Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer

by Patrick Maguire, Gabriel Pogrund, Matthew Spencer (narrator)

Brought to you by Penguin.

Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power under Keir Starmer.

From electoral wipeout in 2019 to landslide victory in 2024 and on into Labour’s first hundred days in government, Get In is a blistering narrative exposé of the most significant and ruthless political transformation in a generation. At its heart is Morgan McSweeney, a mastermind of political subterfuge and author of a strategy, years in the planning, to eviscerate the party, bury the left and rebuild it as a vote-winning machine. In Starmer he saw the perfect vessel for his a man with no political identity but burning with ambition and a single all-consuming to win.

Drawing on unrivalled access throughout the party and extensive leaks of internal party documents and WhatsApp messages, Get In shows how together they betrayed and marginalised Corbyn and his followers, then forged a path in which promises, and at times principles, were readily discarded in pursuit of power. From the near-fatal experience of Beergate to the furore over Israel and Gaza and Labour’s chaotic entry into government under Sue Gray, we are in the room as colleagues considered Starmer's future, as Angela Rayner fought back against demotion and struggled to prove herself in the eyes of the British establishment, and as the leader’s inner circle repeatedly crushed their opponents inside and outside of the party.

Richly peopled with the major figures of Labour present and past, as well as those who were pulling the strings of power out of sight, this is the coming-of-age story of Britain's government and a parable for the politics of our in an era in which faith in politics has plummeted, this is how to game your way to the ultimate prize. But what on earth do you do when you get there?

'The book about Keir Starmer we have all been waiting for. It is impossible to fully understand this government unless you read it' TIM SHIPMAN

‘Fast-paced . . . cutting one-liners . . . it reads as if the authors were alongside McSweeney and Starmer’ Jason Cowley, Sunday Times

'Extraordinarily detailed and sometimes bloodstained' Tom Baldwin, Guardian

Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, History, Current Affairs

Audible Audio

First published February 13, 2025

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes that this book, written by two reputable journalists, would mirror the excellent Tim Shipman books about the high politics of the Conservative Governments, which culminated in "Out", published last year. My hopes are not realised in this scrappy, breathless, gossipy piece of writing.

I am inherently suspicious of books that are founded almost entirely on unattributed briefings. Here were get an account that focuses on the achievements of Morgan McSweeney (aka "The Irishman" as the authors irritatingly call him) as he manipulates Sir Keir Starmer into power. Starmer is depicted as a empty political vessel who passively moves from front-bench role to leadership to the premiership. There is very little context given as the tale of McSweeney unfolds. For example, there is little to no discussion of the Labour Party's position on COVID handling. Rather this is all about men (mostly) in rooms plotting and scheming and then telling the authors about it. Without a wider perspective, not least from the principal political characters themselves, this book, though entertaining, is unlikely to be of lasting value.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I voted Labour 2010-19. Driven mad by Corbynite dysfunction, I voted Starmer for Leader. Despairing of Starmerite cowardice and triangulation, I voted Green in 2024. Anyway, I could be snippy about this delicious and addictive potboiler of Westminster intrigue and ask what the point is of Murdoch hacks if they don't know, say, that a phalanx is an ancient Greek military formation, not a Roman one, or that "disinterested" doesn't mean "uninterested" but "objective". But that would belie the fact that this book made me laugh out loud several times; the authors certainly have an eye for a jawdropping quote and a shocking double-cross. Because really, the big question is: what's the point of the current iteration of the Labour Party? This book is the insider story of how a psychotic and unscrupulous Irishman named Morgan McSweeney set out to destroy the political wing of the British people and replace it with nothing. Towards that end, he found himself a hollow man named Keir Starmer, pumped him full of bullshit, and set him free to obliterate the left, without a care about which promises he broke or which lives he destroyed. It's a shabby shocker, and a grim true-story entertainment. Don't sweat about listening to the audiobook. I think it might be the best way to enjoy a tragicomic soap opera like this.

[Jacob Stelling · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding piece of journalism which does much to open the door to Starmer’s Labour, and paints a portrait of two men in particular - Starmer and McSweeney - allowing us to better understand the workings of the Labour government.

Perhaps better entitled ‘The Inside Story of Labour under McSweeney’, this book provides a stark assessment of the extent to which Starmer owes his position to his chief of staff, and how that affected the running of LOTO and now Downing Street.

While this book doesn’t offer much insight into Starmer as a man, I think it complements Baldwin’s excellent biography of the PM, and the two taken together offer a portrait of a leader who is immensely powerful but seems to lack a coherent vision of how to use that power. Highly recommend.

