How the Guardian flattered Morgan McSweeney and why it did so

Those hoping to be impressed when Morgan McSweeney made a rare public appearance, courtesy of the Commons' foreign affairs select committee, will have been disappointed. A No. 10 led by him and Keir Starmer really was a case of the bland leading the bland.

But how did the Guardian's Whitehall editor greet Morgan McSweeney when he was appointed? Those of you with strong stomachs, read on:

As the brains behind Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, McSweeney is credited with having brought the prime minister to power. He entered No 10 as head of political strategy, in charge of charting the party’s path to another victory in five years' time.

When it emerged there were rival power bases around McSweeney and Gray in No 10, few had any doubt he would survive any fallout. He has now emerged as chief of staff, with unrivalled influence, and is likely to bring a much sharper political focus to the job.

McSweeney is adored by many staffers, with some party figures retaining more affection for him than they do for Starmer. The highest form of praise in Labour HQ has been said to be: "Morgan loves it." However, he is something of a bogeyman on the left after leading the thinktank Labour Together in a campaign to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s influence.

After working in Labour’s attack unit in the New Labour years, McSweeney cut his teeth as chief of staff to the then Lambeth council leader Steve Reed, who is now a cabinet minister, and helped defeat the British National party in Barking and Dagenham. Born in Ireland, he divides his time between Scotland and Westminster. His wife, Imogen Walker, is Labour’s MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.

Why this unctuous tone? As I explained at the time, it was beat-sweetening and source-greasing.

And I got these terms from an article Timothy Noah published when Obama named his team after first winning the Presidency:

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter's access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they've been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. 

My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

This is why even the teams behind candidates for the leadership of opposition parties get enthusiastic write ups. They may just turn out to be the people the journalist wants to take his calls for years to come.

Labour's problem is that its leadership has contempt for its voters

Political activists are treated by their leaders as a stage army to be marched on and berated when they want to show the media how tough they are.

I wrote that in a recent article for Lion & Unicorn.

It strikes me that Keir Starmer and the people around him now treat Labour voters in much the same way.

The views reported in this tweet from yesterday afternoon shows what I have in mind. Because Net Zero and Rejoin are both popular with Labour voters.

Maybe the disappearance of Morgan McSweeney will see a change, but Starmer has little background in the Labour Party and no obvious love for it.

Morgan McSweeney's kitchen cabinet met at Roger Liddle's home

A ghost from the SDP is haunting the Guardian Politics Live this evening.

The blog quotes Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, as welcoming Morgan McSweeney’s resignation but saying more needs to be done to tackle factionalism within the party:

"It is a start, but we need to know how decisions have been made in the Labour party, including the role of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, and how this whole culture will turn away from the factionalism to an inclusive culture which seeks to listen and engage MPs and prevent future errors over policy."

And the then it provides some context for her remarks:

It has been reported that McSweeney convened a "kitchen cabinet" of like-minded Labour figures who met on Sunday evenings at the London home of Roger Liddle, a Labour peer and old friend of Mandelson.

Liddle was made a peer in 2010 and took the Labour whip. You wouldn't know it from his Wikipedia entry but he was once a leading light of the SDP. 

He was an SDP member throughout its existence (1981-88) and served on its national committee. He was then a Liberal Democrats until the mi-1990s,

Liddle was a parliamentary candidate for his old parties, fighting Vauxhall in 1983, the Fulham by-election in 1986, and Hertfordshire North in 1992. 

He had been a special adviser to Bill Rodgers when he was a Labour minister before the 1979 general election and left Labour with him.

But later, with the rise of New Labour, Liddle became a close associate of Peter Mandelson and rejoined the party. In the days when I was on the Lib Dem federal policy committee and had a Commons press pass, he seemed to be at every political event I attended.

"Senior Labour figures now believe Starmer is already toast"

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So runs the headline on a piece by Keven Schofield that went up on Huffington Post this morning in the wake of Labour's humiliation in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election. 

He quotes an "insider" (apparently they have them in the Labour Party too) as saying:

"I think people are now in a place where they believe this can’t continue and we can’t go into massive midterm elections with him in charge.

"The chances of him being gone my Christmas is massively under-priced. People will let the Budget happen at the end of November, and then there could be a move against him.

"If a new leader comes in then and puts 5 per cent on the polls, suddenly things look a lot better. We don’t get utterly decimated in Wales, the Scottish result is a bit better and you save a whole load of councillors."

My impression that Starmer lacks the personality to inspire is reinforced by what Schofield says:

If he does end up being ousted, Starmer's critics say he will only have himself to blame.

Never the most clubbable of politicians, the PM is rarely seen in the Commons, where many of his predecessors could be seen chatting to their MPs, listening to their concerns and getting a feel for the mood within the party.

In the past two months he has only taken part in four parliamentary votes, all of which happened on the same day.

Schofield also reports that Morgan McSweeney singularly failed to impress a meeting of Labour peers. As one told him:

"There was no energy, no ideas and he didn’t have any answers to our questions. It was really very damaging."

"Sell Starmer" is my share tip too, for what it's worth.