the one who work for your cause. All the people who work for your cause.
At 13.30 yesterday this newsletter was about half written when I had to leave the house. I was having a late lunch with friends in Richmond (on the other side of London) at 15.00 and needed to stop in at my parent’s house where I had left my sunglasses the day before. My plan had been to have the lunch and get home for about 18.30 when I would only need another 90 minutes or so before I could send the email.
As a news addict, I checked WhatsApp as I sat in my parent’s drive and discovered that Sue Gray had resigned. That meant that I would have both the drive across London and back as well as the lunch discussion with lovely friends (almost as obsessed with Labour politics as I am) as well as a quick discussion with my Labour obsessed parents to work out what I thought - which given the topic of today’s newsletter would clearly have to be folded into what I was writing.
So the below contains parts written before the news of Gray’s departure and parts that were not. These are not written in two halves but a changed - but hopefully coherent and consistent whole!
Labour has had a poor start to the management of government. I don’t think it’s unrecoverable but I do think it needs sorting out and quickly. The good news is there are things that can be done and done quite quickly. The bad news is that a lot of the things that I think are needed run quite opposite to the strategy of Starmer and his team. If Starmer is as ruthless as is advertised, then that will need to be put to the service of these changes.
Obviously, Starmer and team agree with this initial statement as there has now been a massive shake up of the number 10 operation. Sue Gray is gone which only leave the one power centre in Morgan McSweeney who now has her old job title of Chief of Staff.
There are - as there always are in the Labour Party - conflicting narratives about what has happened and who is responsible. For some, this is evidence of McSweeney’s Stalinism and Starmer’s boy’s club bullying out a powerful woman. For others this is a move to take grip on the chaos that came from Gray’s lack of political nous.
I honestly don’t know which of those narratives is right - in fact they both could be and I am open to that possibility. I do worry about the (potential) bullying and (definite) briefing being seen to be successful - at least in the short term. If I were McSweeney, I would be too.
Because this now rests and falls on him. We have seen that this government exists in a deeply hostile media environment, in a country that has not shown a depth of love for Starmer and in a party that is seriously nervous about the strategy so far adopted by the party. Mistakes have been made and this is clearly an attempt to draw a line under them.
Reading Anuska Asthana’s Taken as Red it is clear that Starmer feels immediate mistakes very strongly. After a live policy stumble on the radio, he is said to have been incredibly quiet, eventually saying “I hate messing up”. Starmer’s team - quite rightly - got him out of this funk. Focusing on the immediate flubs doesn’t really help anyone. On this occasion Starmer had known what his policy was and had simply misspoken.
But what if the problem isn’t Starmer’s personal delivery of the right strategy? What if the problem is that a strategy that won the election is very quickly atrophying under the different set of pressures that come with being in government? What if the “messing up” that Starmer is doing isn’t so much a mistake as an oversight - a big one - about how to manage the Labour Party at all levels in the longer term as it becomes the vehicle for managing the country?
It is easy to berate ourselves for short term and obvious errors - and I am sure there are plenty in the Starmer operation doing just that over ‘Freebiegate’. That’s probably how and why they made the slightly baffling decision to unilaterally announce they were paying some buy not all of the money back just as the story was dying down (I suspect they also thought that the fact that the post election declarations were due and were trying to get out ahead of that played a role in the decision making).
It is much harder to take the strategy that has successfully propelled Labour into government - and I don’t think there can be any real questioning of that success - and examine where it too needs to be changed. Successful strategies are far harder to change. But they are often what does most need to change. Because circumstances - often those created by that very success - have changed. Not necessarily in bad ways, just changed ones that require a completely different strategy that winning an election from opposition and that requires a new approach from the leadership than that we have seen so far. It will be interesting to see if the changes we see in Number 10 can cascade to the much wider changes needed in the leadership’s approach with two other groups that they are far more dependent on than they might like to think.
There are Labour MPs who have both had their noses put significantly out of joint and really need some careful work from number ten to mend a damaged relationship. These are the people whose job put them in the front line of defending that strategy. They deseve greater understanding of it shared by those implementing it. They need to understand what the long term benefits of this strategy are understood to be and to be given a sense of their part in it.
I have been reading Graham Brady’s rather fascinating book Kingmaker - about his time as Chair of the 1922 backbench committee of Tory MPs. Brady is a politician and his politics are not mine. So when he strays into talking about policy - or casually slagging off the Labour Party - he loses me completely. But he was in a very good place to talk about the ways in which the Tories mismanaged their backbenchers and their relationship (or lack thereof) with them. I was particularly struck by this quote - not about Johnson or Truss who were depicted as simply chaotic - or May - whose differences with Brady over Brexit make his quote about her more partisan - but about David Cameron and George Osborne:
“The fact what they [Cameron and Osborne] had no reserves of goodwill on which to draw. They expected loyalty from colleagues to whom they had shown no loyalty themselves.’
