Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer
Welcome to the fourth of my write-ups of the books about the 2024 general election. This time it is Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer. Given how much attention the book has got, I have snuck it in ahead of the planned book (sorry Steve!) but Collapse of the Conservatives will come next time.
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So far, the three books I have covered are predominantly about the general election itself. Yet as I have pointed out before, it is the long run-in before that which really sorts out who is going to win. Therefore, although the formal 2024 general election campaign is only a brief part of this book, I am going to claim it as a general election book because it covers in detail what Labour did in the years before Rishi Sunak stood in the rain. It is those years which, pretty much, determined that Keir Starmer became Prime Minister.
This is also a book that is much more about dinner tables than polling tables. Polling gets mentioned as something people use, rather than presented as evidence of what happened and why. Those dinner tables are Labour ones. As the title implies, this is a book very much about Labour. So much so that Richard Crossman gets an index entry but Ed Davey does not.
Polling of Labour members gets frequent mention as being crucial to the defeat of Corbynism after the 2019 general election. However, it is unclear, at least from this book, how much it really matters as the Starmer leadership plan - make the majority of members, many of whom were Corbyn fans, think he was on their side - was a simple, well-worn plan that did not need any special data insight to identify or execute.
Of course, writing about secret insider polling and its cunning influence always makes for good copy, even if reality could have been as well fuelled by a couple of obvious political strategy cliches.
What the authors though excel at are detailed accounts of insider Labour conversations, even conversations that, nominally at least, only had two participants. This provides much juicy detail which has generated significant press coverage for the book.
Aside from the lure of the gossip, what is striking about those accounts is how leaky every side, faction, group and clique was to the authors. It is normal for the embittered, the losers and the passed over to be happy to spill the beans to authors and journalists. In this book, however - and in a way that reminds me of Bob Woodward’s politics books in the US - much of the account comes from those who have come out on top, who are in power and who won out. Despite those successes, they have chosen to unburden themselves of so much snipping to two journalists.
Which left me at the end with enhanced regard for the authors and also a picture of a Labour Party this is deeply splintered, unhappy and at odds with itself. Even those central to Keir Starmer’s political ascent appear, if the book is right, often to have fairly limited regard for him, and hence the comments of one of his inner circle saying, “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” And that is from someone nominally on Starmer’s side…
The Prime Minister emerges as an enigma. Tony Blair is cited saying that Starmer only really started thinking about politics once he became leader. It is tempting to go with that as an explanation for the stumbles of the early days of the Labour government. It also would explain the way that, as Maguire and Pogrund point out, Starmer has been oddly absent from many of the key Labour issues and moments during his leadership.
Filling that vacuum, Morgan McSweeney gets painted as the Machiavellian mastermind, pulling the strings behind the scenes and deliberately deceiving others about his grand plan. So much so that part way through I double backed to the book cover to check if it actually showed McSweeney behind a Starmer mask.
McSweeney’s outfit, Labour Together, is called by the authors “the great deception”. The authors are less generous than Anushka Asthana is in Taken As Red about McSweeney’s original grassroots campaigning in Lambeth, but they too generously omit to mention the full story of the highly negative personal smears that appeared in Labour’s leaflets in that campaign
In many ways the story told in Get In is more the story of McSweeney than the story of Starmer. In this telling, Starmer is the front man chosen by the mastermind. There are paragraphs where you could delete the names, and asking a reader to guess who should go where, the reader would insert the future PM’s name rather than the future Downing Street staffer’s.
Yet the book also tells us that Starmer had a long-term plan to be Prime Minister, pre-dating becoming an MP and resulting in early preparation work such as actor coaching to improve his presentation skills. His pragmatism and at times extreme political flexibility - such as over the policies he backed in the Labour leadership election and then dropped - both fit with that picture of a long-term, deeply rooted desire to be PM.
But where has that desire come from if, as Blair suggests, Starmer’s thinking about politics only started so recently? And how did his preparation cover the nuances of how he speaks but not get into what he might wish to think?
A lack of interest in politics would at least explain one mystery that Get In does well to set out: how Morgan McSweeney is key to Starmer’s ascent and yet also has political views that appear significantly different from Starmer. McSweeney pushes socially conservative politics; Starmer is a liberal human rights lawyer from north London. There seems to be little friendship or shared ideological mission between the two.
It appears that behind Labour’s huge Parliamentary majority and moment of triumph therefore sits a very fragile operation - happy to bitch to journalists about each other, unsure of its political direction and with many fault lines running through it. The question in the years to come will be whether the pressures, and opportunities, of government, push people together, see them raise their game and those fault dissipate. Or whether the pressures split apart the government disastrously.
Whichever outcome, Get In entertainingly sets the scene, illuminating in apparently authoritative ways, the inside story behind the public actions of Starmer and Labour.
It is a good read, helped by the Pack Mention Index (PMI™)1 being a reassuringly clean zero.
Get the book
You can get your own copy of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer:
Bookshop.org (“an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops”)
The next book
My plan is for the next book is what I had originally intended to read before Get In, i.e. Steve Rayson’s Collapse of the Conservatives: Volatile Voters, Broken Britain and a Punishment Election.
You can zip ahead of me by getting your copy to read right away from Amazon.
The previous books
Anushka Asthana’s Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party.
Lord Michael Ashcroft’s Losing it: the Conservative Party and the 2024 general election.
Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth’s Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election.
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Not really a trademark, honest.
Tim Shipman’s OUT is a heavy 900 pages but the last few chapters summarise the election very effectively. I think he should do another book just on the election.