Lies and Dirty Tricks: How the Starmer-Mandelson-McSweeney Project Was Always Doomed to Fail
Labour is hemorrhaging support, ex-chief of staff McSweeney is out, and in the most recent blow, the UK's High Court ruled Starmer's proscription of Palestine Action as a terror group was unlawful.
In July 2024, Sir Keir Starmer won a landslide victory as the leader of the UK’s Labour Party. His leadership returned the party to power for the first time in 14 years. His just-resigned chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was feted as a genius. McSweeney – correctly – was identified as the primary driving force and architect of both Starmer’s rise to power, first to win the leadership of the Labour Party, and then the country.
Their moment of triumph was, in fact, the moment it all began to fall apart. Their political project has been a disaster. Starmer is the least popular prime minister since polling began. The party is hemorrhaging support across the country and losing seats in areas it has held for over a hundred years. McSweeney has been forced out, made to carry the can for his role in recommending the appointment of the cartoon villain Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US despite overwhelming public evidence of Mandelson’s profound and long relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And just today, in a major blow, the High Court ruled that the Starmer government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group was unlawful.
It is just one of the many glaring ironies of the Starmer-McSweeney project that their momentary, historically contingent success has created a crisis so profound that it poses an existential threat to the viability of the Labour Party – a 100-year-old institution of working-class power that survived two world wars, and which somehow persisted despite the Tony Blair years of neoliberal capture and imperial misadventure. Starmer and McSweeney have achieved, in less than a decade, what a century of skullduggery on the part of organized capital could not.
Many pundits scratch their heads, confused at how it has come to this. Even dear old Mehdi (hi Mehdi!), while acknowledging Starmer’s woodenness, has pondered why Starmer is less popular than previous disastrous PMs like Liz Truss.
But there is no mystery, no riddle to unpick. The answer is straightforward: this project is hated – and is deeply vulnerable – because of the way it achieved power, and because of the way it has wielded it.