Morgan McSweeney, the former chief of staff to Keir Starmer, has admitted that Labour did not properly prepare for power ahead of their 2024 general election win.
Speaking to the BBC’s Nick Robinson, McSweeney said Labour had not prepared enough for “what kind of world we were going to” compared to the last time the party were in power.
McSweeney ran Labour’s 2024 general election campaign before becoming Starmer’s head of political strategy. Three months after Labour won a landslide in the election, he was appointed to the chief of staff role. However, McSweeney resigned from the post earlier this year over his role in Peter Mandelson’s appointment as the UK’s ambassador to the US.
In his first media interview, McSweeney said Labour should have been “way more optimistic” in its first months in power.
He told the BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson 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.”
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On Labour’s first few months in power, McSweeney conceded that the party should have been “more optimistic.”
“You have to deliver quite quickly for people, for them to see the change quickly,” he said. “And we didn’t come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that.”
Pointing to Labour’s controversial decision to remove winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, a policy they eventually U-turned on, McSweeney admitted this had been a mistake.
He stood by the decision to means-test winter fuel payments so that better-off pensioners did not receive them, adding that the threshold for claiming them had been set at “too low a level”.
On Starmer’s resignation last month, McSweeney said he did not have all the answers for the prime minister’s downfall and that he was “still processing” events.
He added that he had found it too sad to watch all of Starmer’s resignation speech.