Who killed Sue Gray? The power struggle in No. 10 has a victor

Most important of all, however, is the fact that she went for McSweeney and missed — and now he has her job. Instead of ensuring McSweeney was at the centre of everything, as he was in opposition, Gray attempted to sideline his entire political operation in favour of a more technocratic administration that she was in charge of. In doing so, however, she lost control of No.10 and the Government appeared devoid of any purpose or direction. It was a disaster.

As a result, Gray finds herself dramatically demoted to “the Prime Minister’s envoy for the regions and nations”. McSweeney, meanwhile, has been promoted, with two new deputy chiefs of staff reporting to him — the former political director, Vidhya Alakeson, and director of government relations, Jill Cuthbertson. In another significant move, the former Daily Mirror and Sunday Times journalist, James Lyons, will join to lead a new “strategic communications team”, in what is effectively a demotion for the current director of communications, Matthew Doyle. This is now McSweeney’s No.10.

But this can only be the start of the internal revolution. Starmer must follow it up with a cascade of other appointments, starting with a new cabinet secretary alongside McSweeney, as well as a new principal private secretary, national security adviser and ambassador to Washington. But for this to work, they all need to know what he wants — and this is where McSweeney comes in.

While Starmer claimed yesterday’s changes were made to “strengthen his Downing Street operation ahead of marking his first 100 days in office”, they are an implicit admission that a reset was needed. There cannot be two rival centres of power within Downing Street, working in separate parts of the building, with separate instincts and ideas. Starmer finally realised this.

It may seem trite but the fact that Gray and McSweeney were not even working in the same room is important. Since moving into No.10, Starmer has taken the same office used by most recent prime ministers, a relatively small office at the back of the building accessible through a larger room where all the Prime Minister’s most important officials tend to sit. This in turn is on a corridor which connects Downing Street to the Cabinet Office via something called “the link door”. The reason most prime ministers have worked here is because they can have all their most trusted aides at hand and the cabinet secretary is just a short walk away. But until now, McSweeney sat somewhere else entirely.

Unlike Gray, who did sit directly outside Starmer’s office, McSweeney and his team worked out of a room at the front of No. 10 near to the front door. To reach McSweeney — Starmer’s longest serving and most important aide — the PM had to walk out of his office, past Gray and her team, down the main corridor of the building and into McSweeney’s office. Such small details matter. As anyone who has ever worked in No.10 understands: proximity is power.

Those inside Starmer’s No.10 liked to argue that proximity mattered less under him  because of how he worked. Every week, time was set aside for him and McSweeney to see each other. And besides, Starmer had developed a habit of taking his work upstairs into the Thatcher room, where he would read through Government papers on the sofa. Starmer, then, was a roving Prime Minister who liked to use more of the building than his predecessors, which meant it wasn’t quite so easy to ensure proximity. This was the argument until yesterday; and it was bogus.

It was always clear that the physical incoherence of this operation reflected its wider strategic incoherence. The Starmer government has yet to find its animating purpose; its all-encompassing mission to which all other priorities must, in the end, be subordinated. It has missions — plural — and they are all perfectly reasonable, but they don’t have one organising principle.

The best way to understand the extraordinary disharmony within Starmer’s government, then, is to know that it wasn’t a battle for personalities, but a proxy war for control of the Starmer project; a battle to define what it was that they were elected to do. That job now falls to McSweeney.

To some of his critics, he is a ruthless Machiavel who conned the Labour Party into electing a leader far to the Right of the one they thought they were getting. To others, he is a  genius puppeteer who guided his uncharismatic frontman to a landslide election victory by pulling all the right strings. The fact that he has clearly won his Cold War with Gray will add further colour to the McSweeney myth. It is certainly true that without ever having a cross word with her, he has ensured that he has emerged on top and not her. To achieve this, he bided his time and consulted those he could trust to understand how he could ensure his influence was felt. In the end, though, it is his personal relationship with Starmer which has ensured he triumphed. He has the Prime Minister’s trust..

The truth is McSweeney is not Thomas Cromwell reincarnate. He has obvious weaknesses, especially for someone who must now manage the Whitehall machine. He remains new to national political power and naive to some of Whitehall’s eccentricities (though, evidently, not that naive). Some of his biggest supporters also worry that his quiet, unassuming nature and lack of “natural authority” — read public school bravado — puts him at a disadvantage in a system which still expects such traits. He will need to learn quickly how to impose his authority.

