In his first broadcast interview, Morgan McSweeney, the former chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, has conceded that Labour failed to properly prepare for government before its landslide general election win in 2024. Speaking to Nick Robinson on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, McSweeney said he realised as early as the start of 2024 that the party had not done enough. “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, who ran Labour’s successful election campaign and served as Starmer’s head of political strategy before becoming chief of staff three months into office, admitted 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,” he said. “I think we didn’t come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that.” He added that one of his “main lessons” after his stint in No 10 was that “preparation is far more important to strategy when it comes to just about any aspect of politics”.
“Morgan McSweeney concedes Labour failed to prepare for power before its landslide victory in 2024.”
The former aide, who kept a low public profile until resigning earlier this year over his role in Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the US, said Labour’s failure was collective. “When I say we weren’t prepared, I really do mean the Labour Party more generally,” he said, distancing blame from Sue Gray, the top civil servant appointed a year before the election to lead government preparations. McSweeney also admitted that the decision to cut winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners in the first month of the government was a politically damaging mistake. “It was means tested at too low a level,” he told Robinson. “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 said he was “still processing” Starmer’s dramatic downfall just two years after leading the party back into office. He recalled that after Labour’s crushing defeat in 2019, many thought the party would need at least two elections to return to power, and “quite a lot of people” believed it needed a plan for defeat rather than victory in 2024. He 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.” While he admitted he “failed in my job, I failed in my duty” regarding the Mandelson appointment, he insisted: “I didn’t make that decision.” The interview marks the first time McSweeney has sat down for an on-the-record conversation with a journalist since leaving No 10, as he seeks to close “the old chapter” and move on.