[Francis · Rating 1 out of 5]

NEW RULE: if you reference Einstein’s so-called definition of insanity, you get one star.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed this a lot, maybe helped by reading alongside a friend and a colleague in a first foray into book clubbing. Definitely important to understand the current Labour Party but a bit disappointing not to get more insight on Starmer himself, although that is ultimately the point being made.

[Mickey Dubs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Get In chronicles the efforts of one man - Morgan McSweeney - to hijack the Labour party and destroy the left-wing populist movement led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Funded by millionaires keen to prevent Corbyn from winning an election, McSweeney and his trojan horse campaigning body - Labour Together - sought to first undermine the left-wing leader and then install their own Manchurian candidate in the form of Sir Keir Starmer. The book reveals that McSweeney saw Labour winning an election as the greatest threat to his project of 'saving' the Labour party and therefore he conspired by any means to destroy its electoral chances, even going as far as exacerbating Labour's antisemitism crisis by sending screenshots of comments made by random Facebook users to friendly journalists in the establishment papers. McSweeney's plan to install Starmer amounted to simply lying to the membership.

Starmer comes off as a complete moron - an unthinking man-in-a-suit utterly devoid of any political or even moral principles, merely riding the tide to power, stubbornly focussed on winning prestige for himself whatever the cost. This moral lacuna not only makes him widely disliked by the electorate, but it also leads him to adopt dangerous positions like affirming Israel's 'right' to commit war crimes in an effort to appear electable.

I felt the book was little too enamoured with McSweeney's self-mythologising image as the genius practitioner of the dark arts of politics and the Svengali behind Keir Starmer to really interrogate some of the larger questions at stake. Even with all of McSweeney's Machiavellian manoeuvring, in absolute terms, Labour actually lost votes from 2019. Their 2024 landslide had less to do with an ingenious master plan and more to do with the Tories' post-Boris meltdown and the rise of Reform UK. The book doesn't really explore why exactly a notionally social-democratic party that purports to represent the working class is dominated instead by freebie-addicted careerists, corporate lobbyists, and wealthy donors. For instance, at one point, it is casually mentioned that some meeting or other took place in McSweeney's mansion. How exactly an anonymous staffer who is introduced to us as an Irish teenage down-and-out came into possession of a mansion is never explained or really remarked upon.

What the consequences might be for Britain now that a Labour government has been elected with extraordinarily little popular support, staffed entirely by cliquish, amoral narcissists only interested in serving themselves and protecting corporate power at a time of rising discontent remains to be seen.

I suspect it doesn’t end well.

[Charlie Bellingall · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting insight - portrays Sir Keir as indecisive, Morgan McSweeney as the real politician and Sue Gray as completely wrong for government.

[Owen McArdle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously a lot of what was new has ended up being pored over in the press since publication, but still enough insight into what went on in Labour before and since the election!

[Aj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. It reaffirmed and has convinced me of a few things:

- Starmer is not a good politician but a bureaucrat.
- ⁠Sue Gray was a terrible chief of staff
- ⁠The left will never take power because they do not compromise, they think they are better than everyone else, and when they do have a candidate who can attract more voters than usual (EG JC), the surrounded by incompetent and militant socialists advising them.
- ⁠Interesting section of bringing down the left - The above played a role in bringing them down but they were also brought down from within the Labour Party itself and JC refusing to negotiate his position.
- ⁠Most people can be a politician.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sure there's a lot wrong with this but I enjoyed it.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

gossipy, diverting

[Crooked · Rating 2 out of 5]

Get in is a sort of sequel to Maguire and Pogrund’s book on the Corbyn years. The latter, a story of failure, the former, a story of success. Both are at once narrative and biography. They tell the wider story of the leaderships, but they focus on one man. First, Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party from 2015-19. The second: not Kier Starmer, his successor and now Prime Minister. Rather, this book (as widely advertised) is above all else about the gris eminence, Morgan McSweeney. This is not particularly the story of Starmer (though he is one of the main characters), but the story of Morgan McSweeney, an Irishman of fairly non-descript origins who has risen to become one of the two most powerful individuals in the United Kingdom. Indeed, he is perhaps more powerful than the Prime Minister himself.

