Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, does not immediately display the demeanour of a disruptor. He speaks softly, picks his phrases with care, and cultivates an unassuming image. But underneath the sober blue suit are the scars of a streetfighter. As a young man, McSweeney came to political maturity fighting the hard left in Lambeth and the far right in Dagenham, winning back working-class voters to a Labour party that had forgotten its roots. He went on to secure last year’s landslide, gifting Keir Starmer a majority large enough to remake Britain.
His style as an insurgent owes something to his background. He grew up in Ireland with parents who were activists in Fine Gael, the party that venerates the IRA mastermind Michael Collins as its founder. His paternal grandfather served in the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, winning a medal for his service. In many ways, McSweeney is Collins’s spiritual successor: a believer in basing strategy on hard intelligence work, a fighter ruthless in identifying the real enemy, an organiser conscious of how internal rivalries threaten success – and a realist scornful of soft-headedness.
For McSweeney the insurgent, Labour’s first six months in office proved a frustrating time. Many of his insights – those that made Labour electable – appeared to have been overlooked by the very ministers he propelled into power. Instead of concentrating on crime, migration and the cost of living, the government appeared captured by Treasury mandarins and soft-left lobbies. They cut fuel payments for pensioners, raised taxes in a way which depresses wages, pursued changes to education policy designed by the teachers’ unions, and struck poses on the international stage which had more to do with decolonisation than defending the national interest.
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