The sacking, or ‘resignation’ of Sue Gray, in the latest Downing Street coup was entirely predictable if you had already read a new book about Labour’s election victory, writes STEVEN DOWNES
Coup control: Morgan McSweeney turning up for the first day in his big new job
Anyone who has read Taken As Red, Anushka Asthana’s new book on “how Labour won big” at July’s General Election, will have totally expected the events and outcomes of the past 48 hours in Downing Street, as a “Croydon clique” (my description, not Asthana’s) tightens its grip on power.
Sue Gray’s resignation last night as No10’s Chief of Staff, barely three months since Keir Starmer’s General Election victory, was entirely predictable, according to the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason, who quotes some insiders as saying that there had been a “personal vendetta” against Gray which “was grossly unfair”. Sources close to Gray (so Gray herself?) have briefed that she is the “victim of a coup”.
That Gray should jump ship less than a week since Cabinet Secretary Simon Case also announced his imminent departure, too (on health grounds, we are told) is for many Westminster observers clear signs that Starmer’s premiership is not going well, and that those lurking in the shadows in the corridors of power already have too much of a say in how things are run.
Asthana’s book offers some clues as to who, and how.
In the 308-page Taken As Red, Morgan McSweeney, an unelected party official, gets mentioned 146 times. By comparison, Steve Reed OBE, the Labour Together MP for Streatham and Croydon North and now a Secretary of State in the new government, rates just 84 name checks. David Evans, until last month the leader’s hand-picked choice as Labour’s General Secretary, gets a mere 21. Only Keir Starmer himself, party leader and now Prime Minister, manages to out-score his political aide (Starmer is mentioned on average twice on every page…).
All so predictable: how Chris Mason and the BBC characterised the Downing Street coup
Gray, the hapless victim of back-stabbing briefings and leaks from No10 within days of taking the job, gets mentioned only half as many times in Asthana’s book as McSweeney, even though she was the person plucked by Starmer from the Civil Service to run his office and organise the election campaign.
A book about last July’s election has entire chapters (including one called “The Morganiser”) devoted to how a small band of political allies from south London managed to seize power at the top of the Labour Party, install Starmer as their leadership candidate and now, with McSweeney as Chief of Staff at No10 with effect from last night, take the reins of power of the entire country.
Or as one observer put it: replacing Gray with someone “whose main qualification appears to have been purging any potential Labour candidate who isn’t 100% on message (with whatever the changing message might be)”.
Diane Abbott, from the Labour back benches, tweeted, “In reality, a hard-right faction has taken over, whose only interest is attacking the left.”
Robert Peston, Asthana’s ITV colleague, describes the deed as demonstrating “ruthlessness and unsentimentality… like nothing I’ve encountered in decades of reporting on the brutal world of British politics”. Peston ascribes that ruthlessness to Starmer. In truth, Gray’s abrupt departure looks to have the finger prints of the “Croydon clique” all over it.
The BBC’s Mason describes Gray’s exit as “a massive demotion, into a part-time job that didn’t previously exist”. Mason said last night, “A party that was ruthlessly well-prepared for the election has looked rather less prepared for the realities of government.” Mason reckons McSweeney’s promotion, is “likely to give the operation a sharper political edge”. At least, that will be what McSweeney and his mates will have been briefing.
For while Gray was a civil servant, McSweeney has always been a scheming political organiser.
Having formed a political partnership of convenience going back almost 20 years, to when Reed, as council leader in Lambeth, appointed the young Irishman as his chief of staff at Brixton Town Hall, the MO of the pair has rarely varied.
Power plotter: Steve Reed OBE organised an MPs’ coup against Jeremy Corbyn from his Westminster office. Now, he brags about it
Emboldened by more recent successes, after the abject failure of the “Chicken Coup” against then party leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2016, Reed has taken to bragging of his recent conduct, with the help of his old pal from their Lambeth days, claiming that it was he who “shaped Project Starmer” and won “Labour back from the crazies” (Reed’s own words) in a hagiographical interview with yesterday’s Sunday Times.
Plans were indeed hatched in Reed’s Westminster office.
McSweeney was placed in charge of organising a “party-within-a-party”, Labour Together, an organisation that pretended it was something it never was.
Whether McSweeney is the competent administrator some claim him to be might be questioned when one considers the occasion in 2021 that he somehow “forgot” to register £800,000 in donations to Labour Together within the required period, resulting in the organisation being fined by the Electoral Commission. Senior figures in the Labour Party receiving donations or gifts and forgetting to register them? Whatever next..?