It’s an interesting tale, and one that Maguire and Pogrund rise to in their storytelling ability. Nobody can doubt that the authors can write in elegant and page-turning prose, nor that they can craft a good story. Plus, Maguire and Pogrund are impeccably well-connected and have revealed major stories that were previously completely unknown to the public. Because of that, despite my low rating of the book, I’d still recommend reading it with one eyebrow raised at all times.

So why, then, have I only given it 2 stars?

Because it’s not very good in every other way. I’ll demonstrate how in more depth below, but the summary is: it’s incredibly biased to the point where the narrator’s commentary is a burden to the book and sometimes is just dishonest, its sources are in-depth but very narrow, the framing belies a racial hierarchy (consistent with the Labour Right) that paints the whole narrative, and it struggles to identify causal mechanisms in its narrative. I’ll demonstrate this with a brief chronological look at the book.

**The McSweeney Mythology**

The first part of the book entails McSweeney’s rise to prominence. It is, by now, a well-worn story that has featured in many different places, all of whom have told an identical story, presumably using the exact same sources.

This isn’t necessarily bad, but it becomes problematic when…it’s wrong. The mythology is as follows: McSweeney came with nothing but the clothes on his back to London and worked from the ground up through uniquely brilliant campaigning skills, a ‘realist’ political insight that everyone else in Labour lacked, and, with this, he delivered results when nobody else could. Unlike those idealistic protest-over-power left-wingers, McSweeney believed ‘the voter is never wrong’. He listened to the people and, er, did what they wanted, and totally didn’t have ideological precepts behind his behaviour like everyone else in the history of politics.

It is said that he was a nobody in 2006, when he single-handedly (well, almost-fellow Labour Right traveller Steve Reed was there, too) orchestrated a great victory in Lambeth over the evil Trotskyists led by Ted Knight. He then supposedly led the defeat of the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, gaining council seats while Labour lost everywhere else in the country. Steve Reed and later Jon Cruddas then slingshotted McSweeney upwards as the two struggled against the Trot leftists and the idealist Blairites (e.g., Chuka Umunna, who beat Steve Reed to the nomination of the safe seat of Streatham). McSweeney ran Kendall’s catastrophic 2015 Labour leadership campaign, then created the shadowy insurgent group ‘Labour together’ which, under the cover of party unity, founded the conspiracy that would destroy Corbynism and place Starmer in office in 2020. He’s seen in this story as self-made, singularly brilliant, cunning and popular, a proven winner, and an underdog. Perhaps the cunning bit is true, but the rest? The evidence doesn’t support it-something you may not know given the mainstream media has fact-checked it zero (0) times.

So it came to the independent journalist, Adam Bienkov, to do so. He shows quite clearly and unequivocally that this part of the McSweeney mythology is wrong.

(A) There is no particular evidence that McSweeney was central to Labour’s campaign there, and he wasn’t credited publicly for it until 2022 when people like Cruddas retroactively claimed to have said this (there’s no record of it, of course) to journalists long after McSweeney was the most powerful man in Labour.
(B) The BNP vote went UP during the election McSweeney was involved vs in 2006, before he arrived.
(C) The rise in the Labour vote in the borough, while above average at a national level, was BELOW THAT OF NEIGHBOURNIG BOROUGHS(!!!). In Redbridge and in Newham alike, the Labour vote increased more than in Dagenham and Barking. In Redbridge, the BNP’s vote went down. This is true across London, as the decline of several smaller parties (e.g., Respect and, to a lesser extent, The Greens) and the continued support for Labour in the capital led to strong results.

Bienkov smartly notes how the 2010 local elections were held on the same day as the 2010 General Elections, which wasn’t the case in 2006 (no GE that year). In the former case, there is a tendency for big parties to draw votes from smaller parties as the logic of FPTP ‘bleeds’ into the local elections, even if they are, in practice, separate votes. Yet the BNP gained in real terms!
That doesn’t mean that McSweeney’s political technologies and logics weren’t useful or positive, but he wasn’t some trend-defying genius, and whether he was even the brain behind the operation is unknown.
(D) This notion of ‘the voters are always right’ being McSweeney’s defining characteristic doesn’t bare any resemblance to the rest of his career. Not as de facto head of the LOTO team, and not as Starmer’s Chief of Staff in power. Labour have constantly pursued obviously unpopular policies and strategies, their communications strategy has been abysmal, and ‘the voter is always right’ only applies to the mythical Labour-Reform swing voter, with the far greater (in numerical terms) Labour -> Lib Dem/Green voter being ignored.

