Get In — The Inside Story Of Labour Under Starmer
Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, Vintage, £12.99

THIS devastating account of the rise and falling years of Keir Starmer’s Labour government really does reveal the inner workings of the project.

Times and Sunday Times journalists, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, chronicle the parallel progression of Starmer and his chief collaborator Morgan McSweeney, a man determined to destroy Corbyn’s Labour and build a new right-wing edifice of obedient servants. All he required was an acceptable face for the project, who happens to be Starmer. The two men seem to share the same goal, with Starmer ambitious and utterly determined to become PM, no matter what the cost.

So the plotting and scheming begins, in the early stages, with meetings at Jenny Chapman’s house in Camden. Then, other groups in other places.

Starmer, though, is as ruthless as McSweeney, effectively getting rid of his cohort of inner support after the narrow Batley and Spen by-election victory in 2021. Then, the Blairites come in.

Labour Together, gestated from Blue Labour, is the initial vehicle to destroy the left. Shabana Mahmood and Conor Mcginn are two leading figures in the fight against the left. Mahmood does much heavy lifting across the party but is screened out of the picture, despite her Muslim heritage, at the time of the Gaza crisis. Steve Reed is another key player.

There is an honourable mention for the Morning Star, as a must read for rightwinger John Spellar to see what his enemies were doing and celebrate any former hard-left adversaries coming up in the obits.

There are some intriguing insights such as when, earlier, Dominic Cummings contacted former Corbyn spokesperson Matt Zarb Cousins, suggesting that if Corbyn’s Labour backed Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the Tories would split, enabling Corbyn to win a subsequent election, and promising to fund the NHS and public services.

Another is McSweeney preparing for government, in a clandestine meeting with Michael Gove.

The overall impression of Starmer, though, is of a man crashing from crisis to crisis, only nominally in charge but willing to throw anyone under the bus to save his own skin. Casualties range from Corbyn and Louise Haigh to Sue Gray and, in the end, McSweeney himself. Angela Rayner is sidelined before she falls from grace over her tax issues, despite having been one of the more effective ministers.

Maguire and Pogrund succeed in producing what comes across as a fly on the wall account of the Starmer years. What is striking is how mythical the facade of competence, that Starmer and co endeavour to put across, actually is. Since being elected the government has just crashed from disaster to disaster — rarely seeming in control.

Gray, brought in as the chief of staff, to ensure a smooth transition to government, seems to do anything but. Instead, Gray seems to alienate everyone, until she has to go. Interestingly, it does not seem that despite popular perception there was any particular feud between Gray and McSweeney; more that she alienated everyone and made government more difficult.

The perception of constant chaos has of course continued. The account ends with the budget in November 2025, so all of the stumbling of this year over Peter Mandelson, McSweeney, the local elections etc has yet to come.

The overall impression is that Starmer is one of the least suited and most incapable individuals to hold the office of Prime Minister, perhaps ever. And as everyone knows there has been quite a bit of competition for that epitaph over recent years. The judgement of Maguire and Pogrund is all the stronger, given that they come over as not unsympathetic to Starmer, particularly in the early stages. They are certainly no Corbynistas. In fact, if I have a criticism it is that they focus too much on McSweeney and his anti-left agenda.

It would also have been useful to have got an explanation as to why the hand-picked 2024 intake of MPs — with the rooting out of anyone perceived to be vaguely left — has resulted in such a rebellious Parliamentary Labour Party. The unstated conclusion must be that, once again, it has been due to Starmer’s uniquely dysfunctional way of running government.

Another area not addressed directly in the book is whether 2024 was, like 1997, a time when Labour were bound to win, whoever they put up. The country was sick of the Tories and wanted them out. Both the Blairite apologists, and those around McSweeney more recently, have sought to build the myth that without radical change to itself Labour could not have got elected. As a result, particularly with Starmer, the party has travelled policy light, bowing to all the neoliberal shibboleths but basically pledging, while deploying the rhetoric of modernisation and change, only to manage the system better rather than replace it.

Get In is a highly readable book, that exposes Starmer and McSweeney’s Labour from the inside — fascinating for those who want to know how things ended up where they are today, and where they may be headed tomorrow.