1. This story is really a commentary on the activities of Keir Starmer and, more importantly, Morgan McSweeney. In fact, given the conversations, insights, and reflections on who was thinking and saying what and when from "sources close to the leadership", McSweeney should have been given a writing credit.
2. Virtually all the dirty tricks the Labour right pulled during the Jeremy Corbyn years (including some not covered previously) are confessed to. The barefaced lying, the arm twisting, the diddling with delegates, and the breaking of electoral law, everything is included. According to Labour legend, when John Spellar read John Golding's vainglorious The Hammer of the Left, he was pissed off that the right's dirty tricks were out in the open for all to see. Reading this book must have made his face melt.
3. On their co-author McSweeney, there are two mentions of planning meetings taking place at his mansion. Which reminded me that McSweeney is actually from a bourgeois background, and helps explain his antipathy to anything smacking of working class politics. Helps, but does not account for all. The pen portrait of McSweeney that emerges is of a bureaucrat who is hungry to smash the left and win elections. What he actually stands for is thin on the ground. There is nothing about a commitment to improving the health service, helping the vulnerable, and making sure education delivers equality of opportunity - which are the values even the most vacuous, tank-grown backbench Starmerite would admit to. But McSweeney does appear to care about immigration and hammering those who, like he once did, want to make their fortunes on these shores. In any other context, McSweeney would fit right in to the contemporary Tory party or, for that matter, Reform.
4. This, its predecessor volume (Left Out), and Tim Shipman's Brexit/Tory collapse quartet (All Out War, Fall Out, No Way Out, and Out), all share the same methodology: of politics boiled down to personalities and the clashes between them. This is soap opera for boring people. The interplay of interest and individuals is a matter of coincidence. In Get In, for instance, there is some discussion of Trevor Chinn and Waheed Ali and what they have done for the Labour right. In the latter's case, there's some treatment of freebiegate and his having once had a Number 10 pass, and his apparent veto on measures that would curb wealth concentration. But his support for the party is presented as an individual foible, not an exercise of his - and by extension - common oligarchical interests. As such this, like Shipman's work, political comment generally, and mainstream politics' obsession with biographies evidences a distorted picture of politics that they all share.
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6 comments:
I am not interested in reading that book.
However I have long been interested in how sociopaths gain power and McS sounds like one.
The ideas of Andrew Lobaczweski have had a resurgence lately. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a secret book in the USSR called Political Ponerology (=the study of political evil), which is hard going but fascinating about how sociopaths grab power and keep it.
There's a modern site which examines the subject in a more accessible way: https://ponerology.substack.com/
He must have some ideological beliefs otherwise why choose to work for Labour? He could have been advising the Tories for the last 14 years. And his hatred of the Left must have something to do with his belief that they damage the delivery of a 'better world'. You must presume what Labour is supposed to be delivering reflects his ideological position - new housing estates, Streetings NHS, bearing down on scroungers, making plans with Macron, defending Ukraine. Doing as little as is respectable to criticise Israel and so on. It can't just be the desire to inflict pain on leftwingers that gets him up in the morning.
Schoolboy error, anon.
If we assume hypothetically that he has no principles other than personal vanity and acquisition (typical of psychopaths), then he most likely chose to work for Labour because that's where he could find his opening. He looked at the organisations with a real chance of gaining power, the likely timelines, and the heft of his own contact networks within them, and the Tories did not come out top.
Just look at how and why Polanski defected from the Lib Dems for an extremely topical example of how it works for career politicians.
Do you mean psychopaths, JulianJ?
Their relationship to modern human society and power within it is certainly an extremely important study area right now - timely to the point of being critically overdue.
See also the works of Dr Clive Boddy.
Anon2, does it not occur to you that people can have a mix of motives, and that they might change their views over time?
People get involved in politics for many reasons, not only ideological or for self-promotion. They may join one party then find that party's ideology shifting in a direction that they are uncomfortable with. It's not unheard of!
There is also the little matter of how power can change those that exercise it. Usually not for the better, and rarely in the direction of humility, compassion or openness. Politicians often seem to improve as people once they have shed power, and stepped out of the daily back-and-forth of party point scoring. Its as if the system brings out the worst and suppresses the best qualities. It should be no surprise that this tends to select for people most endowed with the favoured qualities.
Yes, thank you Sean. All that is true, and none of it changes the fact that merely having chosen to work for Labour does not necessarily mean that McSweeney has any ideology - other than opportunism and narrow self-interest - driving his behaviour.
As you rightly point out, his extremely socially destructive behaviour (being currently on track to gift the government benches to the far right on a plate) could have other origins too. Psychopaths and their behaviour are only one piece of the puzzle, albeit one which looks rather like a centerpiece.
And sure, the same applies to Polanski. It may be coincidence that his defection from the Lib Dems followed their repeated refusal to nominate him to a position that could advance his career. It may be coincidence that, now that he has found a way to the spotlight, the establishment media seem to be treating him with kid gloves, as if he isn't in reality considered a threat to any vested interest.
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