Goodbye, Morgan McSweeney. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff resigned yesterday, taking “full responsibility” for the appointment of the disgraced Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. There’s something vaguely Shakespearean about this tale of sins — a corrupted old powermonger has taken down his loyal protégé. And while it’s clear that the political strategist got this one wrong, it’s worth considering for a moment what he got right.

Starmer inherited a Labour Party more distant from working-class voters than it had ever been. Even at the time of the 1983 general election, remembered for Michael Foot’s “longest suicide note in history”, Labour was still considered an ally of communities around Britain which made their living in the real economy. After the New Labour years and time in Opposition, by 2019 the party looked to be in terminal decline. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, it had become a hobby project of ageing Euro-communists and their privately educated student revolutionary mates.

Like many “Left-wing” parties in Western democracies, Labour had morphed into a grouping of over-educated graduates who compensated for their downward mobility with snobbery. The loathing for provincial working-class communities was obvious; the voters there could smell it, and they were happy to punish Labour accordingly.

If McSweeney had one good instinct, it was that he hated the people who turned Labour into a bourgeois party. His “hero voter” project identified that Labour couldn’t return to power without winning over a type of voter characterised as “middle-aged mortgage man living in an English town”.

The only problem was how. Enter McSweeney’s mentor, Peter Mandelson, and the concept of the “Ming vase strategy” — carrying precious cargo over the line by never saying or doing anything even remotely controversial that might somehow cause a slip-up. Labour could therefore watch the Conservative Party explode under the weight of too many years in government and essentially win an election by doing nothing.

McSweeney helped Labour carry that Ming vase over the electoral line in July 2024 with nary a crack. He played a key part in creating the most efficient electoral vote share in generations. Labour now held a huge majority with a remarkably thin, margarine-like layer of votes. It had alienated nobody, but also inspired almost nobody. At Christmas of 2019, before McSweeney found himself in Labour’s head office, only the most insane person would have bet that Labour would win the next election.

Naturally, the strategist’s achievements won huge loyalty from Starmer, even in the face of hatred from the wider PLP. His electoral strategy helped Labour to understand that it would be impossible to win power by ignoring voters on once-taboo issues such as immigration.

McSweeney oversaw plenty of controversy within Labour. His time at the top of Labour Together rubbished party democracy and blocked dozens of working-class people from becoming MPs, exchanging them for a parachute brigade of consultants, SpAds and think tank CEOs. The public at large care little about this, though. What they do care about is scandals concerning political donations, freebies, and policy which hammered the elderly and disabled and was never in a manifesto. McSweeney must share the blame for some of this; some is just plain old misfortune.

Poll after poll found that his lobbying for Shabana Mahmood to become home secretary was an effort to demonstrate to his wider Labour sceptics an understanding of why voters might be opting for the populist insurgents in Reform UK. But polling shows the public is offering little credit to this version of Labour now that it has seen how it governs.

But what will be McSweeney’s lasting legacy? Voters currently view the Prime Minister as dishonest and lacking vision. There are also questions around what the top of the Labour Party really believes in. McSweeney may be an electoral genius. Or maybe he was just the right person at the right time.