If you have heard anything about Keir Starmer’s chief advisor Morgan McSweeney in recent years, it is most likely about his supposedly critical role in ousting the British National Party in Barking and Dagenham in 2010.

This story, which focuses on McSweeney’s time as a young Labour activist, has been repeated so often in media coverage that it has become a central part of how both he, and the entire Starmer project, is seen.

Nowhere has this been more the case than with the Government’s recent turn towards Reform UK-style hardline migrant politics. This shift, which has seen Starmer’s party adopt ‘Blue Labour’ messaging on immigration, has repeatedly been justified with comparisons to McSweeney’s previous experience in Barking and Dagenham.

If McSweeney could single-handedly beat the BNP in Barking in 2010, the argument goes, then surely he can do the same with Nigel Farage’s Reform in 2025?

Yet, in all the coverage of McSweeney’s supposedly unique ability to slay the far-right through adopting ‘tough’ right-wing messaging on immigration and crime, almost no one has actually sought to determine whether it is an accurate account.

So is it?

McSweeney Lore

The first reference to McSweeney’s supposed role as the one-man slayer of Nick Griffin’s BNP originated in an article in the New Statesman in 2022.

It quoted McSweeney’s friend and former Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who credited him with the party successfully ousting the BNP’s 12 councillors in Barking and Dagenham, in east London, in 2010 – telling the publication that McSweeney “was the real unsung hero of the whole thing”.

This claim was then repeated a year later in The Times by journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, who credited McSweeney with “focusing [Labour’s] campaigning efforts on patriotism and crime” in order to win “the Battle of Barking”.

By this point, his role in the campaign had become a firm part of McSweeney lore, and it was picked up again in Pogrund’s defining book on the McSweeney-Starmer project Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, co-authored with Patrick Maguire.

“After Lambeth, he went to Dagenham, east London, where the British National Party was on the march,” Pogrund and Maguire wrote. “The far-right had exploited white working-class concern over migration, winning 12 of 13 council seats. McSweeney again adopted a laser-focus on local issues and, by 2010, had routed the BNP. That same election, under Gordon Brown, the party lost its 13-year grip on power.”

This represented “one of the most successful campaigns in British political history”, according to Pogrund and Maguire. “McSweeney had won again. Elsewhere in England, Labour lost.”

But was this actually the case?

A ‘Ridiculous’ Claim

Holes in the story begin to emerge as soon as the local election results in 2010 are examined.

When Labour’s local victory in Barking and Dagenham is compared with the national picture, it does appear – at first glance – that the party bucked a broader trend. Unlike elsewhere in the country, Labour increased its share of the vote there, resulting in the BNP losing all 12 of its seats on the council.

But there are several problems with this comparison.

The first is that, when the numbers are scrutinised, the record shows the BNP vote increased in the borough compared with previous local elections in London.

Indeed, far from ‘bucking the trend’, the number and proportion of voters backing the BNP in Barking and Dagenham in 2010 actually rose compared with 2006 – before McSweeney came to the borough.

It is also true that Labour’s vote share increased by more than the BNP’s in 2010 (a six-point rise, compared with a 0.6 point rise for Nick Griffin’s party). But it is unclear what, if anything, this had to do with McSweeney’s activities – given that this rise was actually significantly less than the increase experienced by Labour in other neighbouring boroughs.

In neighbouring Redbridge, Labour’s vote went up by eight points; and in Newham it rose by 19 points (thanks largely to a collapse in support for the minor party Respect) – all without the help of McSweeney and his supposed “laser-focus” on right-wing messages about crime and immigration.

The comparison becomes even less impressive for McSweeney when it is considered that, though the BNP’s vote actually went up in Barking and Dagenham in 2010, it went down by two points in Redbridge at the same election.

Looking right across London in 2010, there was a similar trend – with rises in support for Labour leading to it picking up more seats, at the expense of smaller parties, none of which had anything to do with McSweeney or his strategy.

That this happened was unsurprising given that, whereas in 2010, local elections in London were held on the same day as a general election, in 2006 they were not. This is important because, when this happens at local elections, support for smaller parties on average tends to retreat, while support for the big two parties tends to go up.

Except in the case of Barking and Dagenham, support for the much smaller BNP actually didn’t go down. It went up. But there were more Labour voters heading to the polls because of the General Election than there were in 2006.

There were particular circumstances in Barking that arguably made Labour’s victory more notable there, when considering the number of seats the BNP had won locally at the previous election. However, the extent to which any of this can be credited directly to McSweeney is debatable at best.

Because, at the same time as McSweeney was deploying his supposedly unique abilities, there was a much bigger effort by many other Labour activists from other wings of the party to oust the BNP.

