Labour had not done enough to prepare for government before its landslide 2024 election victory, Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff has admitted in his first media interview. Morgan McSweeney, who ran the party’s successful campaign and followed Starmer into No 10 as head of political strategy, told the BBC’s Nick Robinson that the party was caught off guard by the speed of its return to power. “We didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to,” McSweeney said on the Political Thinking podcast. “We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government. I think we didn’t have enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant, how to prepare for it, what that meant for the state.”
McSweeney, who has kept a low public profile until now, recalled that during planning meetings in early 2024 he began to realise the scale of the problem. “At the start of 2024… I did start to realise that we hadn’t done enough to prepare for government and we got exposed for that I think early,” he said. He added that the party had expected to need two elections to return after the 2019 defeat and that “quite a lot of people” thought it needed a plan for defeat rather than victory. “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.”
“Morgan McSweeney admits Labour failed to prepare for government and that cutting winter fuel allowance was a damaging mistake.”
Pressed on the role of top civil servant Sue Gray, who was appointed before the election to lead preparations, McSweeney insisted the failure was collective. “When I say we weren’t prepared, I really do mean the Labour Party more generally,” he said. He also admitted that cutting winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners in the first month was a politically damaging mistake. “It was means tested at too low a level. 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.”
McSweeney, who resigned earlier this year over his role in Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the US, said he was “still processing” Starmer’s dramatic downfall just two years after taking office. He conceded he “failed in my duty” regarding the Mandelson appointment but noted, “I didn’t make that decision.” He said he gave the interview to counter inaccurate media portrayals. “Repeatedly people were saying to me you’re not who I expected you to be,” McSweeney said. “I need to move onto a new chapter in my life and to do that I need to close the old one.”