Labour failed to prepare for power, admits PM's former top aide

Labour's former chief of staff has conceded the party failed to adequately prepare for government following its landslide 2024 election victory. Morgan McSweeney, who served as Sir Keir Starmer's head of political strategy, admitted in a BBC interview that Labour had not sufficiently considered the changed world since the party last held power in the 1990s.

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We didn't prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to. We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government.

"We didn't prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to," McSweeney told the BBC's Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast. He explained that the party leadership had not engaged in enough high-level discussions about the implications of the new era for governing the state. "You have to deliver quite quickly for people, for them to see the change quickly. And I think we didn't come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that."

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I think we didn't have enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant, how to prepare for it, what that meant for the state.

McSweeney, who resigned earlier this year, acknowledged his personal responsibility for the lack of preparation. He recalled realizing during early planning meetings in 2024 that insufficient groundwork had been laid for governing. While Sir Keir had spoken about how Britain had changed, McSweeney stated that these discussions did not translate into adequate preparation for taking office. He emphasized that the failure was a broader party issue, not attributable to any single individual, including Sue Gray, who had been tasked with government preparations prior to the election.

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You have to deliver quite quickly for people, for them to see the change quickly. And I think we didn't come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that.