Agent Gray has been stood down. Overcome by dodgy donations, impoverished spads, and ministerial angst, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff has been given the boot, and replaced by Morgan McSweeney, her formal intractable opponent in the Number 10’s briefing wars.
Having suggested only two months ago that the opposite outcome was more likely, I feel obliged to apologise to readers. In fairness, I did at least suggest a backlash towards her loomed. But as with so much of this government’s lamentable performance so far, having hinted she could come unstuck, I did not believe she could come unstuck quite so quickly.
Yet here we are. All it took was a few weeks of negative headlines and a steep drop in the Prime Minister’s popularity for him to conclude her position had become untenable. Turns out that a few years as the Blob’s HR point person does not turn you into a second Machiavelli. All those failed promotions may not have been down to male prejudice, but because she wasn’t up to the job.
I underestimated McSweeney’s popularity with MPs and overestimated just how many enemies Gray had – and could make. From parts of the deep, deep state none too keen on her views on the Emerald Isle, to the Labour staffers outraged to discover their salaries, especially to hers, Gray seems to be an expert in losing friends and alienating people, rather than running Whitehall.
She has been blamed for stopping Number 10 from working properly: holding up the appointment of a Principal Private Secretary to favour her candidate, refusing to engage with the media ‘grid’ she was supposed to control and actively muscling out McSweeney’s political team, long-standing avatars of the Starmer project incensed at her newfound importance to the Prime Minister.
If Gray had hoped she could push out the politicos, piggyback on a pliable PM, and hold the sway over Whitehall she had assumed was rightfully hers, she has been proven catastrophically wrong. Turns out Starmer is the most powerful person in government, whatever her unconstitutional aspirations had been.
What should ConservativeHome readers make of this? The smug glow that comes from seeing a party that defined itself against Tory psychodrama hobbled by its own is starting to wear off. Labour have a hearty majority and five years. We can point and laugh, but only because we have nothing else to do.
Downing Street will hope that McSweeney’s appointment ends the feuding and allows the Government to reassert a sense of control. Feted amongst the faithful as the man who cleared out the cranks and took Labour back into power, his elevation comes alongside new deputy chiefs of staff, a new strategic communications lead, and a filling of the PPS role.
Having worked for his boss far longer and more closely than Gray, McSweeney has his trust and loyalty in a way that she did not. But his weaknesses – the very limitations that meant Gray was appointed in the first place – remain. He is not used to Whitehall, having cut his teeth in local politics. He is an electoral strategist, whose administrative abilities so far have run to bin collections.
Sympathetic observers may suggest he has a deep-seated understanding of the electorate and how Labour must align themselves with it. But he won the election by treading the water on Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 defeat and getting lucky as we punched ourselves in the face. If he had hoped to sell Britain on Starmer, he has palpably failed. Blue Labour guff is no substitute for stopping the rot.
Moreover, McSweeney, like Gray, attached himself to Starmer because he hoped the Prime Minister could be a vehicle for his ambitions. Both have seen the truth: Starmer is a stolid, late-middle-aged man of basic Soft Left opinions who would quite like to run Britain for a few years. He has no grand vision or imagination. He is a legalistic plodder, a malleable dud, an NPC.
Where some now praise his ruthlessness, I see only cluelessness. He has smashed the glass marked “New Number 10 Team” within 100 days because he has no idea how else to save his floundering government except to admit he is not up to it. He is a void, in whose absence his minsters spin their own stories: Rachel Reeves’s war on pensioners, Ed Miliband’s eco-boondoggles, and so on.
It is difficult to take this government seriously except by constantly reminding oneself of the power and time it has at its disposal. If it can be this awful in three months, what damage can it do in five years? The sensitive young men of J’Accuse already look at Gray’s sweetener appointment as ‘Envoy to the Nations and Regions’ and wondering what constitutional vandalism she can inflict.
Will this shake-up save this government? It might, at least, restore its ability to deal with politics as performance and fill the hole the lobby has bunged with scandal. If you believe governing Britain involves tickling the bellies of a few chosen hacks, shoving an ex-Sunday Times journo in to do ‘strategic comms’ is just the ticket. Starmer the hopeless becomes Starmer the ruthless, for a week.
But that won’t do a jot to change him or resolve the myriad blights that are making Britain poorer and which have overwhelmed government after government. So far, Starmer has had neither a united team, nor a clear ambition. Perhaps McSweeney will provide them. He can’t do worse than Gray.
Or perhaps, when the polls don’t improve, the next set of scandals break, the boats keep coming and the waiting lists don’t shrink, he will be the next head on the chopping block – the latest sacrificial lamb offered up in the vain hope of saving an administration that has looked moribund from the start.