So, then, how did McSweeney move upwards? Perhaps he was genuinely impressive to talk to, and perhaps his undeniable political cunning, regardless of how effective it actually was, impressed his factional allies. Perhaps he was able to convince his soon-to-be patrons of his genius. Perhaps he was just good at schmoozing in CLP circles, and the justifications are retroactive. We don’t know, but the official mythology is definitely wrong.

The second part of the McSweeney mythology is his role as head of Kendall’s 2015 leadership bid. How can the McSweeney mythology explain such an awful performance? Maguire and Pogrund offer an implausible story: that McSweeney, knowing ‘the voter is always right’, knew that Kendall’s pro-austerity, conservative, pro-establishment campaign was doomed. He told Kendall not to do it, but she just ignored him and did it anyway. We are thus to believe that the person in charge of her campaign was a powerless passenger. What? They briefly mention that it was instead ‘outsourced’ to Blue Labour ‘leader’ Glasman. This is hardly believable because Kendall’s campaign bore no resemblance to Blue Labour, put simply. It was far closer to what McSweeney has promoted in the 10 years since that election than anything from Cruddas or Glasman. The most likely reality is this: Kendall and McSweeney agreed on their core principles and lost on it. He learned not to ‘listen to the voter’, but to lie to them.

McSweeney and the narrator seem to blend into one throughout the opening section. When McSweeney’s perspective is given and when the authors are speaking becomes hard to tell apart, and the former’s narratives are reproduced without subjectivising them or without critically evaluating them in any way. They are gospel. So, too, are the enemies of McSweeney so ‘evil’ and stupid that they don’t even get their voices told in this book. It's just McSweeney, his allies, and his mates, for the most part, with perhaps the sole exception of Rayner, who gets some of her own perspective told. I think Maguire and Pogrund are just a little bit less right-wing than McSweeney, you see, and they’re open to dalliances with the right of the soft-left.

**McSweeney and Starmer**

This section introduces Starmer as a secondary protagonist. The authors are scathingly critical of Starmer. They reproduce the narratives briefed to them by McSweeney and friends without criticism, for McSweeney doesn’t particularly like Starmer, either.

Starmer is described as vacuous, air-headed, dull, without political skill, without beliefs or knowledge, and hopelessly out of his depth. At times he’s depicted as almost child-like. He is seen as a burden on the real hard-workers and geniuses: McSweeney and his allies. To be fair, this is not a wholly false narrative, and I think the evidence does support this sort of evaluation about Starmer.

The left is portrayed as McSweeney views them, as if he is objectively correct in his assessment of them as antisemitic, protest-over-power, virtue signalling loonies who hate the voters and do nothing but ‘preach at them’. He acts as if there were weekly pogroms against Jewish people under Corbyn’s Labour, and that they were somehow hounded out of the party by Corbyn himself-something plainly untrue. If receiving online abuse counts as proof that Corbyn’s Labour was antisemitic, then so too must it surely be vitriolically anti-black, anti-woman, and anti-Muslim (for the most abused MPs are black and Muslim women e.g., Diane Abbott). Why is there this hierarchy of racism in the book, in which Jewish lives are seen as more important than black and Muslim ones? The alleged anti-blackness of Labour is brought up at one point, but only briefly. The authors act as if Starmer was keen to act on this with the Forde Report, yet neglect to mention that the Forde Report was thereafter ignored! The leaked document leading up to this was portrayed as some great tragedy, as if I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the abusive staffers whom McSweeney protected.

The purges of the left are described in a similarly dishonest way. It’s narrated that there was a genuine attempt at unity that was scuppered by the evil/incompetent/conniving left, and that McSweeney was ‘forced to realise’ they had to be purged. So it goes that Long-Bailey had to be fired, that Corbyn had to be removed, and so on. Both of these are portrayed dishonestly. Long-Bailey did very little. She shared an article in which a famous author wrote that some American police force was trained by the IDF, and then they used techniques taught to kill George Floyd. This is apparently antisemitic. The truth is that this police force ACTUALLY WAS trained by the IDF, but that it cannot be proven whether that exact technique was taught by the IDF. Honestly, I imagine it wasn’t considering police all over the US were doing it. That it was inaccurate is partly true, but to say it was antisemitic is absurd. It is also equating Israel with the Jewish people, something widely agreed upon as being antisemitic yet routinely used by pro-Israel right-wingers. The factional nature of this can be shown by comparison. Luke Akehurst has a history of antisemitic comments despite being fervently pro-Israel. He claimed that Marxists Jews were fake Jews because they weren’t religious, and he implicitly claimed that anti-Zionist Jews were also fake Jews, as if Jewishness is a purely religious thing (obviously not), that Jewish people are inherently tied to or loyal to Israel (dual loyalty trope), and that blackness and Jewishness are contradictory.

