Illustration by Pig Meat

Whether we are at the beginning of the end for Keir Starmer or just the end of the beginning, even those close to the Prime Minister appear to have concluded the game is up following the resignation of his closest aide and confidant, Morgan McSweeney, on 8 February. “Look, Keir will fight on,” one friend and ally told me, “but this government is over.”

True or not, we are back where we have so often been of late, facing the prospect of yet another prime minister – our seventh in eight years – as the incumbent clings to power, sacrificing his aides and allies to survive, only to find his grip on power weakening all the while, losing first his authority, and then his purpose.

Theresa May suffered almost this exact fate. Boris Johnson too. Crises begetting resignations; resignations begetting crises. In such circumstances, the mood of the country shifts dangerously. In Ben Pimlott’s 1992 biography of Harold Wilson he writes of an atmosphere of contempt which took hold in the late 1960s, as Wilson lost his authority to govern but could not be removed from office. “A collective revulsion began to take effect,” Pimlott observes, “directed against the man who… [for many] was the incubus of the nation’s ills.” Much the same was true of John Major. Now it is true of Starmer.

Yet beneath each of these frothy political crises lie deeper historic currents pulling British politics across the rocks. In the 1960s, the root cause of Wilson’s political crisis was not simply personal failure, but an ideological one – “a crisis of belief”, as Pimlott puts it. Wilson had won power on a promise of sweeping economic reform – “change” – after 13 years of Tory rule. Yet, he was unable to deliver. National planning had been his great promise, the apparent route out of our terminal decline. Yet, its failure robbed not only him of his own political purpose, but that of the Labour Party itself, leaving an ideological hole that none of his successors – Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot and finally Neil Kinnock – were able to fill. And so Margaret Thatcher did.

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It would take the emergence of Tony Blair in 1994 for the Labour Party to find a new form of modernisation to replace Wilson’s white heat. New Labour, it is easy to forget, was not just Thatcherism with a smiley face, but a promise of national renewal based on an embrace of globalisation, European integration and constitutional revolution. This was the progressive ideology of the millennium. Yet, like Wilson’s early radicalism, it also eventually failed, leaving Labour rudderless.

Iraq was the first blow, robbing New Labour of its moral authority. But then came the financial crisis, which robbed it of its political economy. New Labour never recovered. Scotland’s brush with independence made a mockery of devolution as a soothing rather than agitating reform. Brexit was a further blow, of course, robbing the party of its guiding principle abroad, even if, for a few short years, a tantalising new mission offered itself up – to block withdrawal. Boris Johnson killed this hope in 2019.

But then something strange happened: the chance of a gentle restoration under Keir Starmer; not quite a Blairite but pragmatic and speaking the language of “change” once more. Now, after 18 months in office, the Labour right lies prostrate, discredited first by its own failures and then, finally, by the revelations of criminal degeneracy contained in the Epstein files. Voters are repulsed seeing, not for the first time, Peter Mandelson as the final manifestation of all they have come to hold in contempt. If 2019 was the final defeat of the Labour left, today the Labour right looks just as discredited.

There is a certain tragic irony that Starmer and McSweeney have found themselves dragged into the political abyss in this final Blairite Götterdämmerung. Neither Keir Starmer nor Morgan McSweeney were – or are – in any sense true Blairite believers, acolytes of the old faith. Their partnership was largely a pragmatic marriage of convenience, bringing together the organisational politics of McSweeney’s old Labour right with the instincts of Starmer’s metropolitan progressivism.

McSweeney, in fact, had spent much of his time between the Brexit referendum and Starmer’s election as Labour leader in a behind-the-scenes battle to stop a new centrist party being set up which he believed – and still believes – was being orchestrated by Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell. It was at this point that Mandelson and McSweeney forged their alliance, convinced they could save the Labour Party for its old right. Starmer, meanwhile, spent much of this time serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, having actively supported Ed Miliband in his battle for control over the party with his Blairite brother David.

McSweeney’s scepticism of Blair was not simply tribal either, concerned solely with the interests of the Labour Party. It was ideological. With politics rooted in the old right tradition of the party, McSweeney was always particularly contemptuous of what he saw as Blairite metropolitan liberalism. To McSweeney, the fatal flaw of Blairism was its lack of concern for the interests of the working class. Instinctively, McSweeney was happiest at home campaigning, and loathed the international progressivism that looked to California or New York for answers to Britain’s problems. Here was the Fine Gaeler from Cork sent to Britain to teach it to love itself again.

McSweeney also brought into government a dash of Blue Labour radicalism which further estranged him from the Blairite cause, leaving Mandelson ill at ease. Close to figures like Jonathan Rutherford, McSweeney was even claimed as “one of ours” by the controversial Labour peer and Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman. It is certainly true that McSweeney was privately more “blue” in his analysis than much of the Labour Party has ever been comfortable with, scathing about some of the most egregious social failures of New Labour’s time in office. Though generally quietly spoken, with the air of a reflective academic, McSweeney could be stirred into passion particularly when discussing the failures of Labour councils to protect young British girls from the grooming gangs that operated, unchecked, for years across much of provincial England. He would become angry at what he saw as the systemic cover-up of these crimes by councillors and authorities more concerned about accusations of racism than the lives of working-class girls.

