Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer
By Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund
Published by Bodley Head, 2025, £25
Reviewed by Dean Young
On the surface, Get In appears to be a snapshot of Starmer’s Labour leadership; from gaining the position through his ‘ten pledges’ deception in 2020 to winning the 2024 general election, mainly just because people were so sick and tired of the Tories. However, really the book’s main protagonist is the recently resigned Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer’s right-hand man and served as Chief of Staff and Head of Political Strategy, and also led the Labour Together internal group. At times the book reads almost as a biography of him.
So who is he? McSweeney is described by the authors as the son of “two petty bourgeois Fine Gael supporters in West Cork”. His political upbringing as a young man was in Lambeth, a south London borough in which the legacy of the 1980s, when Ted Knight led the council, still pervaded debate in the local Labour Party. At this time he seemingly became acquainted with Peter Mandelson, who had been a right-wing Lambeth Labour councillor until 1982, and McSweeney developed a hatred for the left of the Labour Party and more generally, viewing Lambeth council’s participation in the 1985 rate-capping rebellion of local authorities, in protest against the Thatcher government’s austerity agenda, an example of “performative politics”.
The authors say McSweeney viewed picket lines as performative politics too. This perhaps explains why, under his tutelage, Starmer banned Labour shadow cabinet members from visiting pickets during the 2022-2023 strike wave.
The book carries many useful anecdotes about McSweeney’s role as ‘saboteur’, as the ‘kingpin’ of the right-wing Labour Together pressure group, undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from 2015-2019. Examples range from planning a successor to Corbyn continuously from 2017 or bussing in twenty remainers to heckle Corbyn at a meeting in Warwick University in February 2019.
As would be expected from two Times journalists, there are also ridiculous slanders, antisemitism slurs aimed at Corbyn supporters, or even anyone to the left of Gordon Brown, referred to frequently as ‘Trots’. ‘Trotsky derangement syndrome’ is primarily a remnant of the paranoia linked to role of the Militant Tendency in the 1980s, and it still exists amongst the Labour right wing. Everywhere they look they see the ghost of the socialist needs budget passed by Liverpool city council, led by the forerunners of the Socialist Party from 1983-1987. An example of these right wingers is Luke Akehurst who, according to the authors, as an NEC member would lecture young budding Labour careerists about Kinnock’s ‘war on Militant’ for hours.
In this book McSweeney is portrayed as a sort of criminal mastermind who pulls the strings. This can be seen in the wider media and is why his resignation as Starmer’s Chief of Staff was big news. There are some particular quotes worth mentioning, allegedly from McSweeney, which show the state of today’s decrepit, passed its sell-by-date Labour Party.
On the topic of scrapping the two-child benefit cap, which the government was eventually forced to do in 2025, McSweeney is quoted as saying to trade union leaders: “If we can create a good policy platform we will campaign on it”. But, as the authors put it: “If they [unions] disagreed with Starmer, they would be ignored”.
McSweeney doesn’t stop there, adding: “The alternative is you could create a bad policy. You could use your votes to get it across the line. But what do you really think will happen then? We’re not Bennites. We will take that document, we will throw it in the bin, and I will write the manifesto. That’s what will happen”.
Indeed, that is in fact what happened. Despite Unite and CWU-sponsored motions at Labour conferences in 2022 and 2023 calling for nationalising energy companies and an end to the two-child benefit cap (among other things) it was not in the 2024 Labour manifesto. Not much was in that manifesto and yet still Labour have not delivered even on the crumbs!
So what can be learned from McSweeney and this book? If you are interested in insider gossip it’s worth a read. Especially if you see it in the bargain bin at your local Waterstones. But more importantly, it shows the moribund nature of the Labour Party, its further degeneration after Corbyn was kicked out in 2020, becoming a safe pair of hands for the capitalist class. McSweeney’s boasting that conference votes don’t matter, that trade union affiliates have no decisive influence in formulation of policy – this is the expressed reality of the Labour Party.
Corbyn’s Labour leadership period was a blip, an accident of history. Starmer has made sure a left-wing leadership candidate getting on the ballot will be even more difficult than in 2015, with the percentage of MPs needed to nominate a candidate now 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) rather than the 15% it was in 2015, for example. This is also a PLP virtually handpicked by Starmer, McSweeney and, allegedly, also Peter Mandelson, so even more right-wing than was the case in 2015 when Corbyn only just squeaked onto the ballot.
The years from 2015 to 2019 presented an opportunity to rebirth the Labour Party into a workers’ party that at the very least allowed working-class people a democratic input into party policy. This unfortunately did not happen, in large part because, for the sake of ‘party unity’ with the Blairites, Corbyn and his allies refused to empower the hundreds of thousands of new members to regenerate the party. Despite this brief historical interlude, Labour now is a capitalist party with lots of bureaucracy and little democracy as it was under Blair, Brown and Miliband. A party once of the working class but dominated by supporters of capitalism at the top is little different from other so called ‘progressive’ capitalist parties such as the Democrats in America.
Labour will likely face electoral disaster in May’s local elections. As the Socialist Party said shortly after the general election, Labour’s landslide victory was “a mile wide but only an inch deep”. Labour may well throw Starmer overboard to try and save a sinking ship. But none of the alternative candidates will be able to overcome the political crisis the party faces, which is a reflection of the severe economic crisis of British capitalism.
Amidst this collapse it is vital that working-class people have a party that is capable of leading them in their struggles. A party of the organised working class, with the collective weight of the trade unions and their six million plus members at the centre. A party committed to a socialist programme, with nationalisation under democratic workers’ control of the commanding heights of the economy, which could allow the economy to be planned on the basis of human need, not profit.