Morgan McSweeney says Labour was not prepared for government in first interview

Labour did not do enough to prepare for power in the run up to the UK general election, Keir Starmer’s former top aide has said.

In his first media interview, Morgan McSweeney said he was speaking publicly because he needed to “move on to a new chapter” in his life, after his period as Downing Street chief of staff and as a senior Labour strategist.

Speaking to the BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast, McSweeney was asked why he believed Labour had faced so much turmoil in its short two years in office, culminating with his former boss Starmer’s resignation as UK prime minister.

I loved working for Labour Party and for a Labour Government. It was an incredible privilege. I loved managing election campaigns, and that means that you don’t have a public voice, and you should not be a visible character. That didn’t work out well for me

The former Labour strategist, who is from Macroom, Co Cork, told the BBC: “I think that we didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to be in.

“We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government, and I think we didn’t have enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant, how to prepare for it, what that meant for the state, how the state needed to be reformed, because in lots of ways the state is really out of shape and is unable to deliver for people.”

People across the country are “frustrated” and have seen politicians break promises time and again, he suggested, adding: “You have to deliver quite quickly for people for them to see the change quickly, and I think we didn’t come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that, and why that was important.”

McSweeney, who remained a private figure during his time in Downing Street, has only made one other public-facing appearance, when he spoke at the Foreign Affairs Committee in April to answer questions about his role in appointing Peter Mandelson as the ambassador to the US.

Asked by the BBC why he had now chosen to give an interview, Mr McSweeney said: “I need to move on to a new chapter in my life, and to do that, I need to close the old one, and to make clear that that’s happening.

“I loved working for Labour Party and for a Labour Government. It was an incredible privilege.

“I loved managing election campaigns, and that means that you don’t have a public voice, and you should not be a visible character. That didn’t work out well for me.

“I became more and more visible the longer I stayed in the job, but I thought I needed to become a bit more public to let people know who I am, and to close a chapter on the past.”

McSweeney told the BBC he has no plans to return to frontline politics, and said he was “professionally moving in a completely different direction now”.

He suggested he was interested in “the future of democratic security, the impact AI will have, what the Russians are doing in eastern Europe, what is happening with these tech giants, and the risk that that brings”.

He added: “I have no intention of coming back to British politics in the foreseeable. I can’t say forever, but certainly for the next few years.”

However, he did say he had been out door-knocking for Labour during the Holyrood election in Lanarkshire, where he lives with his wife Imogen Walker, the Labour MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.