When discussing immigration, McSweeney also drew heavily from Blue Labour thinking, which itself is influenced by conservative philosophers like Roger Scruton, who was a close friend of Glasman’s. Britain was “home”, McSweeney would argue, a place around which you had to build fences and walls, but where this did not mean you hated your neighbours. Some of this thinking would make its way into Starmer’s speeches, including his first as Prime Minister to Labour Party Conference, though usually so carefully diluted it barely registered.

All of this placed him, if not in direct opposition to Blair, instinctively and emotionally at odds with the central tenets of New Labour. And much as Blair was not McSweeney’s hero, nor did Blair think much of McSweeney. After one meeting between the pair, Blair was distinctly unimpressed, as he was – and remains – of Starmer. Blair saw in McSweeney and Starmer a hopeless combination of British parochialism, Blue Labour nostalgia and political naivety ill-equipped to modernise the UK.

The tragic irony for McSweeney was that Starmer’s 18 months as Prime Minister have only vindicated Blair’s central analysis of their project. McSweeney and Starmer might have identified what they disliked most about the excesses of New Labour, but they never developed an alternative political economy of their own that might replace it. In place of Blairism there was no theory of political reform or coherent critique of British state failure, no analysis of Britain’s future place in the world or any kind of distinct moral mission. All there was was a promise to “clean things up” as Starmer put it to me. The mission became, in essence, conservative: to protect the settlement erected by Blair and eroded over the 20 years since his departure. Britain could thrive if it could only begin to live within its means, attract more foreign investment, reassure the bond markets and return a sense of “service” to government. After years of chaos, mere stability would be change. And this would be enough.

Where there was distinct radicalism – from McSweeney’s Blue Labour instincts – there was no mandate. McSweeney and Starmer had not fought an ideological battle to bring Blue Labour to government, as Wilson had done for socialist modernisation in the 1960s and Blair for liberal progressivism 30 years later. This was largely because Starmer never really believed in it in the first place and McSweeney, though a reflective thinker, was always more of an operator than political theorist. And so, the pair offered a programme without a programme, a government without ideas or the mandate to enact them.

Now we have seen the curious downfall of the Starmer-McSweeney partnership in power. McSweeney pulling the party right, but always checked by both the Prime Minister’s instincts and those of the wider party. Without a clear programme, the party below them quickly split into their tribal camps. The left looked to its champions in cabinet – Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner, even Richard Hermer, the Attorney General – and the right to the one group that still had both the ideology and institutional wherewithal to get things done: the Blairites. The Tony Blair Institute fed the ideas: on AI, ID cards, NHS reform. Then came the people: first Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff who became Starmer’s national security adviser; then Liz Lloyd, another Blair veteran who joined Starmer’s No 10 as policy adviser. Tim Allan followed, a former Blair spin doctor who became Starmer’s director of communications. And, of course, there was Peter Mandelson. The ideological hole at the heart of the Starmer project had brought Blairism back to government, only this time without the money or the conviction.

This resuscitation of dead ideology by default is not unique to McSweeney and Starmer. It’s the doom loop Britain has been trapped in not just for the past 18 months, but for much of the past 18 years. Denied the economic confidence that had sustained his chancellorship by a global crisis, Gordon Brown was forced to spend three years in office fending off economic collapse. For six years David Cameron sought to inflate the old economy which had been lost in 2008, convinced that Chinese investment would propel the City of London back to where it had been before its exposure. This attempt collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions in 2016, as the wave of conservative populism swept Britain out of the EU and Donald Trump into power in the US. Then came the years of crisis, in which the UK cycled through one prime minister after another, each without an idea or ideology of their own. Theresa May relied on Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill for her initial burst of radicalism; Boris Johnson on Dominic Cummings; and finally Keir Starmer, who sub-contracted his ideology to McSweeney.

In each case, the visionaries in government were not the prime ministers but their advisers, each of whom was convinced that their parties needed to abandon old shibboleths to survive, yet could never quite persuade them to do so. In the end, each found themselves hated figures within their own parties and were eventually replaced by conventional establishment fixers: Tory centrist Gavin Barwell for Timothy and Hill; City fixer Dan Rosenfield for Dominic Cummings; and now, who knows who, for McSweeney. In post-crash Britain, radicals burn out, and the managers manage on.

