In a surprising admission, the man who ran Labour’s winning election campaign conceded that the party was simply not ready to govern when it took office. Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, told the BBC that Labour “hadn’t done enough to prepare for government” in the run-up to its 2024 landslide victory. His candour has reopened a fundamental question for any incoming administration: what does it really mean to be prepared for power, and why does it matter?
McSweeney, who later became Starmer’s head of political strategy, gave his first broadcast interview to the BBC’s Nick Robinson. He said the party should have been “way more optimistic” in its first few months but had been unable to deliver results quickly enough to satisfy voters. “We didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to,” he explained. “We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government.” He added that there hadn’t been enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant for the state.
“Why a party’s failure to prepare for power matters, and what it means for voters.”
The admission is striking because preparing for government is a well-established process. Opposition parties typically spend months before a general election drafting policies, vetting potential ministers, and liaising with the civil service to understand the machinery of state. Labour had even appointed Sue Gray, a former senior civil servant, as Starmer’s chief of staff a year before the election, tasking her with leading preparations. Yet McSweeney said the failure was not about any one individual but the party as a whole. He revealed that in early 2024, he “did start to realise that we hadn’t done enough to prepare for government.”
Why did such a well-resourced opposition fall short? McSweeney pointed to the widespread assumption after Labour’s 2019 defeat that the party would need at least two elections to return to power. “Quite a lot of people thought it needed a plan for defeat rather than victory,” he said. The party’s time in opposition “went quickly”, leaving little room for the deep thinking required. As a result, the government stumbled early, most notably with its decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners. McSweeney later admitted that was a mistake: “It was means tested at too low a level … it defined the government in a way that really did us a lot of damage.”
For UK readers, this matters because it directly affects the quality of government they receive. Voters who backed Labour on a promise to end years of Tory incompetence were betrayed by a party that arrived in Downing Street without a solid plan. As an i newspaper editorial put it: “It is morally unacceptable to arrive in Downing Street … without a solid policy agenda and a plan to execute it.” The lesson is not just for Labour: any party hoping to win power must take preparation seriously, or risk squandering public trust.
Key questions answered
Q: What does it mean for a party to ‘prepare for government’? A: It involves creating detailed policy plans, vetting potential ministers, building relationships with the civil service, and anticipating major challenges. McSweeney said Labour failed to have enough conversations about the “different era” they were entering and lacked a “theory” about how to deliver change quickly.
Q: Why did Labour fail to prepare properly? A: McSweeney said the party expected to lose or need two elections after the 2019 defeat, so many thought a plan for defeat was needed. The opposition period “went quickly”, and the party didn’t put enough thought into how the world had changed since the 1990s.
Q: What were the consequences of this lack of preparation? A: The government made early mistakes, such as the winter fuel payment cut, which damaged its political standing. It struggled to deliver visible change quickly, eroding the public confidence that had propelled it to a landslide victory.
What happens next
The Labour leadership contest is underway, with candidates including Andy Burnham, who has been urged to learn from Starmer’s failures. McSweeney’s warning is clear: preparation is “far more important to strategy” in politics. Any future prime minister would be wise to have a solid plan before taking the keys to Downing Street.