Akehurst was, of course, never disciplined, investigated, or expelled/fired/demoted. He was parachuted into a safe seat that he has absolutely no connection to, and now he spends his time asking parliament about the arms industry. What happened to ‘zero tolerance for antisemitism’?

The Corbyn suspension was covered better, but it was still often dishonest. It’s true that Corbyn was useless throughout the whole thing and demonstrated his profound weaknesses as a politician and as a person. That said, the book misrepresents the EHRC findings, neglects to mention that the EHRC report explicitly forbade political interference and explicitly allowed discussions of the extent of antisemitism in the party, and failed to mention that several of the unlawful actions under Corbyn’s Labour were to SPEED UP, rather than scupper, disciplinary hearings (wrong, but well-intended). Nor was it mentioned that things improved under Formby.

I think this idea that you can’t say it was exaggerated is ludicrous. Simon Heffer said that Corbyn was going to re-open Auschwitz on LBC. Is that not an exaggeration? If yes, then you’re admitting Corbyn was right. If no, you were working with a genocidaire!

**Israel and Palestine, Jews and Muslims**

A large chunk of the book is focused on October Israel and Gaza. Here, there is a decisive split between the McSweeney clique and the authors, for Maguire and Pogrund are sympathetic to the Palestinians. They seem displeased at the fanatical defence of Israel by much of the LOTO office, and are sympathetic to those like Mahmood, Nandy, etc, who called for a more even-handed approach. They try and bollocks up some Freudian stuff about Starmer’s daddy issues forcing him to be right-wing and pro-Israel, but it’s not convincing at all.

Despite this, there’s still a very pernicious and pervasive inequality in how Israel(is) and Palestine/Palestinians are conceptualised in the world of Maguire and Pogrund. It is clear to me that, throughout, Israeli lives matter more than Palestinian ones, even if they still sympathise with the latter to an extent. It is unquestioned when Labour whip the conference into commemorating the losses on October 7th (which is reasonable), yet when many more Palestinians die, they seem to just be an abstract number, and it’s suddenly fine to just act as if it’s a misfortune rather than a tragedy. Where are the minutes of silence for the Palestinians? Where is there criticism of this inequality in treatment? There’s none. They humanise the Israeli dead (rightly), but the Palestinians are lumped together into a faceless, shapeless collective mass. Israelis are individuals, their deaths are described in vivid, stark, morbid imagery. Palestinian deaths are just that. Deaths. They’re just not seen as equal in the author’s mind.

This translates into the hierarchy of humanity, equality, and racism that exists between Muslims and Jews throughout the book. Muslims as a collective (even Mahmood, at times) are invariably described as clannish, sectarian, retrograde, violent/threatening/intimidating, and insular. Islamophobia is never mentioned despite its pervasiveness throughout Labour, described in depth with regards to Palestine but completely ignored otherwise. You get the feeling that the authors almost see them as backwards brutes. They’re clear antagonists in the story, e.g., Muslims only opposed Labour in Batley because they were manipulated by cunning white men like Galloway; Muslims were too homophobic or sexist to vote Labour; Muslims are too clannish and so organised against Labour; Labour only lost in XYZ seats because Muslims intimidated them, etc. Even Mahmood, a token ‘good Muslim’ and factional warrior of the Labour Right, is seen as only caring about Palestine because they’re part of the ummah. They’re “her people”, as if she doesn’t see herself as British first? As if she’s not a patriot?

By contrast, there is an almost fetishised reverence of Jewishness or, at least, the ‘right sort of Jew’. By this, I am referring to the bizarre inconsistency as to when a person’s Jewishness is emphasised in the book. ‘Jewish’ is used only when they are either on the Labour Right or when they’re talking about someone who is pro-Israel. Even Jews on the soft left like Ed Miliband are not given the adjective, let alone leftist Jews like Lansman. James Schneider is granted ‘Jewishness’ only when it fits the narrative: to give legitimacy for the need for Corbyn to say ‘sorry’ for the failings of the party in handling cases of antisemitism in the party. They invent an internal line of thinking for Schneider that refers to zero (0) sources. It’s extremely notable how Maguire and Pogrund write of Schneider’s Jewishness as being in conflict with his socialism. This is very odd considering the rich history of Jewish socialists, and it reaffirms my hypothesis that the authors view socialism as inherently anti-Jewish (as Siobhain McDonagh, a former Labour Right MP, argued. She used antisemitic tropes to do so and was rewarded with a peerage). It is also clear to me that the authors instrumentalise Jewishness to strengthen their anti-left narrative. So, for instance: Berger, Chinn, Hodge, and Smeeth (who, on an unrelated note, was a CIA informant!) all have this aspect of their personhood emphasised, while others have it omitted unless otherwise convenient. The one exception to this, Lord Hermer, actually fits into this rule rather than excepting it, as I will show below.

