Book Review: Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer By Patrick Maguire & Gabriel Pogrund. The Puppet and the Master. This is an illuminating look under the bonnet of how Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister. It is certainly no rose-tinted story of how he overcame Corbyn and his support on the Left. But Morgan McSweeney does get a glowing report, both in how he propped up Starmer and his politics – the latter very much the authors’ in tandem with McSweeney.
At times the detail has a forensic tone to it – he said this and that – making it more of a reference guide on the last few years of Starmert’s ascent than a more general read. But that level of detail does slow down the pace of what is time a fast paced drama.
This emerges at times as a biography of Morgan McSweeney with a political rags to riches angle to it – his lazy start to life then a Damascene moment in a European university that unleashed his intellectual political skills, firstly in local government, then with the Labour Party.
Morgan McSweeney is portrayed as the mastermind who orchestrated Starmer’s takeover of the Party moving it from Corbynism to a more centrist, managerialist-run party. His use of power and ruthlessness is unquestionable.
Starmer does not get much of a good look in this book – highly principled and disciplined (unlike Boris Johnson) but lacking a clear ideology, a vision or the pragmatism of Blair. The sense of dependency on McSweeney stretches as far as McSweeney being the one pulling the strings when Starmer took on Corybyism. This does beg the question is it McSweeney that has the underlying vision driving Starmer’s work. Even McSweeney cannot fully get inside Starmer’s head. So was McSweeney actually the mastermind and Starmer the puppet.
Get In’s period of interest is the chaos of its 2019 electoral defeat to its 2024 landslide victory under Keir Starmer. Its depth lies in its speaking to a lot of insiders. What it is not is an analysis policy. This comes across as a gap when trying to understanding Starmer’s vision. This weakness seems to reflect a broader lack of vision in the party in power.
The book begins with McSweeney scheming with Labour Together and Jeremy Corbyn riding the wave at Glastonbury. McSweeney described his first strategic objective as evading ‘the threat of attacks of disloyalty by supporters of the leader.’ So it was interesting to hear how McSweeney disguised Labour Together as at one with the party’s new order.
McSweeney commissioned YouGov to poll Corbyn and Labour Party supporters. And it was revealing. For instance, nearly half of Corbyn’s most devout agreed the world was controlled by a secretive elite. McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples ended up in the Sunday Times.
McSweeney went on a mission to amass reams of spreadsheets and focus group reports to destroy Corbynism. He divided up types in to idealogues (the paranoid ones), the instrumentalists (the moderates) and the idealists (pro-Corbyn but not hard left, nor loyal to Corbyn). This began how McSweeney figured out how to win.
Following a disastrous General Election for Corbyn he resigned and Starmer replaced him as leader of the party. McSweeney reckoned on Starmer to convince the idealists he was the one for them. McSweeney saw Starmer as non-ideological and non-factional. What Starmer wanted to do was to transcend the factionalism. Unity was his watchword.
McSweeney sought to reinvent the Labour Party. He would use Labour Together to ensure the shadow cabinet as unified around Starmer, and the NEC had a stable majority to work with.
But the unity mission began to unravel once Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party pending an investigation, for failing to retract his comments on the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s verdict on the Labour Party being responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination.
Starmer’s view that Corbyn’s response that the decision had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party” had put Starmer in an impossible position: his viewthat anyone who claimed that antisemitism was exaggerated was part of the problem. McClusky was pivotal in attempting to rehabilitate Corbyn. But the lack of compromise from Corbyn inevitably led to his whip being suspended, for, as Starmer saw it, to reestablish the credibility of the labour party.
In November 2020, after a hearing by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), Jeremy Corbyn was reinstated as a party member. However, the Labour whip was not restored, meaning he continued to sit in the House of Commons as an independent MP rather than as a Labour MP.
The press were not convinced that Labour offered a clear alternative. Maguire attributes this o his “precarious sense of self as a politician.” His political mind is referred to as a closed book. Another anecdote is how Starmer was regarded in his shadow cabinet member as not liking politics and bored by the detail of politics.
Angela Raynor is portrayed as a rival fuming that he is “incapable of running a bath”, let alone the opposition. McSweeney tried to combat that with his Project eX reforms: abolishing the leadership rules and electoral college that let in Corbyn. He continued to orchestrate behind the scenes with Project Ex being voted through at a conference with one comment “we have been faced with Keir Starmer or Keir Starmer.”
There is a side story of how Dominic Cummings appeared to have courted Corbyn on dismantling the Civil Service, get Brexit through, and Tory Civil War.
The book comes to a close with Starmer accepting the King’s invitation to form a Labour Government. Starmer had hired Sue Gray as she brought experience of government whilst Maguire captures the disbelief in the cabinet in shock at having won power.
A significant portion of the end of this book is devoted to Sue Gray – very much a Starmer appointment which he has now admitted as a mistake. At first Starmer was oblivious to the enmity she infected around her. But one that increasingly appeared eccentric and divisive, and ultimately had to be let go of as a burden.
For all that McSweeney achieved in pulling the strings behind Starmer, Maguire reckons McSweeney didn’t know what Starmer really thought. But, with the demise of Gray, he was moved in to Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister, an operational position that may have stifled his mission.
