Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer

Bodley Head. Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

By Jason Cowley

It used to be said by senior colleagues of Keir Starmer, in his early months as Labour leader, that he had no politics and did not know how to do politics. He had instincts – those of the progressive activist left - but no strategy. He struggled to nurture personal relationships and was remote and inscrutable, and contemptuous of the whole Westminster jamboree. What he had was extraordinary self-belief and a conviction that he could become prime minister. “He is a completely hard bastard,” one of Starmer’s old football friends tells the authors of Get In. He would need to be because as Labour leader he inherited a party divided, traumatised by sectarianism and its worst general election defeat since 1935, and addicted to losing.

Starmer was elected to parliament in 2015 for the ultra-safe London seat of Holborn and St Pancras following a distinguished career as a human rights lawyer and later as director of public prosecutions. He had turned to politics not because he wanted to serve, or because he was an ideologue like Jeremy Corbyn, or relished the company of other politicians. He was motivated by personal ambition. He “wants, more than anything to win”, say Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in their gripping, exhaustively researched, and fast-paced account of Starmer’s rise to power.

Once asked why he wanted to become prime minister, David Cameron reportedly said: “Because I think I’d be rather good at it.”

Starmer’s self-assurance was no less significant. Unlike Cameroon - or indeed his fellow old Etonian Boris Johnson - he was not of the upper middle class English public-school establishment. He was part of a different establishment: the north London liberal legal elite.

But Starmer had a problem. He came from outside the Labour movement. The former MP Nick Boles once said of his old friend Cameron, who went straight from Oxford to work at the Conservative research department at Smith Square, Westminster, his path eased by a recommendation from Buckingham Palace, that “he worked his way up from the inside, floor by floor”. Cameron was the consummate Conservative insider: charming, entitled, fluent, and persuasive.

Starmer was, by contrast, not a Labour insider as Ed Miliband or Rachel Reeves were, or a product of the trade union movement like Angela Rayner. Nor was he articulate in the language of Labour politics, with its arcane codes and procedures, its pieties, and its self-savouring romanticism. He came late to the party and was not even a member of the party until a few months before he stood to become the prospective parliamentary candidate for Holborn.

Then in 2019 he was introduced to Morgan McSweeney, the book’s dominant and most fascinating character and from whose point of view much of it is told. McSweeney grew up in West Cork and as a young “slacker” came to London to work on building sites. He later spent time in California and worked on a kibbutz in Israel, before returning to England to study politics and marketing at Middlesex University. Inspired by Tony Blair, he joined the Labour Party and by 2001 was working at its headquarters at Millbank Tower, little noticed but determined. “The Irishman”, as he is described throughout as if he were some kind of legendary character in a Scorsese movie, rose in the party from the inside while never seeking elected office.

I got to know McSweeney, now Starmer’s all-powerful chief of staff, when he was running Labour Together, a secretive network (it later became a think tank) of MPs, intellectuals and wealthy donors that had been established to plot how to win back control of the party from the Corbynite left. From the outset the mission of Labour Together, the authors say, “was division”. It was more than that: the aspiration was not only to defeat the left but to develop a patriotic social democratic politics through which Labour could reconnect with the working class and reflect the mood in the country as the Brexit wars raged on.

Through working in local government, McSweeney had experience of battling the radical left in Lambeth and the far right in Barking and Dagenham. He relished a fight. Unusually for a Labour strategist, he was also used to winning those fights, apart from when, in 2015, he led the neo-Blairite Liz Kendall’s doomed campaign for the party leadership.

The Irishman, who “believed identity politics was an electoral dead end”, understood what Labour must do: ruthlessly marginalise the Corbynites and put the country before party. Labour Together was in search of someone competent and pragmatic, a leader among MPs who could master a brief and implement a plan. This then was the project and it pre-existed Starmer whose boundless ambition in time led him to McSweeney; Starmer never attended Labour Together dinners.

Get In is billed as an “inside story” and it reads as if the authors were alongside them as McSweeney and Starmer grappled with multiple crises as they struggled to make Labour relevant again – the scourge of antisemitism inside the party, the banishment of Corbyn, the Covid pandemic and the Partygate scandal, the Israel-Hamas war and how it radicalised British Muslims, and so on. There is much reported speech, and scenes are recreated novelistically such as when Starmer’s closest aides persuaded him not to resign as leader after an abject by-election defeat in Hartlepool in 2021. There are some cutting one-liners (McSweeney summaries Lisa Nandy’s thinking thus: “No gender, no borders, no Queen”) and nuanced character studies. The most incisive are of Shabana Mahmood, a brilliant campaigner and the only Muslim in the cabinet, and Sue Gray, the career civil servant who was Starmer’s chief of staff until she was sacked in October 2024 after the Downing Street operation became factionalised and dysfunctional.

Starmer’s decision-making is characterised throughout by an unsentimental ruthlessness. During periods of intense intra-party conflict, he will deliberate and then do whatever he thinks is necessary to maintain his position and keep on track to win. When he ran for the leadership, he did so from the left as the self-described “unity candidate”. He had remained to the bitter end in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet because he correctly calculated that the party’s next leader would not come from outside it. The Ten Pledges he made to appeal to the left-wing Labour membership were promptly dropped after he won. Job done.

Colleagues say that Starmer gives them a lot of responsibility and agency “and expects them to get on with it”. They also say that his government lacks an overarching purpose and coherent politics that can join up and explain everything it is trying to do. Ministers have no script to follow, no story to tell the country. What then does Starmer believe in, Labour insiders ask. More than this, what does he want for the country beyond a nebulous desire for progressive change?

Keir Starmer emerges from the book as a kind of anti-politics politician. According to the authors, he is “forever uninterested in the politics of politics itself”. His personal ratings are poor, and his government is already deeply unpopular. Reform UK is rising fast in many Labour-held constituencies. Winning the election against a discredited and loathed Conservative Party was the easy part of “the project”, as it turned out.