Maguire and Pogrund seem to crudely fetishise Jewishness in stark contrast to how they talk about Muslims/South Asians. The adjective ‘Jewish’ is used to give more credence to someone’s views or opinions, as if it allows them some magical insight into the world that nobody else could know. It is used to ‘state facts’, almost, e.g., if Berger says something, it becomes ipso facto true, and if Hermer criticises Israel it means a lot more and is more credible than if Mahmood does so. It’s very peculiar and unsettling. Jewish people are stereotyped just as much as Muslims are, just in different ways. Both are instrumentalised to legitimise the Labour Right narratives that Maguire and Pogrund believe in.

On that note, it’s taken ‘as a fact’ that the Labour Left, and the whole party under Corbyn, was, in fact, rabidly hostile to Jews, despite the fact that, of course, Jews like Schneider and Lansman were in senior positions.

**Sue Gray**

A final area worth criticising is the book’s coverage of Sue Gray. I am not going to dispute whether she actually was incompetent or not. What matters is that the author’s voice was unrelentingly hostile to her, practically taking a side in the narrated arguments as they were happening! They once again relied on extremely narrow sourcing. McSweeney is saved from the failure of the first 100 days of the Labour government by the argument that he was basically sidelined by Gray, yet the fact nothing whatsoever has changed since the former ousted the latter indicates the importance of Gray’s supposed incompetence and McSweeney’s genius returning to Starmer’s side is much overstated.

[Euan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A pretty cringeworthy and terrible puff piece for McSweeney. An entire chapter titled “the Irishman” was bad enough, but the constant fawning made me feel ill. He’s just a person who has a job!

On the sourcing for this, a few things to note. One, you have no idea if any of the accounts are corroborated or real, it’s just one persons view and feels like a lot of it is (bad faith) actors trying to get their version of history written. Two, you can actually tell who has briefed what in as the book progresses. Three, they were clearly lacking material as at points they quoted the same anecdotes multiple times. Bizarre.

As great as journalists Maguire and Pogrund are, and as good as their first book was, they’ve let themselves down big time here.

[Eyejaybee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book picks up almost immediately where their previous work, Left Out finished, with the Labour party having been trounced in the 2019 general election that had swept the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, into power on a ‘Get Brexit Done’ manifesto.

The book tells how Labour regrouped under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, and how it gradually rebuilt support within the electorate at large, before [Spoiler Alert!!!] sweeping into power following the general election in July 2024 that had been called, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, by a drenched Rishi Sunak standing unsheltered at an open-air lectern in Downing Street during a ferocious May shower.

That all sounds fairly straightforward, really – if only it had been that easy!. For much of the five-year period covered by the book, Starmer’s greatest obstacle in establishing himself as a viable leader was not the activity of the governing Conservative Party. After all, it spent most of the five years tearing itself apart, and despite its massive majority, would see two prime ministers removed by internal disputes. No, the biggest obstacle in the path to a Labour victory was the bitterness and vicious feuding within the Labour party itself.

I think it is safe to say that neither of the authors of this book are especially kindly disposed to the Labour Party themselves. They both work for The Times, and I have inferred from columns that they have written that their own leanings are right of centre. However, I don’t think that that partiality is particularly evident from the book.

This book does not chronicle the whole five years in the same detail as the mammoth series of books by their colleague Tim Shipman, as their focus is specifically on the path that Sir Keir had to follow in order to secure his election victory. Consequently, there is relatively light-touch handling of the pandemic, and the various debacles and scandals that led to the removal of first Boris Johnson, and then Liz Truss, from No 10.

Still, the thematic approach works, and this is an intriguing, and occasionally alarming, insight into the seething factions that remain to the fore in the Labour Party.

