Get In by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund review – behind the scenes with Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s arch strategist
This is a rattlingly good tale of a modern-day Machiavelli that ascribes credit for Labour’s journey to power not to Keir Starmer, but to his Irish chief of staffThis is the compelling story of how one intensely motivated man grabbed control of a broken party, eviscerated its left and ruthlessly reforged Labour into a power-hungry machine. The central character of the plot is not Keir Starmer; the main protagonist is the operative and strategist Morgan McSweeney. The Irishman will be unknown to the great majority of voters, but it is the claim of this account that he has been one of the most consequential figures in contemporary politics.It becomes clear early on that Starmer will often be peripheral to the tale of how Labour was taken from abject defeat in 2019 to victory with a parliamentary landslide in 2024. The Labour leader is largely absent from the first 40 or so pages. Everything is McSweeney and McSweeney is everything, to use the kind of formulation that these authors are rather fond of. The school-hating son of an accountant and a clerical worker, he comes from the small market town of Macroom in County Cork. In search of wider horizons, he makes his way to London as a “17-year-old slacker”. I assume this is a self-description that he offered to the writers to whom he’s obviously given a lot of cooperation. He gets work in the capital as a labourer on building sites. Tiring of it, he tries university, only to drop out within 12 months. The authors suggest that the making of him is three months spent in Israel on a kibbutz, where “the lazy teenager learned to work”. He takes a degree in politics and marketing at Middlesex University. Continue reading...
This is a rattlingly good tale of a modern-day Machiavelli that ascribes credit for Labour’s journey to power not to Keir Starmer, but to his Irish chief of staff
This is the compelling story of how one intensely motivated man grabbed control of a broken party, eviscerated its left and ruthlessly reforged Labour into a power-hungry machine. The central character of the plot is not Keir Starmer; the main protagonist is the operative and strategist Morgan McSweeney. The Irishman will be unknown to the great majority of voters, but it is the claim of this account that he has been one of the most consequential figures in contemporary politics.
It becomes clear early on that Starmer will often be peripheral to the tale of how Labour was taken from abject defeat in 2019 to victory with a parliamentary landslide in 2024. The Labour leader is largely absent from the first 40 or so pages. Everything is McSweeney and McSweeney is everything, to use the kind of formulation that these authors are rather fond of. The school-hating son of an accountant and a clerical worker, he comes from the small market town of Macroom in County Cork. In search of wider horizons, he makes his way to London as a “17-year-old slacker”. I assume this is a self-description that he offered to the writers to whom he’s obviously given a lot of cooperation. He gets work in the capital as a labourer on building sites. Tiring of it, he tries university, only to drop out within 12 months. The authors suggest that the making of him is three months spent in Israel on a kibbutz, where “the lazy teenager learned to work”. He takes a degree in politics and marketing at Middlesex University. Continue reading...