One Labour MP this newspaper spoke to expressed his frustration at the focus on McSweeney’s role, describing it as “ridiculous” and adding that “I’m not even sure how much time he spent in Barking”.

The anti-fascist and anti-racist campaign organisation Hope Not Hate was also instrumental in ousting the BNP in Barking, distributing 355,000 newspapers, leaflets, and letters across the borough and mobilising hundreds of activists to campaign against the party.

Yet, despite Hope Not Hate’s CEO Nick Lowles being interviewed by the authors of Get In about his organisation’s efforts, its arguably key role appears to have been largely overshadowed by the supposed influence of one right-leaning Labour activist who just happened to go on to work for the Prime Minister.

Less Than ‘Laser-Focused’

The myth of Morgan McSweeney’s campaigning prowess becomes even more questionable when his much more central role as the campaign chief for Liz Kendall’s 2015 bid for the Labour leadership is considered.

Internal Labour elections are very different from those among the wider public, but it is telling that McSweeney’s “laser-focus” in this campaign resulted in a dismal 4.5% vote for his right-­leaning candidate.

His subsequent role in campaigning for Keir Starmer to become Labour Leader and then Prime Minister was clearly much more successful. However, Starmer’s victory in the Labour leadership contest was largely the result of his adoption of a decidedly left-wing platform – which he then abandoned.

It is also worth noting that, when it comes to general elections, the influence of individual strategists is often hugely overstated.

As political scientists have repeatedly shown, it is normally the case that the relative position political parties enter a general election campaign with, is pretty close to the position they end up in at the end of the process.

One thing that was notable about last year’s General Election campaign is that Labour actually significantly underperformed, in terms of its share of the vote, compared with the predictions of pollsters and pundits. That it ended up with a landslide anyway was more to do with the sheer scale of the Conservative collapse than massive public enthusiasm for Starmer or Labour.

Far from focusing relentlessly on the issues voters actually care about, Labour wasted the first part of its campaign – thanks in large part to McSweeney – focusing on its own internal battles with the left of the party, and on Diane Abbott in particular. There were entire weeks of the early campaign which were dominated by discussions of the Labour internal rulebook which came close to derailing the whole show.

This obsession with fighting the left has long been a key attribute of McSweeney.

As Pogrund and Maguire have previously documented, the motivation behind his key role in ousting Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader continued long after the left of the party was marginalised. And though the focus was initially on ousting the far-left of the party, even those in the more moderate wing have since been targeted.

In the immediate aftermath of the General Election, McSweeney’s allies launched a campaign to oust Sue Gray from Downing Street, while also attempting to oust Ed Miliband, before ultimately succeeding in ousting his ally Louise Haigh.

In recent weeks, briefings about other Labour women seen as being on the ‘soft-left’ of the party have continued, with journalists close to McSweeney reporting that Culture, Media, and Sport Secretary Lisa Nandy and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson will be “for the chop” in the upcoming reshuffle.

Briefings, originating from Downing Street, that Nandy and Phillipson are somehow ineffective, ideological, or lazy, have continued to be disseminated to sympathetic journalists – despite neither politician being responsible for any significant controversies or scandals, in contrast to those surrounding the Prime Minister.

Elevation and Access – At a Cost

If recent decades have shown us anything it is that the influence of individual personalities in politics is often massively overstated by a political media establishment obsessed with the influence of individual advisors, strategists, and ‘gurus’.

This focus on personalities, at the expense of a focus on broader structural trends, originates in the cosy nature of ‘Westminster village’ journalism, in which political advisors are normally the primary source of both stories and access.

This was particularly evident during the 1990s and 2000s, when political journalists spent years obsessing over the relationships between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and their advisors – while largely missing the trends that led to the financial crisis of 2008, which would go on to define the politics of the following decade.

This tendency continued under the Conservatives, with journalists endlessly reporting the psychodrama surrounding individual advisors such as Steve Hilton, Nick Timothy, and Dominic Cummings – while missing much more significant issues such as Russian interference, the PPE cronyism scandal, and the rise of the far-right.

The same has happened again, with journalists close to McSweeney emphasising his particular approach to politics – while largely ignoring the much more significant impact of a decade of policies such as austerity and the UK’s hard Brexit on the landslide result Labour won in 2024.

The myth of the ‘all powerful’ individual advisor is allowed to dominate coverage, despite their actual influence – in reality – being far less significant than we are led to believe.

The beneficiaries of this approach to political journalism are not only the individual advisors themselves, whose status is elevated to often mythical levels, but also the journalists whose careers are dependent upon maintaining good relations with them.

But while all of the focus is placed on mythic individuals, the real story of what lies beyond them remains largely obscured. ■