In Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer, like its predecessor Left Out, which chronicled Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have grasped the core reality of Labour’s history over the past decade.
For all their portrayal as ruthless Stalinists, the left were hopelessly ill equipped for the life and death struggle Corbyn’s unexpected 2015 victory plunged them into.
They lacked organisation, coherence and, above all, the cold bloodedness that the battle ahead required.
It is the right who have behaved like a ruthless Trotskyist sect.
The first sentence of the first chapter states Jeremy Corbyn was destroyed by a “conspiracy.” Thereafter the book is an exposé of what the authors (who work for the Times and Sunday Times) call “the great deception …. a plot without precedent in Labour history.”
The astonishing story Get In tells would probably lead to a left wing member of the party being suspended for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories if they articulated the bare outlines in a speech.
It revolves almost entirely around one man, Morgan McSweeney, the founder of Labour Together, the organisation that propelled Starmer to power, and now his Chief of Staff.
Labour Together
The bald facts, in Pogrund and Maguire’s telling, are these.
Established in 2015, Labour Together claimed it existed to bring different parts of the party together.
In fact it was a ruthless, factional grouping which aimed, the authors say, “to use any means necessary to delegitimise and destroy” Jeremy Corbyn, “to ensure he lost badly” and restore the right to power.
“The imperative: don’t get caught.”
The key weapon they alighted on was allegations of antisemitism.
Labour Together aimed, McSweeney wrote in an early confidential strategy paper, to cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative and challenge fake news and political extremism.”
One of these was the campaign group Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), which later morphed into the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
One of its first targets was The Canary, a pro-Corbyn website that was achieving 8.5 million hits a month.
Working closely with the anti-Corbyn Jewish Labour Movement, the book says McSweeney secretly recruited Countdown co-presenter Rachel Riley to front a campaign targeting The Canary’s advertisers with claims the outlet was antisemitic.
The Canary was later cleared by the independent regulator Impress (a fact Pogrund and Maguire don’t mention), but the damage was done. The Canary “went down from 22 staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it,” SFFN crowed.
“Bye bye Birdie!!!” tweeted Rachel Riley.
‘Destroy Corbynism’
Simultaneously, McSweeney and SFFN devoted enormous resources to scouring huge pro-Corbyn Facebook groups for incriminating posts.
“McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times” where they were published on 1 April 2018 under the headline: “Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory.”
“McSweeney revelled in Corbyn’s misery and did everything he could to exacerbate it”, all the while posing as “smilingly compliant with Corbynism,” the authors say he secretly organised hecklers to hound the Labour leader as he travelled the country.
The money to finance Labour Together came from hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and from Trevor Chinn, “a multi-millionaire Jewish philanthropist” who “had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader.”
This money was not declared, as required by law, to the Electoral Commission—an “oversight” that served Labour Together’s “strategic interests”.
“It kept the secret … The result was that nobody caught [McSweeney] amassing the data he used to understand and destroy Corbynism.”
Morgan McSweeney
McSweeney spent hundreds of thousands of pounds commissioning polling which provided vital insights into how the Labour Party membership, post-Corbyn, could be persuaded to vote for a candidate who would advance the interests of the right.
The answer, of course, was to lie.
The candidate McSweeney eventually alighted upon was Keir Starmer, whose great virtue was that he had served loyally under Corbyn.
Indeed, for the membership he had the additional virtue that, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, he had been the chief proponent of a second referendum.
Corbyn knew the policy was far less popular with Labour voters than Labour members and Starmer’s position undermined him as he sought desperately to cobble together a compromise that would keep both on board.
In Pogrund and Maguire’s telling Starmer was acutely aware of this. Starmer “had succeeded not only in securing his own future, but in binding Corbyn’s hands behind his back.”
At the December 2019 election the pro-Brexit Red Wall was duly lost–the blame for which Starmer, with the help of a compliant media, succeeded in foisting on Corbyn.
Antisemitism
The story of how Starmer stood on a continuity ticket and then subsequently broke every pledge he had made to the membership has already been told many times.
What emerges here is how central Israel/Palestine and antisemitism was in propelling the leadership rightwards, and how on this issue it was Starmer rather than McSweeney that was the driving force.