What McSweeney really offers is a hard-headed, unromantic clarity about Labour’s purpose that is more reminiscent of the party’s tougher social democratic past than its softer liberal present. He — more than Starmer — is a figure who would be instantly recognisable to any figure from the old Labour Right, from Ernest Bevin to John Reid but is a rarer sight in Westminster of late. He did not learn his politics at Oxford and the bar, but on council estates working for local government. This experience has given him an instinctive loathing for the kind of badge-wearing politics of virtue the Labour Right has long associated with the middle-class Left.

McSweeney sees the purpose of Labour in straightforward, class terms: to represent in government the interests of ordinary people who are not otherwise looked after by their employers, landlords — or, indeed, politicians. He holds those officials who failed to protect the working-class girls of Rochdale in particular contempt. Unlike many in the party, this idea of purpose also combines with an instinctive sympathy for the attitudes and instincts of their voters and those McSweeney believes should be Labour voters.

The upshot of all this is a naturally blue Labour instinct that borrows the language and feelings of conservatism to pursue an older class-based politics. Rather than being some kind of re-run of Blairism, this is a politics more deeply rooted in Labour’s past. In the run up to the 1979 election, before the Winter of Discontent blew James Callaghan off course, that grand figure of the Tory Right, Maurice Cowling, complained that Margaret Thatcher was losing the political battle against the Labour prime minister because he appeared and sounded in every respect a more reassuring conservative presence than her. The challenge for McSweeney is to convince the Labour Party to follow his lead when it does not feel his politics in the way that he does.

There are two areas in particular where McSweeney and his team’s instinctively conservative understanding of Britain has shone through and will define much of this Government’s record: welfare and immigration. The Labour Party is united in its opposition to the two-child benefit cap based on the straightforwardly moral argument that it increases child poverty. But McSweeney’s team also know that this is the one area where the Labour Party is most at odds with the country overall: there is overwhelming support among every cohort and group based on the entirely different moral principle that you shouldn’t have children if you can’t afford them. It is an important early marker of this government that, when forced to choose, it has decided not to argue with the public.

On the second issue, immigration, there is a clear understanding within the group close to McSweeney in government that only by making the argument for reducing the numbers and being seen to have achieved a significant reduction can they hope to be reelected. That Starmer chose to adopt the language of “love of home”, rather than “hatred of neighbour”, when defending his commitment to reducing migration in his party conference speech is another important signal of the possible future direction of this government should it, over time, start to become more “McSweenyite” in flavour.

Until now, however, the reality is that this government has lacked any real coherent narrative about its purpose, intent, mandate or strategy. It has not been blue Labour in the way Blair’s government remained distinctly new in its opening few years. Fast-tracking assisted dying, freeing prisoners early from their sentences and closing down blast furnaces as part of a green revolution are not the instincts of conservative social democracy — it’s soft Left Fabianism.

Instead, the country has been treated to a mush of different policies and declarations. One day Rachel Reeves declares the Government’s central purpose to balance the books, as if she were George Osborne, while at the same time handing out pay rises across the public sector. But nobody believes her: nobody thinks the purpose of the Labour Party is to control public spending. This may be something that has to be done, but only as part of a longer term aspiration to achieve something else.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s central purpose was to save the British economy. This was part of a wider struggle for free markets and liberty — against socialism at home and communism abroad. In 1997, Blair’s central purpose was to save public services by increasing investment and opening them up to the kind of choice he believed would permanently lock in the middle classes. Like Thatcher, this domestic purpose was also tied into a wider “third way” internationalism, in which Britain would lead Europe into its future.

A cynic might point out — reasonably — that neither government was particularly successful in its missions. Thatcher’s economic record is one of solid, if not spectacular, economic growth bookended by two deep recessions. Blair, meanwhile, saw a marked improvement in public services, but one that was ultimately dependent on an economy that, it turned out, was fundamentally broken. Internationally, meanwhile, Thatcher left office as one of the victors of Cold War, but also one who had become an “ineffective brake” trying to stop German unification and the European single currency which flowed from that. Blair, in contrast, left office with two of his wars still raging, the British army effectively beaten in both Basra and Helmand.

Politics, though, is hard and ultimately ends in failure. The point about the premierships of Blair and Thatcher — and, to a certain extent, David Cameron’s — was that they were successful in taking control of the political narrative, offering a diagnosis of what was wrong with the country and showing how they would put it right. In each case, there was a clarity of purpose. Today, there is no such thing, but there needs to be. By sacking Sue Gray Starmer has made the necessary first step. Now he needs to let McSweeney take control. And this time it has to work.

---

Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

TomMcTague