Morgan McSweeney

Morgan McSweeney (born 1977) is an Irish-born political strategist based in the United Kingdom. He has served as Downing Street Chief of Staff under Prime Minister Keir Starmer since October 2024. McSweeney was the campaign manager for the Labour Party and director of think tank Labour Together.

McSweeney built a reputation as a Labour organiser, leading successful campaigns to win a majority on the Lambeth London Borough Council and to defeat the far-right British National Party in  Barking and Dagenham. In 2017, he became Labour Together director during the Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, where he worked to replace Corbyn and to reduce left-wing influence in the party. In 2020, he led Starmer's successful Labour leadership campaign and subsequently led Labour's successful campaign in the 2024 general election.

In June 2024, ''The New Statesman'' ranked McSweeney first on a list of the most influential progressive figures in the UK, having described him as Starmer's "most trusted aide". In October 2023, ''The Times'' stated that "nobody without elected office wields as much power in British politics as McSweeney".

Early life and education

McSweeney was born in 1977 in Macroom, County Cork, Ireland. Tim McSweeney, his father, was/is a senior partner of an accounting firm, and his mother, Carmel McSweeney, was a bridge player. His paternal grandfather, Michael McSweeney, served in the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence and won a medal for his service. His aunt was a councillor for Fine Gael and his first cousin, Clare Mungovan, was special adviser to the Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar as of October 2023. As a child McSweeney played hurling and was a mascot of the Macroom GAA Gaelic football team.

He migrated to London in 1994 aged 17, initially working on building sites and later attempting university, though he dropped out within 12 months. He spent several months living in the Sarid kibbutz in Israel in the late 1990s. He tried university second time at age 21, studying marketing and politics at Middlesex University.

Political career

Local Labour organiser

In 1997, motivated by backing for the Good Friday Agreement, McSweeney joined the Labour Party, and in 2001 he was hired to work as an intern receptionist and in the party's attack and rebuttal unit in Millbank, where he input data into Peter Mandelson's "Excalibur" database. Alan Milburn dispatched McSweeney to marginal seats to campaign for Labour in the 2005 general election.

He then moved on to campaign for Steve Reed for the 2006 Lambeth London Borough Council election, working to take control of the council from the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, gaining a reputation as a "formidable organiser," according to ''The Guardian''. Labour succeeded in the election, gaining the council from a previous Conservative- Liberal Democrat coalition. McSweeney simultaneously ran as a council candidate in the 2006 Sutton London Borough Council election, which he lost with 149 votes. He then worked as chief of staff for Reed in Lambeth Council.

From 2008 until 2010, he campaigned with David Evans, Jon Cruddas, Margaret Hodge and Hope not Hate against the British National Party in Barking and Dagenham. He worked with the council's leadership, developing communication strategies for the 17 wards in the community including the re-establishment of a duty on residents to keep their front gardens clean, also focusing on patriotism and crime as campaign points. This campaign succeeded in the 2010 general election, when Labour defeated the BNP in the borough. Cruddas later referred to McSweeney as "the real unsung hero of the whole thing". Following Labour's national defeat in the 2010 general election, he became head of the Labour Group Office at the Local Government Association.

2015 Liz Kendall Labour leadership campaign

In the 2015 Labour leadership election, McSweeney ran the leadership campaign of Liz Kendall, who came fourth with 4.5% of the vote.

McSweeney then spent another period in local government.

Director of Labour Together

McSweeney became director of the think tank group Labour Together in 2017, reporting to a board that included Reed, Lisa Nandy, Jon Cruddas and Trevor Chinn, and also serving as company secretary. As Labour Together director, he declared his aims to be "to move the Labour party from the hard left" and to "build a sustainable winning electoral coalition."

Under his leadership, Labour Together worked on a potential replacement of then leader Jeremy Corbyn and reforms to prevent the left-wing of the Labour Party from regaining power. Through polling Labour membership, he determined that it would be possible to peel away the soft left, younger "idealists" of Labour from Corbyn's support base, eventually picking Keir Starmer to do so. As part of his strategy, he focused on preventing the growth of the newly founded left-wing news website '' The Canary'' among Labour members while building a close link between the mainstream centre-left newspaper ''The Guardian'' and Labour Together.

He composed a three-year plan for Starmer to become Prime Minister after taking control of the party, which involved first performing "immediate CPR" to reform the party's ranks (which included removing supporters of Corbyn and Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard and excluding them from future leadership contests), then secondly becoming an effective opposition in parliament by directly attacking the Conservatives on their failures, and lastly winning power by outwitting the Conservatives on crime, defence and the economy. He was then recruited to run Starmer's 2020 campaign for Labour leader, which Starmer won. During this time McSweeney set up the Center for Countering Digital Hate, initially designed to target online antisemitism.

McSweeney fundraised for Labour Together during his role as company secretary, though stopped reporting the large majority of donations the group received from December 2017 onward, eventually failing to report more than £730,000 in funds within the 30 days required by law during his tenure. The undeclared donations as well as additional incorrect information declared by McSweeney were investigated by the Electoral Commission; Labour Together received a fine of £14,250 for over 20 breaches of electoral law in September 2021, which a spokesman for the Commission stated was "towards the high end of hescale".

