Being the prime minister’s right-hand man is a position of extraordinary power and privilege. But when things start to go wrong, you are directly in the line of fire. So has found Morgan McSweeney, the political mastermind credited with helping Keir Starmer win his election landslide, in recent days as the Labour party has collapsed into moral fury over planned welfare cuts.
The softly spoken Irishman, now Starmer’s chief of staff, has become the lightning rod for the frustration of many Labour rebels who backed a wrecking amendment designed to blow up the big welfare bill next week.
Many of them blame McSweeney and his political operation for ignoring Labour MPs to such an extent that they missed the strength of feeling over the disability benefit cuts and just how far the rebels were prepared to go.
“They just kept saying that MPs were in a different place from the public on benefit cuts and we’d just have to tough it out,” said one MP who signed the amendment. “But we speak to our constituents all the time and many of them are terrified. They just don’t get it.”
One rebel ringleader was reported as saying that while they were happy with the prime minister’s leadership, they thought he should have fewer “overexcitable boys” in his team. An MP even posted about “regime change” in a Labour WhatsApp group.
McSweeney has also been blamed for allowing the Treasury to focus too much on the financial case for change, rushing through the cuts before the spring statement to give Rachel Reeves more headroom. Senior No 10 sources now acknowledge that was a mistake.
Those inside Downing Street also accept they should have done a better job making the moral case for welfare reform, and started doing so earlier. Starmer has been virtually silent on the issue, unless specifically asked, in the weeks running up to the vote.
“The criticism of our engagement with MPs and of our communications is fair,” one senior figure conceded.
But allies of McSweeney pushed back hard on claims by some Labour backbenchers that he was using the cuts to chase down Reform voters.
“There’s not a shred of evidence that we’re pursuing a strategy of attacking welfare recipients to appeal to voters who feel that they’re scroungers or whatever. We’ve never used language like that, nor would we,” one source said. “These are real people and our motivation is to help get them back into work and improve their lives.”
It is no new thing for backbenchers to feel underappreciated or neglected by Downing Street, and to blame whoever the prime minister’s closest political aide is at the time.
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David Cameron-era Conservatives turned on Steve Hilton, his “blue skies” thinker, for pursuing his own agenda and leaving them out of the loop. Boris Johnson’s troupe of Tory backbenchers fell out spectacularly with his chief aide Dominic Cummings after the Barnard Castle affair.
But there are deeper tensions at play between McSweeney, whose instinct is to focus on Reform-inclined voters, and others in the party – said to include Pat McFadden, the powerful Cabinet Office minister – who believe the government should pitch to the entire electorate.
While many of those same MPs who now criticise McSweeney owe him their seats, and few doubt his golden electoral touch, questions are starting to be asked about whether he is the right fit for chief of staff, which involves helping to run not just the government but also the party.
But ultimately, some of those inside government whisper, the buck stops at the top. While the grumbling about McSweeney may continue, since the welfare cuts debacle some MPs have been quite openly suggesting it may be Starmer rather than his chief of staff who is not up to the job.