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If Sue Gray divided opinion inside and outside Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet – and she certainly did – then his chosen replacement may prove to be even more controversial.
Even before the Sunday lunch of short knives saw Ms Gray ousted from Sir Keir’s top team, Morgan McSweeney was a deeply controversial figure within the Labour Party, a man who has attracted an almost pathological hatred from the left.
But what is now fascinating many within the Westminster bubble are the comparisons between McSweeney and that recent Svengali figure at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government, Dominic Cummings.
Given that Mr Johnson in his new autobiography Unleashed has compared Cummings to a fictional “homicidal robot” bent on destruction, this may not be the most comfortable comparison for the newly installed regime around Sir Keir.
But the comparisons are there to be seen. Both men earned their reputations masterminding extraordinary victories at the ballot box. Cummings headed Vote Leave to victory in the infamous EU referendum in 2016, and McSweeney first engineered Sir Keir’s leadership election victory in 2020, then the general election this year.
These alone do not link the two men in terms of personality. What really raised eyebrows were the briefings from McSweeney supporters over the weekend and at the start of this week as he took control of the levers of power in Downing Street.
A significant comparison is the idea that it was Cummings who is believed to have decided that Johnson was the man to get his agenda through, rather than the other way round. Similarly, McSweeney is understood to have decided that Sir Keir would replace Jeremy Corbyn before the thought had settled in Sir Keir’s mind.
There is now talk of bringing the operation in No 10 into the 21st century under McSweeney, a sense that the government machine is still analogue rather than digital. There is a desire to have an analytics-led approach to governing. All this is familiar to those who followed the musings of Cummings while he was chief of staff.
An even greater parallel is the drive and ruthlessness of the two men. Cummings became infamous for the way he was willing to discard people. An early sign of that came when Sajid Javid resigned as chancellor because Cummings wanted him to sack his special advisers. Ultimately, once spurned by Johnson, Cummings was the one who literally brought about the former prime minister’s downfall.
McSweeney has also built up a similar reputation for ruthlessness. As Labour’s election coordinator, once the election was called he was accused of imposing candidates he wanted and would fit his way of thinking across hundreds of seats. Those who did not fit the blueprint – like Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green – were ditched seemingly without a second thought and replaced by one of his allies. Diane Abbott survived but only after coordinated lobbying through her supporters.
That cold-blooded approach to politics has been evident since Labour won power. It has been clear from day one that McSweeney and Sue Gray disliked each other and both disliked the incumbent cabinet secretary Simon Case.
While Gray’s advantage was that she knew the civil service inside out, her weakness was that she was unused to being a political figure and within 100 days she was gone. Case had also provided his leaving date. The briefings against both largely came from McSweeney’s allies and now he sits alone at the top of the pile in control of the prime minister’s operation.
It is perhaps also not a coincidence that McSweeney has also adopted another tactic used by Cummings early in his new regime. All the special advisers (“spads”) working for ministers have been called in for a meeting. One told The Independent: “I think we are going to be given our orders and warned of the consequences of stepping out of line.”
One further similarity with the duo is that they have both been involved in controversies over the breaking of rules. Cummings’ infamous drive to Barnard Castle in lockdown is well reported, less well-known is the fact that McSweeney was director of the anti-Corbyn, now uber-powerful Labour Together think tank, which was fined £14,250 by the Electoral Commission for missing the 30-day deadline to register a reported £730,000 of donations, a fine that was paid in September 2021.
Sir Keir could have picked a chief of staff to unify and bring warring factions together. Instead he has seemingly followed the path chosen by Johnson to bring in someone who will stop at nothing to get the government’s business done, drive through change and not be afraid of taking down anybody who gets in the way.
Johnson did this after Brexit split his party down the middle and sparked a civil war. Sir Keir does the same as his government is rocked with scandal over freebies and rows over policies such as scrapping winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners.
Such a strategy worked for a time for Johnson, but we all know how it ended. Maybe Sir Keir should heed that particular warning from history. Based on what we’ve seen so far it seems more likely McSweeney will think the prime minister is surplus to requirements than the other way round.
