Keir Starmer and the Purge That Devoured Its Architects
The same shameless tactics that Starmer used to purge the UK's left are now destroying his project from within.
This post was originally published by Grace Blakeley on her Substack. Zeteo is republishing it with her permission.
The departure of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, over the Peter Mandelson scandal exposes Starmerism for what it is: a political project built on deception, created by people guided only by an insatiable desire for power and a belief in their own invulnerability.
Since its inception, Starmerism has been presented as a boring, bureaucratic project – a necessary return to ‘sensible, grown-up politics’ after a period of irresponsible populism under Jeremy Corbyn. The suspension of members, the proscription of organizations, the purges, the disciplinary innovations, the legal threats, the message control – these were all measures designed to return the party to “electability.”
But Starmerism was never about winning elections. It was about destroying the Labour left – and with it, any hope of a socialist government running one of the world’s largest economies. But the tactics required for the success of such a project – stealth, deception, ruthlessness – are now helping to bring about its collapse.
The Strategy
After 2017, the Labour right confronted a problem. They needed to get rid of Corbyn and replace him with a leader who could dismantle the party’s internal democracy and destroy the Labour left forever. But they had to stage their coup from within the Party’s democratic structures. In other words, they needed members to vote for their anti-member project.
Thanks to the disastrous 2019 election result, no one questioned the need for a new leader. But Corbyn’s policies – public ownership, stronger labour rights, higher taxes on wealth – remained extremely popular; not just among members, but across much of the electorate. So, the Labour right developed a plan to present their candidate as the successor to Corbyn’s democratic socialist project – as the “Corbynism without Corbyn” candidate.
Starmer was the natural choice. He had been close enough to Corbyn to give him legitimacy among much of the left, without ever really laying his ideological cards on the table. His “Corbynism without Corbyn” platform was epitomised by his 10 pledges, from promoting public ownership, to raising taxes on the rich, to investing in a Green New Deal.
The Team
Starmer clearly never planned to follow through on these pledges – they were convenient lies told to win the Labour leadership after the largest expansion of the Party’s left wing in modern history. In this sense, Starmer’s team required a very specific set of skills, like stealth, ruthlessness, and intimidation. They needed to be proficient bureaucrats, capable of leveraging party rules to their advantage – not skilled electoral operators.
Starmerism was built by deeply cynical, power-hungry people who would happily lie, cheat, and dissemble to get their way. Few figures embodied that tradition better than Peter Mandelson, long nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness.” This nickname stuck because he understood something fundamental about British politics: you don’t need to be popular to be powerful - only the ruthlessness and guile to destroy your enemies.
As soon as Starmer took power, he immediately set about doing just this. Starmer’s team managed selections, destroyed internal democratic processes, and invented reasons to purge the left. They defined an entire ideological tradition – the tradition upon which the Labour Party was founded – as illegitimate within the Party.
The speed and comprehensiveness of their success would have been impressive, were it not for the fact that they were playing politics on easy mode. The British establishment fully backed Starmer’s agenda. Moves that would have been criticised as ‘Stalinist’ in any other context were welcomed by the British press. And the donations just kept flooding in. For a while, Starmerism seemed unstoppable.
The Pride Before the Fall
The latitude given to the destroyers of the left bred a dangerous complacency among Starmer’s top team. They came to believe that they were completely untouchable. And why wouldn’t they? For years, they had been able to lie, cheat, and deceive without consequence. They marginalised their critics, protected their allies, and managed the media with ease.
All this success made Starmer’s team forget the underlying fragility of their project. Starmerism derived coherence from its war on the Labour left. Once the enemy had been defeated, his coalition lost its unifying purpose. What remained was not a movement but a managerial network – one held together by a shared history of deceit, rather than any ideological coherence.
With their main enemy defeated, Starmer’s acolytes began scrambling for status. Figures who had once been protected suddenly became expendable. Controversies that had been covered up were deployed opportunistically to take down former allies. In other words, Starmer’s team began using their well-worn anti-left tactics against each other – each believing that they would never be the victim.
The Collapse
In the end, Mandelson and McSweeney were ruined by their own hubris. Mandelson’s Jeffrey Epstein links were common knowledge when he was appointed – but McSweeney still advised Starmer to go ahead with it, because his experience had led him to conclude that supporters of Starmer were beyond reproach.
Having consummately destroyed their internal enemies, these people truly believed that they were invincible. They didn’t anticipate that, with the Labour left destroyed, they would outlive their usefulness. And once they outlived their usefulness, the skeletons they had been hiding for decades – with the full permission of the entire political and media establishment – were suddenly revealed for all to see.
Grace Blakeley is the author of Zeteo’s ‘Billions’ column. She is a British economic commentator and the author of the book Vulture Capitalism. Subscribe to her Substack for more of her writing, and make sure you’re signed up to receive her Zeteo column, ‘Billions.’
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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