Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff, has admitted that Labour failed to properly prepare for government in the run-up to its landslide general election win, saying the party did not give enough thought to how the world had changed since it last took power in the 1990s. In his first broadcast interview, McSweeney told the BBC's Nick Robinson on the Political Thinking podcast: "We didn't prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to. We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government." He added that the party should have been "way more optimistic" in its first few months, and had been unable to deliver results quickly enough to satisfy voters. "You have to deliver quite quickly for people, for them to see the change quickly. And I think we didn't come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that," he said.
McSweeney, who ran Labour's successful 2024 election campaign and followed Starmer into Downing Street as head of political strategy, said he was "still processing" the prime minister's dramatic downfall just two years after leading the party back into office. He recalled that during planning meetings in early 2024, "I did start to realise that we hadn't done enough to prepare for government". He blamed the entire party, not any individual, saying: "When I say we weren't prepared, I really do mean the Labour Party more generally." The party had expected to need at least two elections to return to power after its crushing 2019 defeat, and "quite a lot of people" thought it needed a plan for defeat rather than victory in 2024.
“Morgan McSweeney admits Labour failed to prepare for government and cut winter fuel allowance too low.”
Pressed by Robinson, McSweeney admitted that the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners in the first month of government was a politically damaging mistake. "It was means tested at too low a level," he said. "I think it was one of those early mistakes and it defined the government in a way that really did us a lot of damage." The admission comes as McSweeney seeks to close what he called "the old chapter" of his life. He explained that he wanted to do the interview to show his true self after years of what he felt was inaccurate media coverage. "When I left and I started to meet new people … repeatedly people were saying to me you're not who I expected you to be," he said. "I need to move onto a new chapter in my life and to do that I need to close the old one."
McSweeney, who resigned earlier this year over his role in Peter Mandelson's appointment as UK ambassador to the US, acknowledged: "I failed in my job, I failed in my duty" regarding that appointment, but insisted: "I didn't make that decision." He emphasised his role in convincing the party it could win power within one term, but said one of his "main lessons" from his time in No 10 is that "preparation is far more important to strategy when it comes to just about any aspect of politics."