It was he who insisted on dismissing Rebecca Long-Bailey as Shadow Education Secretary after she re-tweeted a post claiming the American police who killed George Floyd, sparking the Black Rights Matter movement, had learned their techniques from the Israeli secret services.
And it was he who insisted on including in his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on antisemitism in the Labour Party the words: “Those that deny this is a problem are part of the problem.”
“We essentially set a trap that [Corbyn] leapt into,” says a shadow cabinet minister.
Responding to the report, Corbyn stated: “One antisemite is too many but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons.”
It was “little more than a statement of the obvious”, the authors write, but set in motion a train of events that would lead to Corbyn’s expulsion from the Labour Party.
Instinctive vassal
A deep commitment to Israel meant Starmer resisted mounting calls for a ceasefire in Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into Israel, calls that came from allies as well as political opponents.
McSweeney, for whom a three-month stint on an Israeli kibbutz at the age of 17 was a formative life experience, was firmly behind him, genuinely bewildered by why solidarity with Israel should be viewed any differently from solidarity with an ally like France.
“They see Palestinian activism as a creature of the hard left,” says one shadow cabinet minister.
The book reveals that the apparent indifference of the leadership both to the suffering of Palestinians and the anger of British Muslims reduced the justice minister, Shabana Mahmood, the only Muslim in the shadow cabinet, to tears.
Starmer also saw Gaza as “nothing less than his audition for statesmanship.”
Like Blair before him he had concluded “that Britain’s interests, and his own, were best served by hewing close to whatever line was set by the Americans.”
An instinctive vassal, like Blair he quickly discovered his influence in Washington was, in fact, almost zero precisely because the imperial power knew his support could be taken for granted.
While still in opposition Starmer’s team pleaded for a meeting with President Biden but were ignored.
Fobbed off with secretary of state Antony Blinken they were dismayed to discover he was entirely uninterested in their views on Gaza.
Starmer’s energy over Israel is striking precisely because elsewhere in the book he is an absence—“an HR manager, not a leader,” as McSweeney himself is quoted as saying.
His portrayal as a hapless pawn in McSweeney’s hands is positively humiliating.
Smash Labour
McSweeney himself appears to be driven above all by a visceral loathing of the left. He is “seized by an almost millenarian zeal for destruction” and a desire to “pick the Labour Party up and smash its head open,” the authors say.
“His world view” is marked by “a certain fanaticism, paranoia and moral certitude.” McSweeney’s supporters would point to the 2024 election result as vindication.
But the most serious failing of Get In is that it fails to probe the fundamental question of whether McSweeneyism really has succeeded in repairing Labour’s relationship with the electorate.
In 2019 Jeremy Corbyn, hamstrung by Brexit, confronted by a united opposition and facing ferocious hostility from the entirety of the press and most of his own parliamentary party, obtained 10,269,051 votes.
In 2024 Keir Starmer had a united party, faced a disgraced and discredited government undermined by a resurgent Reform Party, and enjoyed a largely compliant press. He obtained 9,708,716 votes.
In his own constituency Starmer’s vote halved to 18,884. You would have no idea this was the case from reading Get In.
Operating in the shadows
McSweeney’s achievement was to distribute the Labour vote with hyper-efficiency, pulling off a conjuring trick that enabled the party to obtain two thirds of the parliamentary seats with one third of the votes—a distortion without precedent in British parliamentary history.
Since then Labour’s support has plummeted. Reform now leads in the polls.
And McSweeney’s performative cruelty to the remnants of Corbynism has achieved the remarkable feat of opening up a meaningful political space to the left of the Labour Party.
It may be that McSweeney himself has already decided Starmer is a busted flush. Why else collaborate—as he clearly has—with a book so damaging to his boss?
McSweeney is frequently compared to Dominic Cummings, the man who foisted Boris Johnson on the country and within months decided he was an idiot, began referring to him as the “trolley” and worked behind the scenes to destroy his premiership.
If history is repeating itself then serious questions need to be asked about how it is our destinies came to be governed by unelected middle-aged men, operating in the shadows, whose only virtue seems to be an unshakeable faith that their own absurdly reductive understanding of the world constitutes a wisdom so profound that it frees them from the constraints of democracy and common decency that bind lesser mortals.