Is Starmer about to lose his secret weapon over an ‘admin error’?

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is under siege by the Tory attack unit that brought Angela Rayner down. Will it claim another scalp, asks John Rentoul

Morgan McSweeney is – perhaps apocryphally – seen as the brains behind the Labour operation (Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock)

Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is becoming more of a story. He has been built up to semi-mythic status by journalists eager to believe in an organising genius behind Labour’s stunning election victory last year.

So much so that the portrait of “the Irishman” in Get In, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book, has become the received wisdom: of McSweeney as the brains behind the operation to take the Labour Party back from the Corbynites, who settled on Keir Starmer as the frontman.

In this telling, Starmer was a mere passenger – in the book, “one of McSweeney’s acolytes” is quoted as saying, “we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR”, London’s driverless Dockland Light Railway train, and allowed him to think that he was in charge.

The cycle is now turning, and the media have moved on from building McSweeney up to tearing him down – although some of the research is being done on their behalf by the Conservative Party. Kevin Hollinrake, the party chair, yesterday published something he grandly called “The McSweeney Files”. This consists of two documents: a leaked three-page email from Gerald Shamash, the lawyer, to McSweeney in 2021, and a letter from Hollinrake to the Electoral Commission about it.

The leaked email suggests that McSweeney should explain his failure to declare £739,000 of donations to Labour Together, his think tank, which acted as a kind of shadow Labour Party in the Corbyn years, as an “admin error”.

The media have moved from making McSweeney the talk of the town to tearing him down (PA)

Hollinrake has secured headlines for this scoop and hopes to follow up on his success in helping to bring Angela Rayner down. It seems to have been Hollinrake who established that the nature of the trust set up to provide for her son meant that she retained a stake in her constituency house, and was therefore liable for the higher rate of stamp duty on the purchase of her flat in Hove.

It is a minor irony, of course, that the more successful Hollinrake’s attack unit is, the more Reform and the Lib Dems benefit, as the recent Tory record on ethical issues is so poor.

There is no doubt that the undeclared donations are a damaging story for McSweeney, although the story is not new. It was reported by Pogrund in The Sunday Times in November 2023, when Starmer was riding high. Even then, the story was old, because the Electoral Commission had already investigated, told Labour Together off, and fined it £14,000 in 2021.

Pat McFadden, the new work and pensions secretary who drew the short straw for media interviews today, was spikily dismissive. He praised McSweeney, stressed how closely he had worked with him and said: “I’m not surprised the Tories are targeting someone like that.”

He said that the Electoral Commission had dealt with the issue at the time. And it is true that unless there is new information, McSweeney will probably survive. But he is a target. The Tories and the press know that Starmer cannot afford to lose him – even if the offensive DLR metaphor was a colourful exaggeration.

Labour may be in deep trouble, but one way to make it worse would be for Starmer to lose the person who has become his political brain.

The attack on McSweeney is also aiming in the right direction, in that it is going after Starmer on the issue of money and openness in the handling thereof. For a party that made so much of the murky financing of Boris Johnson’s redecoration of the Downing Street flat, Labour people seem surprisingly careless when allegations of sleaze are made about them.

Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Bridget Phillipson were lucky to get away with accepting free tickets or clothes, possibly because those stories broke so soon after the election and before Labour started to plumb its current depths of unpopularity.

They are now in the danger zone where new revelations, or new facts about old ones, could easily force resignations. McSweeney must be more vulnerable than most of the prime minister’s inner circle, because Labour’s opponents know how important he is. Time to reinforce the bunker.