BY PAUL T HORGAN
That Morgan McSweeney would have to quit his job in Downing Street was all but inevitable as soon as Peter Mandelson was sacked, but it was not for the reasons he gave in his resignation statement. The clue is in his job.
McSweeney was Chief of Staff in Sir Keir’s operation. Being Chief of Staff means being able to fire said staff. It’s the way that management keeps discipline in organisations. The ever-present prospect of dismissal is a powerful deterrent when said staff consider their course of action in any scenario. It is unlikely that none of McSweeney’s subordinates, the Special Advisors (spads), would do anything worse than The Man Who Recommended Mandelson unless they were passing government secrets to Vladimir Putin. So the fact that the spads’ boss had committed a clearly sackable offence, but had not been sacked for it, made the spads unsackable. No. 10 would have become like games day on the last day of school. Or more than it is already.
If McSweeney had given any spad the Order of the Boot from their job, the freshly-dismissed spad could have gone to the press and quite reasonably pointed out that whatever they had done paled into insignificance when compared to recommending Mandelson for the UK’s most important diplomatic position while there was clear evidence in the public domain of his continuing post-conviction associations with Jeffrey Epstein, and presumably considerably more evidence held by our security services, all of which McSweeney deliberately brushed aside in his indecent haste to promote his mentor.
Perhaps McSweeney’s reasoning went that only the Prince of Darkness was specially equipped to deal face-to-face with The Donald, as both The Donald and the Prince of Darkness swam in the same waters, but this is a shaky foundation on which to build the case for Mandelson, as it suggested that any shady character could have done the job, and the job of ambassador to the USA should never go to a shady character no matter how shady the President of the USA is seen to be.
As I write, McSweeney has set off a cascade of senior resignations from Downing Street, and there is deservedly considerable speculation about when the holder of most senior position will also fall on his sword. Sir Keir is fighting a rearguard action, but he seems to be just going through the motions as the facts are against him. The only question is whether defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election later this month, or the elections in May this year finish him off.
If Labour loses its deposit in Gorton, then the calls for Sir Keir to go will be difficult to contain, which explains why it seems Labour is throwing the kitchen sink at the constituency. Labour MPs are flooding the place. Leaflets and posters abound. The irony is that the fight is not about who can win, but which party can beat Reform in the polls. Labour’s best hope is to come second to Reform if they cannot win. If Reform wins or the Greens win with Reform coming second, Labour’s problems get much worse. This may explain why Labour is playing dirty in the campaign, with personal attacks on Reform’s candidate, Matt Goodwin.
All of this is a mild distraction from the main problem, which is that there is a power vacuum spreading out from Downing Street which threatens to engulf Whitehall. Paralysis at No.10 is contagious. The government has been reduced to reacting to events rather than dictating them. The country seems to be in the kind of holding pattern normally only seen in the months leading up to a General Election which is held at the last possible moment by a party seen as destined to lose. This can’t go on.
All of which leads to the reason why the power vacuum is growing. Labour has cursed itself with an extremely shallow talent pool in its MPs. Whenever a Conservative leader falls, there are always an ample number of credible runners and riders to replace them. The same is not the case in Labour. The choice is quite poor. Far too many of its MPs have never held a proper job in the private sector and have leveraged ideology to navigate their way through the non-profit organisations, such as trades unions, think tanks, charities, the civil service, local government, and academia. Labour is a statist party and simply have no understanding of how wealth is created and seem to believe that there is no limit to how much money can be raised by taxes. This belief is manifested at its worst by thinking that all the country’s problems can be solved by ‘finally’ making the wealthiest pay their ‘fair share’, when the cold fact is that the highest earners pay a disproportionate amount of tax already.
The shallowness of their talent-pool explains why Sir Keir was made party leader less than 5 years after being elected as an MP. There was no-one better who stood against him. While both David Cameron and Ed Miliband became Leaders of the Opposition just as quickly, both had extensive experience in Whitehall and Downing Street prior to becoming MPs. This is not true of Sir Keir, who leapfrogged over dozens of more experienced MPs, some of whom, like Yvette Cooper, had experience in government and Whitehall comparable to Cameron and Miliband.
