Where does power lie within Keir Starmer’s strange government? In the case of other recent administrations, the question of who held power was relatively easy to answer. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown shared it awkwardly and stressfully – their government was close to a duopoly. Follow closely the amicable dance between Cameron and Osborne, with the occasional swerve towards Clegg, and the dynamics of the potentially complex coalition were easy to read. The power struggles that swallowed up subsequent Tory administrations were played out on the surface. Few could fail to notice the noisy dominance of Cummings and the fleeting omnipotence of Johnson.

The Starmer government is more challenging to read, the oddest administration I have observed since starting out as a political journalist in the late 1980s. Nonetheless, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund offer a clear answer to the opening question: Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s unyielding, all-conquering chief of staff. According to Maguire and Pogrund, whatever McSweeney wants, he gets. He rules the party with dogged determination, ruthlessness and an around-the-clock attention to strategy. ‘The Irishman’, as he is referred to throughout the book, regarded the Corbynistas as ‘evil’. As soon as he had the chance, he made them pathetically marginal. He saw Starmer as the only feasible successor to Corbyn. Starmer duly became leader. The 2024 landslide was won largely thanks to McSweeney, who presided over a disciplined campaign that focused an unswerving gaze on former Labour voters who had switched to the Conservatives in 2019. The Irishman wanted only loyalists in the post-election Parliamentary Labour Party. More or less, he has got what he wanted. When Starmer appointed Sue Gray as his chief of staff, McSweeney sensed trouble. Gray was gone soon after the election.

Focus groups suggested that Labour voters who had deserted the party in 2019 regarded Corbyn as ‘unpatriotic’. In response, McSweeney ensured that Starmer was rarely seen without a huge Union Jack hovering behind him. McSweeney was keen for the national anthem to be sung at Labour’s conference after the Queen’s death. Inevitably, the anthem was sung and without protest. Given the might of the Irishman, I would not have been surprised to read that McSweeney had ordered Starmer to fly to Mars in order to further the party’s prospects, and that the leader had done as he had said. 

Although Starmer won a remarkable victory in 2024, considering the scale of the slaughter in 2019, he inevitably emerges here as a less than impressive figure, almost ghostly. It’s as though the prime minister, a former director of public prosecutions who had to act impartially in that role, does not quite know who he is as a public figure. Sometimes we read of McSweeney launching a high-stakes initiative and only informing his boss about it afterwards. Starmer comes across, at best, as indecisive, not wholly sure what to do about the dilemmas he’s confronted with, from determining what role Gray should play to deciding what to do about Labour’s commitment to borrow £28 billion a year for green projects.

There is, though, a much bigger vacuum in the Labour Party than a gap at the top. There is very little in this book about ideas or values and the policies that arise from them. That is not the fault of the authors. The nearest McSweeney has come to stimulating a debate on policy is to pose the question ‘Why should Gary Lineker be paid £2 million a year?’ No doubt some in the red wall loathe Lineker for his tweets and his vast BBC salary, even if many admired him as a footballer and Match of the Day presenter. But is that it? Has the party of Anthony Crosland and his The Future of Socialism really been reduced to debating its attitude towards a former footballer?

Starmer has come in for criticism for declaring, according to the authors, that there is no such thing as ‘Starmerism’ and never will be. In policy terms, it’s by no means clear that ‘McSweeneyism’ exists either, though one would hope that behind the Irishman’s determination to smash the Corbyinstas and win big at the election lies some kind of agenda for government. What does McSweeney think about ‘growth’, beyond the obvious point that voters must have more money in their pockets if they are to feel the effects of an economic revival? Is he a supporter of publicly owned railways? If so, why? If not, why not? What does he think of Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget, over which, I assume, he could have asserted some influence? It appears he is no fan of the green evangelist Ed Miliband or of Starmer’s friend Richard Hermer, the attorney general and a crusader for international law. Does that make him a ‘disruptor’ within the government or a conservative force, continuing cautiously with the course mapped out over the last two decades?

Although there are revelations on virtually every page of this addictive and compelling book, there are no detailed answers to these policy-related questions. Maguire and Pogrund are impressive political journalists. They appear to be trusted by many across the Labour Party, which continues to be marked by factionalism. This means that a range of voices are heard here, a tribute to the authors’ integrity. Part of this integrity is a commitment to protecting sources. The withholding of names leaves the reader having to guess at the seniority of those they have spoken to. I might be wrong, but I suspect that the majority of their interviewees are unelected special advisors taking the opportunity to fight their battles via the pages of this book.

But these advisors are only part of the story. Ultimately it was an elected politician, Starmer, who approved Labour’s election manifesto, a programme of extreme caution with latent potential for radicalism. Away from Downing Street, the paralysing focus groups, the preoccupation with Nigel Farage’s Reform party and the obsession with winning a second term, there are cabinet ministers working away on policy formulation and implementation. Some of the bills being debated in the Commons, though barely reported on in the media, will bring about significant changes, for good or bad. There are other stories to tell about this government beyond the eternal internal battles.

So where does power really lie in the Labour government? Ultimately, the prime minister can do what he wants: look at the way Starmer appointed a radical attorney general and prisons minister, presumably in opposition to McSweeney. For the most part, Starmer chooses to be constrained by those around him – to depend on McSweeney for strategic advice and to put his chancellor in control of economic policy. Meanwhile, cabinet ministers plough on, knowing that Starmer, or McSweeney, could sack them at any moment. A reshuffle is likely to come later this year and McSweeney will attempt to shape it. Starmer could, however, resist him and show who is really in charge. At least, if he wants to.