Labour did not do enough to prepare for power in the run-up to the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer’s former top aide has admitted. Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former chief-of-staff, said the party should have been “way more optimistic” in its first few months in government. He said early mistakes — down to a lack of planning — including the decision to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners, “defined the government in a way that really did us a lot of damage”.
Lack of preparation exposed early
McSweeney’s comments come after Starmer announced his resignation as Prime Minister last month and prepares to step down on July 20 — just two years on from the party’s landslide general election victory. He told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “We didn't prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to. We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government. 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. 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.”
Winter fuel payment cut a mistake
McSweeney recalled that before the election in early 2024, he started “to realise we hadn’t done enough to prepare for government and I think we got exposed for that early”. Shortly after entering office, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the controversial decision to axe the winter fuel payments for all but the very poorest pensioners in order to plug a black hole in the public finances left behind by the Tories. Weeks later, Starmer also issued a gloomy message from the Downing Street Rose Garden, telling the public Labour’s first Budget would be “painful”.
McSweeney said while the challenges were much more severe than had been expected, he added: “I think we should have been way more optimistic when we started.” He admitted it was a mistake to cut winter fuel payments — a decision the party partially U-turned on last summer — adding: “[It] speaks to not having enough of a plan. A new team came, saw there was massive overspend going on, felt the need to rein it in and I think it was a mistake, I think it was one of those early mistakes and it defined the government in a way that really did us a lot of damage.” Asked whether No10 should have overruled the Treasury, he said: “Yeah, in hindsight yeah, definitely… it was a mistake.”
Trump’s bizarre call about foxes and wind turbines
McSweeney also said Donald Trump claimed in his first call with Starmer that foxes were becoming too fat to recognise after eating dead birds killed by wind turbines. He said the PM “held it together” when the remark was made, while officials in the room were struggling to do so. The former Downing Street aide also said Trump was “much funnier than I expected him to be”. He said: “The first call that Keir had with the President, he got into a conversation about windmills, and he started saying, ‘Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills’. Fine, he was making his point, he’s made that publicly enough times. Then he started to say, the windmills are killing your birds, birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds.”
McSweeney added: “At this point the officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves, because it was extremely funny, but this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the president, and everyone wanted to be professional, but were struggling to hold it together. He went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds and became lazy, they became fat, and as they became so fat, people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were, because they were too fat. I thought, this is just going to be so, so very, very different.”
McSweeney on leaving government and speaking out
In his first interview since resigning from government in February over the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, McSweeney said he was speaking publicly because he needed to “move on to a new chapter” in his life. Asked why he had now chosen to give an interview, McSweeney told the BBC: “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.”