McSweeney, as Labour’s executive director of campaigns, working alongside Evans again at Labour HQ, also played a key part in the often dodgy-looking selection of candidates for the General Election. Michael Crick, the veteran political journalist, described Labour’s selections for the General Election as “unfair and verge on corrupt”.
Among those who got selected and then elected as an MP was none other as McSweeney’s wife, former Lambeth councillor Imogen Walker, in their Scottish constituency home of Hamilton and Clyde Valley.
Power couple: former Croydon Council adviser Imogen Walker and her husband, Morgan McSweeney
A former actress who once played porn star Linda Lovelace in a British documentary series, in 2021 Walker provided the rehearsals and briefings to Croydon’s then Labour council leader, Hamida Ali, for an unedifying series of car-crash media interviews about the cash-strapped council’s finances and its shambolic handling of housing at Regina Road.
No one at Croydon Council had as much as a Post-it note to record how Walker landed the £39,000 publicly-funded job, which included her drafting the strategy for Croydon Labour’s 2022 local election campaign (and we all know how that turned out…).
Walker’s selection as Labour candidate for Hamilton and Clyde Valley was among those that caught the attention of Michael Crick. Walker, the journalist wrote last year, “won surprisingly narrowly against a young and inexperienced local contender, Gavin Keatt, by just 62 votes to 55.
“Keatt actually won strongly at the hustings meeting, but Walker took the nomination by winning decisively with online votes.” The online votes were cast, of course, using the Anonyvoter system which Evans had bought in without any competitive tendering, from a company whose co-directors include a Labour councillor in Croydon.
Common denominator: David Evans’ The Campaign Company motto: ‘Values first’) has been connected with several in the Croydon Clique
McSweeney himself had previously worked for Evans in Croydon, at The Campaign Company, the consultancy set up by Evans when he finished working as campaign organiser for Blair in 2001.
It is against that records that the alleged “coup” by McSweeney, Reed and their Blairite mates ought really to be judged, as Starmer and his government seek a quick re-set.
Peston reports that “the McSweeney ascendancy has been coming since the end of Labour conference and was all but set in stone a week ago”. He says that McSweeney and therefore Reed) has “won a power struggle with Gray, whose reality they all denied”.
Peston writes: “Unless you think it’s Starmer’s lifelong ambition to be remembered for taking £300 from elderly pensioners or receiving £1,000 Sandro suits as presents, it isn’t… There is an overwhelming case that the chief of staff role should be filled by someone whose expertise is politics and policy – which are McSweeney’s strengths rather than Gray’s.”
Taken As Red, it is fair to say, appears to rely on McSweeney/Reed versions of events, rather more than those left to live in the boroughs – Croydon and Lambeth – which have suffered the after-effects of the pair, and their mates’, administration. To describe Labour’s campaign as “strategic brilliance”, when they had nothing to do with Reform UK taking millions of votes from the Tories, can only be described as a rose-tinted view of how the 2024 election played out.
Asthana’s book is billed as, “The inside story of the most seismic election in a generation”, which might be judged to be a little heavy on the hyperbole, but you get the gist.
It offers what is calls an “insider’s perspective on the inner workings of Keir Starmer’s
Labour”, and it sometimes betrays quite how close to the main players Asthana, a former Guardian political editor, now deputy political editor at ITV, managed to become.
And if nothing else, as the past weekend has shown, Taken As Red does show McSweeney, Reed and Starmer in their true colours.
- Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and The Tories Crashed The Party, by Anushka Asthana (308pp), is published by Harper North
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
As the Fun Boy Three song goes, “the lunatics have taken over the asylum”
Typical Labour..
For example it happened in Wales recently when the first minister Bjorn “teflon don” Guessing was kicked out for rather foolishly thinking he was above anybody & rather foolishly accepted a £200,000 donation off a dodgy businessman.
So Drakeford and his posse staged a coup to elect his old mates & Jim Callaghan’s mates daughter to the role…
Oh Gawd what balls up are these pernicious self serving fools going to inflct on us next. They were all connected to Lambeth Council originally.
When will this Brixton Clique try to rehabilitate Jo Negrini? It is where she commenced her road to ruin to blight Central Croydon and bankrupt the Council. Perhaps after all this time she has come up with her Plan B?
Facebook removed my forwarding and posting.
The algorithms used by Meta got particularly fussy ahead of the US elections.
Now any dumb fuck with $33billion seems able to post what they like on social media.
Suggest you might want to give it one more try, Maureen