Book review: The Irishman behind Labour’s return to power in Britain

There's an old, perhaps apocryphal, story told about Michael D Higgins, long before his presidency, which those who read this book will get the significance of. In the early 1980s, when Labour was involved in one of its interminable, internecine battles about its future and whether it should enter coalition, the party leader Frank Cluskey noticed Higgins, usually a firebrand on such matters, was absent from a crucial meeting.

On hearing Higgins had gone on an emergency trip to Nicaragua, Cluskey is reported to have said: “Typical Michael D, taking the easy option of saving the world over saving the Labour Party.”

While Higgins was off in Central America offering brotherly solidarity to the Sandinista revolutionaries, Labour was tearing apart in Ireland, and its sister party in Britain was doing something similar.

The early 1980s was the nadir for the modern British Labour Party. It was wracked by division over its attitude towards nationalisation, nuclear disarmament, membership of the EEC, the power of the unions, and ultimately how to react to Thatcherism. It was routed in the 1983 election, losing to the Conservatives by 15 percentage points, receiving only 27.6% of the vote. In the end, it was her fellow Tories who got rid of Labour’s bête noire, Margaret Thatcher. But Labour spent close to two lonely decades in opposition before it figured out how to win back power.

The lesson of Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 was that Labour had to offer the British people a platform it could vote for, not one that made Labour feel good about itself. If the Blair wing of Labour looked back to the party’s dark days in opposition between ’79 and ’97 with a sense of despair, those years were a badge of pride for Jeremy Corbyn, who shared many of Higgins’ policy beliefs. 

Between Corbyn’s surprise victory in the leadership contest of 2015 to his resignation some four years later in the aftermath of his routing by Boris Johnson in the 2019 general election, Labour revisited the battles of the 1980s with undisguised relish.

Notwithstanding his narrow defeat in the 2017 general election, Corbyn was always happier basking in the purity of his stances, rather than trying to win power to get something done in government.

The closeness of that election had far more to do with the ineptitude of Theresa May and the Tories than with any affection for Corbyn or the purity of his Labour politics. One of the criticisms of Keir Starmer by his Conservative opponents in the July 2024 election was that he was not fit to serve as prime minister given he stayed in the shadow cabinet amid allegations of antisemitism that had dogged Corbyn. 

Other senior figures in the party, particularly Rachel Reeves, the current chancellor of the exchequer, refused out of principle to have anything to do with a man they believed would consign Labour to the opposition benches forever given how left he had brought the party.

But Starmer, who knew the bitterness and craziness of Labour in the Michael Foot years of the early ’80s, understood that to win any leadership contest post-Corbyn, he would have to appeal to the left-wing membership. Once he had the leadership, he could refashion Labour as a centrist party and devise a platform to win power.

Or, if we’re to believe this book, that was not Starmer’s vision but Morgan McSweeney’s of Macroom, a man too young to remember the 1980s, but who came of age politically in Tony Blair’s Britain.

McSweeney left Cork for London as a 17-year-old in 1994, wandered around America and a kibbutz in Israel, before returning to Britain in 1998, where he joined Labour, having been inspired by Blair.

The first chapter of this intriguing work on Starmer’s Labour is called “The Irishman” and that Irishman, McSweeney, appears on the very first page, on the very last, and is the dominant figure on every page in between. 

Irish readers will read this with a bit of scepticism. Young Morgan is depicted as a bit of loner. As his contemporaries played Gaelic football, he was belting a sliotar against a wall for hours on end with his “hurl”. A hurl? In Cork? Really?

In this same paragraph, we are told Macroom is a hotbed of Blueshirts, with a barrel of McSweeneys canvassing for Fine Gael, the “party of Ireland’s petit bourgeois” and Garret FitzGerald, a “short-lived taoiseach who broke bread with Margaret Thatcher”.

This would be the same FitzGerald who spent close to five years as taoiseach, more than Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak served together as prime minister, and also longer than such grandees as Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan in the 1970s.

Oh well, it could be worse. Fianna Fáil is depicted as populated by “gombeen men — practitioners of petty parish pump corruption”.

I am happy to report the authors, two distinguished political journalists, know more about Britain than they do about Ireland. They give a riveting account of the Starmer-McSweeney axis that brought Labour back to power from the humiliation of 2019, and that banished the grim years of Corbynism.

Despite the fact the 174 seat Labour landslide majority in July 2024 was won on just 33.7% of the vote, this was no pyrrhic victory. Labour improved its vote by only 1.6% in 2024, but in Britain it’s all about seats given the first-past-the-post system.

One of the themes of this book is that both these centrist men are as zealous in their approach to politics as those of a more ideological bent such as Thatcher and Corbyn. 

McSweeney views Corbyn’s politics as not just wrong but evil. This is the language of the zealot. And this is a book about a zealot’s successful efforts to crush the left of the party and remake it as one that wants to be in power to make the lives of ordinary British citizens better. This was not always Labour’s way.

This is what McSweeney understands more than anyone in the contemporary Labour movement. He gets the better of the civil servant Sue Gray, the daughter of Irish immigrants, who Starmer had chosen to be his chief of staff.

Perhaps because of its sources, and this is a book written almost entirely from anonymous interviews, the book is kinder towards McSweeney than it is to Gray, who it portrays as power hungry, but if anyone is desperate for power it is McSweeney, and indeed Starmer.

Ultimately, this book paints Starmer as a puppet of McSweeney. In its last paragraph we are told: “There was much that the prime minister did not understand about politics.”

But I wonder. Advisers always seem indispensable until they’re not. Just look at Dominic Cummings. But for now, Morgan McSweeney, as this fascinating book tells us, has achieved the task of saving Britain’s Labour Party. 

The volatility of British politics means he will not be able to bask in that achievement, but he has four years to consolidate it. He will need them.