The Banality of Morgan McSweeney

I see there was a strange effort to rehabilitate Labour Together, the right wing think tank/pressure group set up by Morgan McSweeney as his vehicle to organise against Jeremy Corbyn and the left. It's black and white in the book he co-wrote with Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire. Yet, in Sienna Rodgers's piece for PoliticsHome, we hear claims this was not the case at all.

Labour Together was set up as a fluffy broad front, and not asan overtly factional vehicle for the right as (apparently) portrayed. We're reminded that "Lisa Nandy – Starmer’s leadership rival – was a Labour Together director. Rachel Reeves, Shabana Mahmood, Wes Streeting, Steve Reed and Bridget Phillipson partook, yet so did Jon Cruddas, Jim McMahon, Ed Miliband and Lucy Powell." These characters all went their separate ways when the leadership contest began. Keir Starmer, for his part, was nowhere to be seen where Labour Together was concerned. Rodgers goes on to quote Neal Lawson, chair of Compass and one of the main movers behind the new Mainstream initiative, as labelling Labour Together as the most cynical political operation he's ever witnessed. It looked open and welcoming, but it only had factionalism in mind. This invites an anonymous response that the levels of bad faith involved was "not feasible". Has this person spent any time in politics? "McSweeney is simply a talented organiser who was genuinely interested in bridge-building before figures such as Peter Mandelson reshaped his thinking."

Naivete or yet more dishonesty? The argument against this credulous drivel is, at that time, 20 years working in and around the Labour right, McSweeney's chastening experience as the organiser of Liz Kendall's openly Blairite leadership campaign in 2015 amply demonstrates that he was the man he is today then. We know from multiple accounts, not just the Pogrund and Maguire, that he concluded underhanded methods were the only way Labour could be returned to its rightful owners. The pluralism of Labour Together was only part of the deception. It drew in different strands because, by his own admission, at launch he had no idea who the standard bearer for the right was going to be. Indeed, in this initial period, for McSweeney even a soft left figure might have fit the bill. Like Lisa Nandy who was considered as such at that point. However, by the time of Labour's defeat Starmer had presented himself as a figure that could be steered, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I know the illusio of politics presents itself as a public service, politicians are motivated as such, and that disagreements arise from the tension between different traditions and ideas. But once politics is apprehended for what it is, i.e. the clash of contradictory and often antagonistic interests that are variously contained and constrained - and sometimes not - by the constitutional rules of the game, the sorts of skulduggery McSweeney has pulled off is entirely explicable. It is not a stretch to believe industrial scale lying and deception takes place. Indeed, one only needs to open a newspaper and glance at the politics coverage to know this is the case. Rather, the behaviour of the Prime Minister's right hand man in the Labour Party is simultaneously outrageous and utterly banal.

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