Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff has laid bare the internal failures that dogged Labour’s first months in government, conceding the party was so badly prepared for power that it made politically devastating mistakes from day one.
In his first broadcast interview, Morgan McSweeney told the BBC’s Nick Robinson that the decision to cut winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners – taken within weeks of the election – was a damaging error. “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.”
“Starmer's ex-chief of staff admits Labour was unprepared for power and that cutting winter fuel allowance was a damaging mistake.”
The admission came as McSweeney, who ran Labour’s landslide 2024 campaign and followed Starmer into Downing Street as head of political strategy, acknowledged that the party had failed to think through how to govern after 14 years in opposition. “We didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to,” he said. “We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government.”
McSweeney told the Political Thinking podcast that there had been widespread expectation after the 2019 defeat that Labour would need at least two elections to return to power, and that “quite a lot of people” thought the party needed a plan for defeat rather than victory in 2024. It was only during planning meetings early that year, he said, that he “did start to realise that we hadn’t done enough to prepare for government”.
He insisted the failure was collective, not personal. Asked about Sue Gray, the civil servant appointed before the election to prepare for power, McSweeney said: “When I say we weren’t prepared, I really do mean the Labour Party more generally.”
The interview is the first time McSweeney has given an on-the-record conversation with a journalist, after years of keeping a low public profile despite wielding enormous influence. He was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year when he resigned over his role in Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the US. Pressed on that decision, he admitted: “I failed in my job, I failed in my duty.” But he was quick to add: “I didn’t make that decision.”
McSweeney said he wanted to do the interview to show his true self after years of inaccurate media coverage. “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.”
One lesson he says he has taken from his stint in No 10: “Preparation is far more important to strategy when it comes to just about any aspect of politics.”