[Rachael Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving this book 4 stars because there was quite a lot of hyperbole in it especially towards the end and the metaphors got a bit annoying. That said, it was a very entertaining listen and the narrator did Keir Starmer's accent really well, to the extent that it was a bit disturbing at times. It's an insight into how vacuous the politics of the current government are. Corbyn, Blair and even Tories like Liz Truss had a concept of what they wanted to achieve in government, but Keir Starmer didn't, it was all about winning. Nobody comes out well, I'm sure McSweeney wants to depict himself as the hero of the story but it doesn't look that way to me at all. It was interesting to read about the overtures to Corbyn and his team by various Tory and Labour politicians and all the back room deals going on. Towards the end, Sue Gray is depicted as being responsible for some of the chaos in Number 10, maybe that's true, but getting rid of her hasn't ended any chaos at all. McSweeney's beliefs seem to have come from seeing mismanagement by the far-left and to an extent I can understand it, but Starmer seems to have very few in the way of set beliefs about politics and in fact seems bored by policies and details. It's a good account of how Labour ended up the way it did, and confirms many of my beliefs about the party all along.

[Sam Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Torn between thinking this is an interesting account of Labour under Starmer up to late 2024, and that it's a glorified puff piece about how great Morgan McSweeney is, which is rapidly not ageing very well. References, which arise increasingly frequently in the clearly rushed final quarter of the book, to "The Irishman" don't really help its cause with the latter sentiment. Every mention of a mistake or error of judgement of McSweeney's seems to quickly follow with the authors writing his mitigation on his behalf.

This book contains some excellent tidbits of information and some great anecdotes. It's brought to life, mainly, by a range of interesting sources who are clearly very close to Starmer. However, I don't think it takes a detective to work out who the primary source is.

Hopefully "the Irishman" will be able to divulge a bit more when the current mess ends in tears.

[Patrickmarsh_ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I proper nerdily read and thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Class book to be fair if you’re into modern day Labour politics, written to excite rather than a dreary day-by-recount of what happened under Starmer’s Labour Party, he manages to make it read like a story. Very revealing at times, explaining a lot of the plotting and politics behind Labour’s frontbench, the unions and the hard left - but yeah a solid read. Nuff said.

[Daniel Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maguire and Pogrund with another strong book. Interesting look behind the curtain at the McSweeney-Starmer relationship. Reminds me of the Rawnsley books on New Labour at times with some of the infighting and briefing. Strong stuff.

[Grey]

🎵🎶I cannot accurately provide a review without it being riddled with swearing and colourful metaphors, not because of the writing, but because of what it reveals about Starmer, and how much of a c√nt he iiiiiiiiis. 🎶🎵

[James Callender · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Insight into background manoeuvres during the Corbyn years & early days of the leadership, weaker as it went on closer to the present day, likely due to insider source availability. However, a good read overall especially for those who followed politics in less granular detail from 2016-2020

[Leem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this genre of book. Reading this type of literature is -much like the Prime Minister- philosophically meaningless. This, like its predecessor, is a non-fiction thriller for news enthusiasts. Taken as that, it’s absolutely brilliant

[Marcus Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

For fans of political non fiction this is a good read that takes you to the heart of the Labour government and PLP. First audio book and thought the narrator was excellent, really enjoyed this and for those interested in reading and learning about UK politics would recommend

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly balanced. This book is equally frightening and thrilling. Worth a read for anyone interested in British politics

[Lucy Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

shockingly good, couldn't put it down, especially enjoyed the account of kier starmer screaming with anguish and kicking a bin

[Lois Hinder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good scoops. Left the last few chapters as it’s my life at the moment every day but still a good book

[Jonathan Chern · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's all the drama Mick I love it

[Abe Staples-McCall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into how the Labour party changed, the politics or lack of from Keir Starmer and the strife at the heart of the latter days of Sue Gray

[simon crossley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review: Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer By Patrick Maguire & Gabriel Pogrund.  The Puppet and the Master.  This is an illuminating look under the bonnet of how Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister.  It is certainly no rose-tinted story of how he overcame Corbyn and his support on the Left. But Morgan McSweeney does get a glowing report, both in how he propped up Starmer and his politics - the latter very much the authors' in tandem with McSweeney.

At times the detail has a forensic tone to it – he said this and that – making it more of a reference guide on the last few years of Starmert’s ascent than a more general read.  But that level of detail does slow down the pace of what is time a fast paced drama.

This emerges at times as a biography of Morgan McSweeney with a political rags to riches angle to it – his lazy start to life then a Damascene moment in a European university that unleashed his intellectual political skills, firstly in local government, then with the Labour Party.

