'Get In': The plot involving a pro-Israel Irishman that helped Keir Starmer to power
He’s the leader of the Labour Party. He’s the prime minister of the United Kingdom. But who is Keir Starmer – and is he just a pawn in someone else’s game?
Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer is the new book by British political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, of the Times and Sunday Times respectively.
It tells the story of how an ostensibly loyal member of Jeremy Corbyn’s cabinet became part of a “plot without precedent in Labour history” to succeed him.
Or rather, how a state servant and former human rights lawyer with no real political ideology became the frontman for the return of Blairism, while continuing to invoke Israel’s “right to defend herself” as the bodies piled up in Gaza.
He is portrayed as ambitious, as competitive. But by the end, the reader might still be wondering who Starmer is, other than perhaps one of TS Eliot’s “hollow men”, a “shape without form, shade without colour”.
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When it comes to Israel’s war on Gaza, though, Starmer, now boxed in by the political project he is fronting, takes the lead, cleaving to Washington’s line and ignoring the advice of two Jewish friends, the lawyers Philippe Sands and Richard Hermer, now Starmer’s attorney general.
“He had always understood, as viscerally as intellectually, that the Jewish state had lived its own 9/11,” Maguire and Pogrund write of Starmer’s uncharacteristically emotional response to the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023.
“He resolved not to waver in his loyalty to Israel or the United States… His commitment was single-minded and masochistic.”
It is an approach approved of by his predecessor Tony Blair, who is shown to be back in a position of enormous influence in the Labour Party.
Blair, who is described as the “author” of the Abraham Accords and who we are told brokered meetings between Gulf ambassadors and then-Labour shadow cabinet ministers, describes Starmer as having once approached politics “in terms of vague progressive thoughts”.
As he gets closer to power, Blair observes that Starmer is “approaching it [Gaza] as if he were a prime minister”.
While Maguire and Pogrund, two very well-connected Westminster journalists, do not put it this way, their portrait of Starmer casts him as a staunch defender of the status quo, a supposedly sensible servant of Britain’s elite capitalist class and its interests at home and abroad.
Who is Morgan McSweeney?
But then in many ways, Get In is not about Starmer. It’s about the person who made him leader, the person who gave him a political mission, the person who, in the opening scene of the book meets an unwitting Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader he is already plotting to bring down.
Morgan McSweeney, now in his late 40s, is an Irishman who came to Britain as a teenager, lived on a kibbutz in Israel, joined the Labour Party after Tony Blair’s government struck the Good Friday agreement in 1998 and went on to become a local campaigner.
Witnessing what he considered to be the absurd and dangerous indulgences of Labour’s left wing, McSweeney becomes their implacable, fanatical enemy.
While some on Labour’s right wing considered abandoning the party under Corbyn, McSweeney held tight, fronting a seemingly innocent group called Labour Together
While some on Labour’s right-wing, Blair included, considered abandoning the party under Corbyn, McSweeney held tight, fronting a seemingly innocent group called Labour Together. “In his mind,” the authors write of McSweeney, “Corbyn’s politics were not just wrong. They were evil.”
With the help of wealthy donors like Trevor Chinn, an octogenarian pro-Israel businessman, and Martin Taylor, referred to as a “hedge fund millionaire with a social conscience” – a description somewhat at odds with his firm’s investments in Amazon and a private healthcare giant - Labour Together conducted extensive polling of Labour’s membership that McSweeney would later use to get Starmer elected.
A lot of this work was not strictly above board. Between 2017 and 2020, McSweeney failed to declare £730,000 in donations, and in 2021 the Electoral Commission found the group guilty of more than 20 separate breaches of the law.
The plot to make Starmer leader
By then, it didn’t matter. “Ultimately,” McSweeney told Labour Together in 2017, “we will need a candidate to win a future leadership election on the political platform we are developing.”
Starmer, who continued to work for Corbyn as his Brexit secretary but wasn’t an ideological leftist – and who had served the British state as the director of public prosecutions – emerged as the natural candidate. He could attract the votes of some Corbyn voters, but he was nothing like the lifelong socialist campaigner.
