Sir Keir Starmer

THE trouble with popular political books is that most of them miss the point. Get In, to its credit, at least makes a virtue of it – if a rather apologetic one. “Little of what happens in Parliament or to politicians really merits its billing as high drama,” its authors tell us, “[but] the recent history of the Labour Party is a rare exception.” Let’s see.

As Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund excite themselves over Keir Starmer’s bumpy road to Downing Street, we lurch from sweary set-piece to zero-sum Zoom call. It’s a macho world in which accusations of a “boys’ club” fighting Sue Gray, the first former civil servant to need no introduction, are routinely dismissed. Chapters open dryly: “Each Labour leadership has its foundational texts.” And they end on cliffhangers reminiscent of a cheap thriller: “The hairs stood up on the nape of his neck. He pressed send.”

The story will unfold “primarily in Westminster, Starmer’s home turf of Kentish Town and the various corners of central London where Labour has been headquartered since 2019”. While New Labour, the Brexit-era Tories and, of course, the Corbynites were very much Islingtonians, Starmer’s Labour is instead a Camden project. Disgruntled MPs complained of a “Camden clique” around Starmer, which once not so long ago would have included personalities familiar to these pages – but now means less than remarkable figures who happen to live in the borough. The only light relief here is provided by Lord Alli, the Blairite sugardaddy and the Labour leader’s sometime dresser in chief, who lent the Starmer family his Covent Garden penthouse. One real scoop is the extraordinary influence Alli exercised over policy in the run-up to last year’s election, something Labour always denied.

Yet the protagonist of this book wasn’t often found north of the river. Spoiler alert: said protagonist is not the MP for Holborn and St Pancras, but his right-hand man Morgan McSweeney.

Not long ago you’d be called a conspiracy theorist if you said the dear leader was in fact an empty vessel, used by hardcore “moderates” as an acceptable figurehead to wrest back control from the left. But Pogrund and Maguire puncture the illusion of Starmer as his own man, once and for all.

“Keir’s not driving the train,” one “acolyte” of McSweeney is quoted as saying. “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

The young McSweeney got his foot in the door of Labour HQ as a supply receptionist, then worked as an organiser in Lambeth, where Labour regained the council against the odds in 2006, and in Barking, seeing off an insurgent British National Party, in 2010. After the embarrassment of running Liz Kendall’s leadership campaign five years later, he took stock. Rejecting the knee-jerk “Bitterite” attempts to depose Corbyn or launch a rival party, he instead hatched a long-term plan to take back control by stealth.

His vehicle for so doing was Labour Together, an apparently anodyne think tank to which, initially, even Corbyn himself could not object. In public, the group briefed the Guardian it would “bridge the gap between grassroots activists and those involved in national and local government”.

Behind the scenes, it polled Corbyn’s supporters, trawled Facebook groups for offensive material and coached Starmer in the art of leadership. It would be a tough job to convince the new party members, when the time was right, to vote for a candidate who would put Labour’s leftwards shift into reverse. If one didn’t know the constituency inside out, failure was inevitable.

It’s a strong CV. Yet it feels as if the authors have arranged the facts to suit the McSweeney myth crucial to this tale of power play and palace intrigue. Does it add up? “The Irishman” – as he is troublingly referred to throughout – is said to have developed his hatred of the hard left in Lambeth. It was here, we are told, he became enraged by the failure of firebrand Ted Knight’s council to stop paedophiles accessing children’s homes. But Knight was in fact disbarred from office in 1986. By the time McSweeney arrived in Lambeth a decade later, the borough was being run by Blairites – who must surely take the blame for losing control to the Lib Dems in 2002.

Four years later, did McSweeney really single-handedly save Barking from the forces of fascism? Get In glosses over the crucial role of campaign group Hope not Hate and the good fortune of the local and general elections being called for the same day. “McSweeney had won again,” Maguire and Pogrund purr. “Elsewhere in England, Labour lost.” In fact, Labour won back scores of boroughs that day, and achieved Barking’s North Korea-style clean sweep in neighbouring Newham too.

Perhaps that’s the trouble with writing very recent history as thrilling hi-jinks, by way of off-the-record interviews. Self-aggrandising advisers will inevitably exaggerate the roles of their mates, while nuance falls by the wayside. The authors diligently chronicle McSweeney’s personal disorganisation and the disfunction that reigned under his manor, or when he was sparring with his sometime successor Gray. But somehow, that’s not incongruous with his underlying strategic genius. Then again, now he’s seen off Gray and back in the top job, who can possibly disagree?

There are strong sections on the suspensions of Corbyn and Diane Abbott, the “10 pledges” of Starmer’s leadership campaign that McSweeney always intended to drop, and the party’s chaotic response to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Having been repeatedly told “the adults are back in charge”, the post-Corbyn left is inclined to see conspiracy where cock-up is more likely.

Yet the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and Get In’s biggest weakness lies in taking the motivations of Labour’s right wing at face value. Maguire and Pogrund never stop to consider whether hatred of paedophiles, dislike of lentils or fear of electoral oblivion were only ever convenient cover stories.

The surge of corporate donations, secondments to Labour from City accountancy firms – barely covered in this book – and subsequent watering down of workers’ rights legislation suggest the Starmer project was always about something else: the corporate re-capture of a party that had returned to being the political wing of organised labour under Corbyn.

It’s no accident that at least 31 of the “highest possible quality candidates” selected by Starmer’s team were current or former lobbyists at the time of the election. That’s not conspiracy – it’s fact.

In the event, the Tories’ performance was so bad that the final stage of McSweeney’s plan for Labour’s recovery – why us? – “receded entirely from view”. It’s just as well, because Labour had little in the way of an answer.

• Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer. By Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. Bodley Head, £25