Yes, Morgan McSweeney should be sacked.

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Image taken from Tribune

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By Bryn Talbot

Labour councillors, when polled in January 2025, identified Imogen Walker as the most right-wing of all Labour MPs.

She has done nothing outlier or notable as an MP. She was identified because she is the partner of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. No-one in the Labour Party, member, councillor, or MP, gets a say on what McSweeney does, so the councillors named Walker as proxy.

As the well-informed journalist Patrick Maguire has put it: “McSweeney and his acolytes [aspired to] control the party’s politics themselves — without interference from small-minded Westminster villagers… Their political project was predicated on this unpolitical leader [Starmer] doing as he was told.”

No-one in the Labour Party, or the broader electorate, ever elected McSweeney to anything. (He did run for council once, in 2006, in Sutton, and lost). He is entirely a backroom figure, powerful, but unelected and unaccountable.

The Mandelson-Epstein creates an opening to get rid of him, and every Labour member and trade unionist should seek to amplify and boost the calls to “sack McSweeney”.

According to The Economist, in a neat summary: “The prime minister appointed [Mandelson as US ambassador] largely because an aide, Mr McSweeney suggested it… Before [that, the Mandelson-Starmer] relationship extended [only] to Lord Mandelson offering the prime minister advice from the sidelines and once suggesting on a podcast that Sir Keir was too fat”.

Now “only dumb luck… can possibly save Sir Keir… Wes Streeting [is] far closer to the disgraced peer than the prime minister ever was”.

Streeting won’t want Starmer to go until the echoes have died down from the Mandelson-Epstein scandal, and Streeting may well have enough clout to save Starmer for now.

But Streeting can’t, and may not even want to, save McSweeney. Better if Starmer goes quickly, and we can get a real left candidate in the ensuing leadership, and a soft-soft-left successor elected under left pressure who may reopen political life in the Labour Party a bit.

Even short of that, Starmer without McSweeney managing him from the backroom will be better than McSweeney surviving this scandal intact because he depends on no vote for his powerful political position. Sack McSweeney!