'They see Palestinian activism as a creature of the far left'
- Labour cabinet minister describing the view in Starmer's office
Along with Chinn and Taylor, Peter Mandelson’s old friend Roger Liddle – Baron Liddle – emerges as a key behind-the-scenes figure, hosting dinners for the tight inner circle that was already planning, many months before the 2019 election in which Boris Johnson defeated Corbyn, to make Starmer leader.
Later, McSweeney will write “with the help of Peter Mandelson”, a paper called Labour for the Country, that argues for “all-out war on the Corbynites”. Mandelson is now Britain’s ambassador in Washington.
These dinners at Liddle’s home were part of a plot. “McSweeney fixed it for Starmer, and Starmer fixed it for McSweeney: methodically, clinically, secretly,” Maguire and Pogrund write.
Once Starmer is leader, McSweeney prods and pushes him away from any instinct he has towards unity. Labour’s left is stripped of its influence.
In the Irishman’s eyes, the only way Labour can win an election is if they crush the left of the party and ruthlessly tailor their message to the “white working-class voters” that have abandoned them.
McSweeney, the conduit for hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists and businessmen who moonlight as Israel lobbyists, sees himself as a man who understands the British voter.
He is convinced that what they really want is a Labour leader who’ll put on a Union Jack, deport asylum seekers, and make sure Palestinian refugees can’t resettle in Britain.
On his way to the top job, Starmer almost lets down his Machiavelli on several occasions – and his deputy leader, Angela Rayner, comes within a whisker of challenging him for the leadership.
Starmer, Israel and Palestine
By the time Get In reaches the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the war on Gaza, we already know that McSweeney “lionised” the pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel groups, who he sees as having “kept up the fight against Corbyn”.
We also know that with Starmer as the frontman of this political project, he will always be pulled in Israel's direction.
Maguire and Pogrund’s framing of the war – like their framing of antisemitism in the Labour Party – is sometimes too ready to replicate the entrenched biases of so much of Britain’s media.
They describe “weekly pro-Palestinian marches in London, whose peaceful attendees were overshadowed by protesters glorifying Hamas”, and treat the idea of Israel being an apartheid state as a leftist fixation, rather than a designation agreed on by a slew of international human rights groups.
In this way, the authors occasionally mimic a senior adviser to Starmer they quote as saying that “Muslims had taken ‘the Corbyn Palestine pill’”. But the two journalists have always taken a little time to hear from sources on the left and seem mainly motivated by scoops and details. This book is full of both.
We learn that there is a WhatsApp group called “I&P” to “coordinate the leader’s response to the conflict”, and that after Starmer’s infamous LBC interview, in which he appeared to countenance the cutting off of water and electricity to Gaza, the Labour leader was apparently “apologetic” and his team asked the radio station to take down the clip from its social media channels – a request that was refused.
McSweeney defends Starmer’s lack of apology or explanation by saying that “if anybody should apologise for indifference towards Palestinians” it is Hamas, for carrying out the 7 October attacks.
As the destruction in Gaza deepens, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, Lisa Nandy and key members of the Labour right, including Shabana Mahmood, then the only Muslim in Starmer’s shadow cabinet, and Wes Streeting, who will come within a few hundred votes of losing his seat to British-Palestinian candidate Leanne Mohamad, lobby Starmer to change his tune.
“Mahmood diagnosed in the leader’s office a debilitating case of double standards, suspecting privately that they believed that opposition to Israel’s actions was driven by antisemitism,” the authors write.
“Starmer’s advisers looked on impassively… McSweeney had always embraced the possibility that Labour might lose millions of voters who had been willing to support the party under Corbyn.”
“They see Palestinian activism as a creature of the far left,” one unnamed shadow cabinet member tells the authors, describing the view in Starmer’s office.
In the background, Blair works, arranging meetings. Angela Rayner is “given the brief of liaising with ambassadors from the Gulf, joking to one MP that the Saudi envoy was seeking her hand in marriage. Over private lunches and dinners at Harrods, she told him: 'You need to stop chopping people’s heads off.’”
Today, as one civil servant who worked with McSweeney told me, the Irishman “is in control. But has no idea what to do with it.” Starmer is prime minister, but any popularity he had has evaporated. His government appears to still be defined by McSweeney’s obsession with opposing the left.
As to how the two men got to where they are, Maguire and Pogrund have provided an account that is likely to remain definitive.
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