Labour Failed to Prepare for Power, McSweeney Admits
Morgan McSweeney, the strategist who built Labour’s 2024 landslide and ran Downing Street as chief of staff, used his first-ever interview to deliver a verdict on the government he helped create: “We didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to.” He said the winter fuel cut “defined the government in a way that did us a lot of damage”, backed Andy Burnham as “the right person” to take over, and ruled out returning to politics for years.
This is the first insider post-mortem of a premiership that collapsed within two years of a landslide, and its central claim — that Labour won power without a theory of how to use it — reframes the winter-fuel row and the Sue Gray affair as symptoms rather than causes. McSweeney’s blessing matters practically: the party machine he built remains loyal to him, and his endorsement of Burnham’s Manchester-based “No 10 North” unit signals that machine will fall in behind the new leadership. He resigned this year over the Mandelson ambassadorial appointment and says he was too sad to watch all of Starmer’s resignation speech. Watch whether Burnham adopts the deliver-fast prescription as his governing playbook.