Morgan McSweeney, the former chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, has offered a stark admission: Labour arrived in Downing Street unprepared. In his first broadcast interview, McSweeney told the BBC's Nick Robinson that the party had not given enough thought to how the world had changed since it last governed in the 1990s. “We didn't prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to,” he said on the Political Thinking podcast. “We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government.”
McSweeney, who ran Labour's successful 2024 election campaign and followed Starmer into office as head of political strategy, recalled that in early 2024 he “did start to realise that we hadn't done enough to prepare for government”. The party, he said, should have been “way more optimistic” in its first months but 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.”
“Morgan McSweeney admits Labour failed to prepare for power, calling it a 'shocking admission' of incompetence.”
One of the earliest and most damaging missteps, McSweeney admitted, was the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners. “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.” He described the lesson as a painful one: “Preparation is far more important to strategy when it comes to just about any aspect of politics.”
McSweeney, who kept a low public profile until his resignation over Peter Mandelson's appointment as the UK's ambassador to the US, acknowledged his own failings. “I failed in my job, I failed in my duty,” he said, though he insisted “I didn't make that decision”. He also revealed that during planning meetings, “quite a lot of people” thought the party needed a plan for defeat rather than victory after the 2019 election. Labour's time in opposition “went quickly”, he added.
The admission comes as Britain prepares to turn the page. After Starmer's resignation, Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is in pole position to become prime minister. In a pointed editorial, the i newspaper urged Burnham to take note: “You ask people to invest their trust in you, you better have a plan.” The question now is whether the next Labour leader will heed the warning.