In each case – Timothy, Cummings and McSweeney – the chiefs of staff came to be seen as scornful of the parties they were meant to represent. “Morgan’s problem was that his politics became the politics of contempt,” one former colleague told me. “Contempt for the left, for the MPs, even, you suspected, of the Prime Minister.” This, in effect, is how the appointment of Mandelson has come to be seen, too – contemptuous of women, of the left in general, of standards in public life. The result, in each case, was loss of control. After six years in charge of Labour, the right of the party has lost its authority. Those connected with its various tribes – notably Wes Streeting, the Blairites’ last great hope – now appear weakened, perhaps fatally so. The big political winners from inside the Labour Party, meanwhile, are the Brownite veterans: Yvette Cooper, John Healey and, perhaps most of all, Ed Miliband, the only figure in this government who holds both a radical vision and an idea of how he wants to achieve it. Whichever way we turn, it seems we are heading back to somewhere in the early 2000s.

At the heart of this political crisis lies something much more fundamental than a factional battle for control of the Labour Party: a “crisis of faith” similar to that which robbed Labour of its purpose at the end of the 1960s. Labour – whether Blairite, Brownite or something more radical – has simply not worked out what to do in an era of next to no economic growth. It has failed to develop an alternative political economy to the one destroyed by the financial crisis. It has failed to develop a programme to reform the state, to modernise the constitution, and to rethink the UK’s place in the world in the face of Brexit, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Its ideology is out of date.

The failure of the Starmer-McSweeney project, then, is not simply the result of the Prime Minister’s political limitations or the misjudgement of his advisers. Its failure is the failure of the system it could not manage – and even, perhaps, the entire generation of those who tried to sustain it.

Everywhere we look, morbid symptoms abound: the state of the British economy; the persistent support for Scottish independence; the grotesque failures of privatised utilities; the absurdities of the housing market and university sector; the backlog in the courts; the asylum hotels and NHS waiting times. The Epstein scandal is at once unrelated to these systemic crises of governance and yet entirely representative. The revelations buried within the files reveal the reality of modern power, which much of the electorate feel even if they could not know. They understand that the system does not function fairly, that power and wealth are hoarded; that capital and politics have fused together. And they are furious about it.

The response to this cannot be what it has been: a sense of managed deterioration, the country forced to accept the steady decline of what it holds dear: jury trials, functioning A&E departments, support for disadvantaged children, public safety and so on. There is a danger that all the government is offering is a slightly worse version tomorrow of what was already considered inadequate yesterday.

The Epstein files, however, are a reminder of the guiding purpose of social democracy itself: to democratise economic power through the ballot box. And, today, we can even add to this mission a new and even more existential goal: to save liberal democracy from oligarchic authoritarianism. Here are missions the Labour Party can believe in, because it has always believed in them. Writing in Tribune in 1957, Aneurin Bevan, the great hero of the Labour left, warned of letting “market forces… take the place of political responsibility” in the management of the economic life of the country. At the time, Bevan was warning against entanglement in the European Economic Community, then coming into existence. But his point remains. “Socialists cannot at one and the same time call for economic planning and accept the verdict of free competition, no matter how extensive the area it covers.” The Labour Party exists to exert political control over the market to protect the interests of ordinary people. In a world of global capital, tax havens, multinational corporations – and the shadow world of power brokers revealed in the Epstein files – the purpose of social democracy is obvious.

The challenge, however, is that in facing up to this defining purpose of social democracy, Labour would have to confront the kind of difficult decisions it has so far preferred to avoid. Can the interests of global capital be tamed by a single state alone or can it only be done through European cooperation? But even if the answer to that question lies on the continent, it is one thing to declare that Britain must break with America, and another to follow that logic to its conclusion.

Few experts I know believe Europe can achieve independence from the US without an accommodation – of some description – with both China and Russia to bring an end to the war in Ukraine and supply the continent with the kind of cheap energy required to compete with America. Even without such a compromise, is the British left prepared for the kind of accommodation that may be required on the continent itself, which is drifting ever further to the right, and with an EU leadership that hasn’t contemplated anything as grand as treaty change for almost two decades?

Speaking to one former Labour aide recently, I was struck by their prediction for the next general election. Searching for growth, Labour would move inexorably towards Europe and “rejoin”, they said, while Reform moved inexorably towards America. It would be a second referendum in all but name – a return to the single market, customs union or even the EU on one ticket; further withdrawal from Europe and the court of human rights on the other. Underneath this lies an even starker choice: China or America; one way, the electrification of our economy; the other, the embrace of Trump’s petro-driven alternative. Which way Britain? For now, though, such questions are being ducked or hidden, as with almost all the difficult choices about the British state. The government, meanwhile, plummets towards the ground, in political free fall, shorn of the ideas – or the mandate – necessary to pull itself free. “Keir will be talking to his friends and thinking to himself there’s no decent replacement, the Western alliance is on the line, all these things,” one of his long-time friends told me. “Morgan, meanwhile, will be cycling through all the usual stages of grief, anger, guilt, and all of that. But ultimately, he, they, are in denial about the state of things.” Perhaps we all are.

[Further reading: A letter to Keir Starmer’s new Chiefs of Staff]

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