Will Starmer lose his secret weapon over ‘admin error'?

Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister's chief of staff, is becoming more of a story.

- JOHN RENTOUL

He has been built up to semi-mythic status by journalists eager to believe in an organising genius behind Labour's stunning election victory last year.

So much so that the portrait of “the Irishman” in Get In, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book, has become the received wisdom: of McSweeney as the brains behind the operation to take the Labour Party back from the Corbynites, who settled on Keir Starmer as the frontman.

In this telling, Starmer was a mere passenger - in the book, “one of McSweeney’s acolytes” is quoted as saying, “we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR”, London’s driverless Dockland Light Railway train, and allowed him to think that he was in charge.

The cycle is now turning, and the media have moved on from building McSweeney up to tearing him down - although some of the research is being done on their behalf by the Conservative Party. Kevin Hollinrake, the party chair, on Tuesday published something he grandly called “The McSweeney Files”. This consists of two documents: a leaked three-page email from Gerald Shamash, the lawyer, to McSweeney in 2021, and a letter from Hollinrake to the Electoral Commission about it.