This is from someone who also thought that Nadine Dorries - who he frequently uses the sobriquet “Mad Nads” about - was awful so not simply an irreconcilable but someone who saw where that sense of disconnect between the leadership and the PLP was leading.
I raise this because I am beginning to see similar in the PLP. The quote below is from an anonymous, newly elected MP:
“I was a councillor and a candidate and I’ve been an MP for three months, I’m not a rebel and I have never met Kier. I don’t mind but there are definitely people with fragile egos who will. It’s poor management.”
In a longer discussion with a candidate during the run up to the election, we talked (with significant self-awareness on their part) about the same thing. They said something very interesting.
Those who chose to put themselves forward for election, we agreed, are people with high egos and low self-esteem.
I think that’s right. These are people who have ego enough (and while I know many will read it this way, this is not mean to be a criticism) to put themselves forward essentially saying “I am the best person to represent my areas of all those you can choose”. That does take a certain amount of ego.
But these are also people putting themselves in front of the public asking them to choose them and knowing that a lot of them will actively choose not to. That will cause low self-esteem for anyone and I do think the kinds of people who put themselves through it do tend to this.
(I also think - by the way - this is true of people like myself who write newsletters like this. This description is one I have used about myself to my therapist. I have ego enough to believe I have a voice in the conversation worth hearing and I spend several hours a week crafting something I hope my readers will enjoy and I hope will make some sort of difference to the conversation. I also have the lack of self-esteem to not take the steps that might make that voice more official or more prominent than a self-promoted newsletter. I think that’s probably important to say when I talk about the kind of response needed).
It doesn’t take much to balance a response to this combination that brings a need of recognition and - dammit - a thank you. MPs in the very large PLP are more than aware that not all of them will get government jobs. But they do believe - not unfairly - that they are people who made a contribution to the size of the victory. A small thank you from the Prime Minister would not go either unnoticed or unrewarded with that fist building block of loyalty.
In Sue Gray’s new job of working on the relationship between the UK Government and the nations and Regions I hope that the same approach she has already taken with these people will also be recognised. At the conference Gray was one of the people that Andy Burnham and other regional mayors had gone out their way to praise because they did feel that they were being properly engaged with. Given a lot of these figures represent some of the areas that were on the sharp end of the deliberate decision to trade some of the majorities in safe Labour urban seats for a more diverse electorate across the country - a decision I don’t disagree with, but one that does have consequences and one that was not always delivered in ways that felt proportionate - they will be vital in any work towards not increasing the trend of Labour losses in such places as Birmingham, Yorkshire and parts of London.
I have worked in some very dysfunctional workplaces. A lot of the problems there absolutely stemmed from the top - with poor leadership and infighting among the senior few having severe knock-on effects for the rest of us who felt powerless, voiceless and leaderless. Leadership does not mean kowtowing to all the demands of such wounded workers. But it does mean listening to them and understanding their perspective. Dumb decisions made on a spreadsheet and poorly managed and communicated make workers feel less secure but also less valued.
When those workers are your public face, that also means that they are just that bit less willing to make your positive case and defend your harder decisions. If, as has been the strategy thus far, those hard decisions are going to be front and centre of the establishment of your government, then taking the local deliverers of that message with you will be essential.
My friend Rachel writes a brilliant newsletter called The Art of a Leader – about her role as a leader in the arts. Some will argue that the arts and politics have little in common. I think they could not be more wrong. Both are industries ultimately focussed on people. Both have enormous levels of infrastructure that support the star players. The people who make this infrastructure work are as committed to their cause as those stars but do not get the same levels of public or financial recognition or respect. This needs to be addressed by sensitive managers who understand their worth and the needs of their egos and self-esteem.
These people don’t need as much as using therapeutic terms might imply. But the lack of any attempt at relationship building is self-harming and easily fixed by people with the will to do so. Simply listening to backbenchers – rather than managed speeches to a whole PLP meeting with planted questions – might be annoying as they will have gripes. But those gripes are manageable while they are still gripes. They won’t be if Labour descend back into civil war.
Ultimately, I have never met Morgan McSweeney or Sue Gray and while I am as addicted to gossip as anyone else with my level of interest in politics, I don’t think the gossip - or the individuals is the point. We have all watched the office politics of number 10 play out. There has been a winner and a loser.
That winner - McSweeney - will now have all the focus on him. He’s won the internal tussle and demonstrated that the way to win that is to brief viciously (either personally or through proxies I don’t know) until you do win that battle. He will have to hope that a change is seen - fast. Before other people decide to learn from his example. Because if things in number 10 are not seen to improve quickly and significantly there is now only one place that people will be looking.
I hope he has the self-awareness to address what needs changing from his successful strategy, the humility to find ways to ensure that other voices are listened and responded to and that Labour can become a better happier team.
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