The current front-runners all have major disqualifications. Wes Streeting has been more-or-less openly jockeying for the top job within a few months of Labour gaining power with selective briefings to the press and almost, but not quite, open dissent with Sir Keir. However, his associations with Mandelson have tainted him, and it is also highly probable that he will lose his seat to an Islamist at the next General Election. Angela Rayner fiddled her taxes in a property deal that seemed to be designed to allow her to escape inevitable defeat by an Islamist or Reform candidate in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne by relocating to the left-wing stronghold of Brighton in a manner conceptually similar to Wimbledon FC moving to Milton Keynes to become the MK Dons.
At present Rayner remains under investigation by tax authorities and was also found guilty of breaking the ministerial code, neither of which are things that can recommend her to voters, but provide excellent and quite legitimate attack lines for opposition parties. She cannot occupy the moral high ground, and that is traditionally from where Labour politicians (apart from Peter Mandelson, obviously) operate:
However, neither of these front-runners have the major qualification for replacing a Prime Minister in the middle of a Parliament, which is being a current or former holder of one of the Great Offices of State, being Chancellor, Home, or Foreign Secretary. Thus the pool is reduced to four people: Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, and Shabana Mahmood. None of these commend themselves. Home Secretary Mahmood, after initial comments about getting tough on illegal migrants, has gone to ground. But then that seems to be true of all of the above. All have been forced to release messages of support for Sir Keir, but these are just tokens. No-one wants to be seen to be wielding the dagger, as this never works in British politics except to ensure that someone other than the wielder ultimately benefits.
While I have been previously rather disparaging of these four hopefuls, it remains the case that of the four, only Yvette Cooper is suitable. She ticks all the necessary boxes. She is the ideal candidate around which a ‘stop Rayner’ cabal may form. She is a woman, and her rise to the top job fixes Labour’s problem of never electing a woman to lead the party, as well as making her Labour’s first woman Prime Minister. She has decades of experience at the heart of power, serving in senior government posts under Gordon Brown (and never being sacked, or quitting). She can present herself as a safe pair of hands, compared to the anarchy caused by Sir Keir’s ‘hands-off’ style of delegated governance. She is not Rachel Reeves or David Lammy.
It is also interesting that, while Sir Keir’s premiership was disintegrating, Cooper was overseas and thus thousands of miles away from the epicentre of the growing political disaster. This mirrors John Major’s rather strategic dental issues while Margaret Thatcher faced her terminal leadership crisis in 1990.
So Cooper is the one to watch. I am not just saying that because I put down £20 at 20-1 at the bookmakers yesterday. In fact this suggests a way that non-members of the Labour Party can influence events.
How much money are you willing to lose on a political bet?
At present the only way to influence who becomes the next Labour leader is to stump up the cash and become a member of the Labour Party, but doing so might be distasteful for a number of reasons, no least being a member of another party already. At present the odds on Cooper are all over the place (Coral 20-1, Jenningsbet 14-1), but that is because the bookmakers are making the odds based on their analysis rather than the number of bets made.
Placing a bet on Cooper will help to make the odds shorten, and this may have a cascading effect, as, should the odds move favourably, then this would get picked up by news organisations, and could start commentators talking up Cooper’s prospects, which, compared to all the other contenders, are actually quite good. So if you have some spare cash, and want some skin in the game, a bet on Cooper to shorten her odds seems a good way to influence events. This is not just because I want to make £400 and want you to help me do so.
Cooper’s election to Party Leader has to also be a coronation, like it was for Gordon Brown in 2010, Theresa May in 2016, and (eventually) Rishi Sunak in 2022. It is not in the national interest or the interests of the Labour Party for there to be a prolonged campaign while a Sir Keir acts as a caretaker Prime Minister. The Iranian regime faces collapse either from internal events or attacks by the large US Navy fleet based near the Arabian Gulf, and this cannot help but impact the UK due to our changing demographics. This is not the time for the country to have ineffectual leadership or to have a leader elected on a trade union vote.
Very soon, I believe the choice for the Labour Party will be between Cooper or guaranteed oblivion after June 2029, the most likely date for the next General Election. If Cooper gets the top job, then Ed Balls will have to quit his spot on Good Morning Britain and his podcast with George Osborne. It is to be hoped that this inevitable loss of income to the Balls/Cooper household is not holding back Cooper’s ambitions. Perhaps Ed Balls could become a spad. Or Chief of Staff. If the boss is going to be sleeping with a junior colleague, it does help to be married to them already.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.