Labour Party offices

Chief of Staff

Starmer succeeded in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election on 4 April 2020 with 56.2% of the vote and choose McSweeney as his chief of staff.

On 20 June 2021, following Labour's worst ever by-election performance in the Chesham and Amersham by-election and in anticipation of the July Batley and Spen by-election, Starmer moved McSweeney from Chief of Staff to a "strategic role" in his office, though he remained as Starmer's "number one adviser".

Director of Campaigns

In September 2021 McSweeney was appointed as Labour's director of campaigns. He also worked to impose a new MP selection process for the Labour Party, centralising the longlisting of candidates which largely locked out left wing candidates and those connected to Corbyn's leadership. ''The Times'' has noted that "Those who question his authority inevitably find Starmer sides with McSweeney." According to Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund of ''The Times'', "McSweeney and his acolytes saw themselves as insurgents within the Labour Party. As long as Starmer’s private office was functional, they could control the party’s politics themselves — without interference from small-minded Westminster villagers. They knew that Starmer’s real life — his true self — was not the work they shared with him. Their political project was predicated on this unpolitical leader doing as he was told."

McSweeney led preparations for the 2024 general election, with Scotland being a priority target for his campaigning. McSweeney made contact with members of the US Democratic Party and Australian Labor Party, respectively Neera Tanden and Anthony Albanese, to discuss election tactics. He argued in a December 2023 shadow cabinet meeting that despite Labour's significant lead in national polls, six different elections from around the world were examples of leads reversing once campaigns began.

Head of political strategy

Following Labour's victory in the 2024 general election on 4 July, McSweeney was appointed the head of political strategy alongside Paul Ovenden.

Some media reports suggested in August that McSweeney had come into some tension with Starmer's chief of staff Sue Gray, with McSweeney being more politics-focused and Gray being governance-focused, both allegedly developing rival power centres within 10 Downing Street. McSweeney privately rejected the idea and insisted that he worked well with Gray. Later that month, it was reported that Gray had moved McSweeney's desk further from Starmer's office twice and that she had requested that he be denied access to a secure computer system. While some sources put forward that Gray suspected McSweeney's allies of accusing her through briefings of " micromanaging staff", other sources stated the two worked well together.

Downing Street Chief of Staff

Following the resignation of Sue Gray, McSweeney was appointed Downing Street Chief of Staff on 6 October 2024. Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson were appointed as his deputies.

Reputation

In September 2023, ''New Statesman'' ranked McSweeney third on a list of the most influential left-wing figures in the UK and described him as Starmer's "most trusted aide". In the next edition of the list in June 2024, the magazine upgraded McSweeney to first place, naming him "the most influential person on the left today".

In February 2025, Bethany Dawson of ''Politico Europe'' stated that McSweeney "is seen as a key protagonist in the rise of Prime Minister Keir Starmer." James Ball of ''The New European'' described McSweeney in May 2025 as "a core foot soldier in the internal resistance to Corbyn during his leadership, and was behind efforts to stamp out dissent once Starmer won," saying that he "has risen to an astonishing level of power and influence with the government, not least through the brutally effective removal of internal rivals." In October 2023, ''The Times'' stated that "nobody without elected office wields as much power in British politics as McSweeney", and ''The Guardian'' described him as "the most influential backroom operator in the party".

Jason Cowley of ''New Statesman'' has compared McSweeney to prominent Conservative Party advisor Dominic Cummings, saying that both "continue to exert a special fascination," among observers of British politics. John McTernan, who previously served as Tony Blair's Director of Political Operations, described McSweeney as "the heir to Peter Mandelson."

Political positions and ideology

Jason Cowley of ''New Statesman'' has described McSweeney as a "conservative social democrat." Andrew Grice of ''The Independent'' has described him as a "workerist with links to the Labour right." Gabriel Pogrund and Hugh O’Connell of ''The Sunday Times'' have described his politics as similar to "the old Labour right: a combination of patriotism, social conservatism, and traditional left economics." Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman of Blue Labour has stated that McSweeney "is from us."

According to George Eaton of ''New Statesman'', McSweeney's political positions were marked by his activism in Lambeth, with McSweeney blaming "far-left sectarianism for enabling the abuse of hundreds of children in the borough’s care homes during the 1980s". According to Robert Shrimsley of ''The Financial Times'', McSweeney believed that the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn "saw Labour divorced from its key voters," and that McSweeney's "contempt for those who prioritised liberal ideals over the ordinary concerns of traditional and patriotic voters convinced him that Labour had to be saved from the left and that Corbynism had to be destroyed." Former Conservative Party minister Michael Gove has written that McSweeney "believes Labour should fight for working people against the establishment, rather than seek comfortable accommodation with its institutions," and "wanted, above all, the Corbynites to lose, for the role they had played in damaging the Labour party."

Personal life

McSweeney is married to Imogen Walker, a Labour politician who has served as the MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley since 2024. They have a son.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McSweeney, Morgan
1977 births
Living people
Alumni of Middlesex University
British campaign managers
British special advisers
People from Macroom
Political chiefs of staff
Irish emigrants to the United Kingdom
Labour Party (UK) officials