“You might imagine that the hero of a book about how Keir Starmer led the Labour Party from electoral disaster to Downing Street would be, you know, Keir Starmer,” said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times.
But while Starmer is “certainly present” in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s “well-researched account of Labour’s return to power”, his role is that of a supporting actor. The book’s hero is Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s 48-year-old chief of staff, who is portrayed as the architect of Labour’s triumph and the current power behind the throne. By this account, it was McSweeney “who picked Starmer and not the other way round”: in 2019, he needed an MP to front his crusade to make Labour electable again, and he alighted on Starmer. “Keir’s very bright and picks things up very fast,” he told friends. “He’s not completely unpolitical.” Packed with such revealing details, “Get In” is a “cracking read”.
“The Irishman”, as McSweeney is referred to throughout, as if he were a character in a Scorsese film, grew up in a middle-class family in County Cork, said Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times. Arriving in London aged 17, he worked on building sites and, later, on a kibbutz in Israel, then studied politics at Middlesex University and got a job at Labour HQ in 2001. Over the next few years, he developed a reputation as a formidable organiser by masterminding successful local election campaigns in east London; then, in 2017 he became director of Labour Together, a “secretive network” dedicated to defeating the Corbynite Left.
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Cunningly, McSweeney presented Labour Together to Corbyn as an organisation that could help him unite the party, said Kara Kennedy in The Telegraph. So thoroughly did McSweeney dupe the “now-exiled member for Islington North” that you “almost feel pity” for him.
This is a “rattling tale, terrifically well told”, but McSweeney should keep it away from Starmer, “because he will surely loathe it”, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. The PM emerges as “someone acting a part others have ghostwritten for him”. As one insider puts it, “Keir is not driving the train. He thinks he is driving the train, but we’ve sat him in the front of the DLR” – a reference to the driverless trains of the Docklands Light Railway.
Another wonders if the PM knows that he is “just a pawn” in McSweeney’s game, but doesn’t care: he comes across as “weirdly disengaged”. But if this book flatters McSweeney, it also endangers him. “Machiavellis attract resentment”, and PMs don’t relish “being portrayed as the dumb instrument of someone else’s designs”