Morgan McSweeney is portrayed as the mastermind who orchestrated Starmer’s takeover of the Party moving it from Corbynism to a more centrist, managerialist-run party.  His use of power and ruthlessness is unquestionable.

Starmer does not get much of a good look in this book – highly principled and disciplined (unlike Boris Johnson) but lacking a clear ideology, a vision or the pragmatism of Blair. The sense of dependency on McSweeney stretches as far as McSweeney being the one pulling the strings when Starmer took on Corybyism.  This does beg the question is it McSweeney that has the underlying vision driving Starmer’s work.  Even McSweeney cannot fully get inside Starmer’s head.  So was McSweeney actually the mastermind and Starmer the puppet.

Get In’s period of interest is the chaos of its 2019 electoral defeat to its 2024 landslide victory under Keir Starmer.  Its depth lies in its speaking to a lot of insiders.  What it is not is an analysis policy.  This comes across as a gap when trying to understanding Starmer’s vision.  This weakness seems to reflect a broader lack of vision in the party in power.

The book begins with McSweeney scheming with Labour Together and Jeremy Corbyn riding the wave at Glastonbury.  McSweeney described his first strategic objective as evading ‘the threat of attacks of disloyalty by supporters of the leader.’  So it was interesting to hear how McSweeney disguised Labour Together as at one with the party’s new order. 

McSweeney commissioned YouGov to poll Corbyn and Labour Party supporters.  And it was revealing.  For instance, nearly half of Corbyn’s most devout agreed the world was controlled by a secretive elite.  McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples ended up in the Sunday Times.

McSweeney went on a mission to amass reams of spreadsheets and focus group reports to destroy Corbynism.  He divided up types in to idealogues (the paranoid ones), the instrumentalists (the moderates) and the idealists (pro-Corbyn but not hard left, nor loyal to Corbyn).  This began how McSweeney figured out how to win.

Following a disastrous General Election for Corbyn he resigned and Starmer replaced him as leader of the party. McSweeney reckoned on Starmer to convince the idealists he was the one for them.  McSweeney saw Starmer as non-ideological and non-factional.  What Starmer wanted to do was to transcend the factionalism.  Unity was his watchword.    

McSweeney sought to reinvent the Labour Party.  He would use Labour Together to ensure the shadow cabinet as unified around Starmer, and the NEC had a stable majority to work with.

But the unity mission began to unravel once Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party pending an investigation, for failing to retract his comments on the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s verdict on the Labour Party being responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination.  

Starmer’s view that Corbyn’s response that the decision had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party” had put Starmer in an impossible position: his viewthat anyone who claimed that antisemitism was exaggerated was part of the problem.  McClusky was pivotal in attempting to rehabilitate Corbyn. But the lack of compromise from Corbyn inevitably led to his whip being suspended, for, as Starmer saw it, to reestablish the credibility of the labour party.

In November 2020, after a hearing by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), Jeremy Corbyn was reinstated as a party member.  However, the Labour whip was not restored, meaning he continued to sit in the House of Commons as an independent MP rather than as a Labour MP.

The press were not convinced that Labour offered a clear alternative.  Maguire attributes this o his “precarious sense of self as a politician.”  His political mind is referred to as a closed book.  Another anecdote is how Starmer was regarded in his shadow cabinet member as not liking politics and bored by the detail of politics.

Angela Raynor is portrayed as a rival fuming that he is “incapable of running a bath”, let alone the opposition.  McSweeney tried to combat that with his Project eX reforms: abolishing the leadership rules and electoral college that let in Corbyn.  He continued to orchestrate behind the scenes with Project Ex being voted through at a conference with one comment “we have been faced with Keir Starmer or Keir Starmer.”

There is a side story of how Dominic Cummings appeared to have courted Corbyn on dismantling the Civil Service, get Brexit through, and Tory Civil War.

The book comes to a close with Starmer accepting the King’s invitation to form a Labour Government. Starmer had hired Sue Gray as she brought experience of government whilst Maguire captures the disbelief in the cabinet in shock at having won power.  

A significant portion of the end of this book is devoted to Sue Gray – very much a Starmer appointment which he has now admitted as a mistake. At first Starmer was oblivious to the enmity she infected around her.  But one that increasingly appeared eccentric and divisive, and ultimately had to be let go of as a burden.

For all that McSweeney achieved in pulling the strings behind Starmer, Maguire reckons McSweeney didn’t know what Starmer really thought. But, with the demise of Gray, he was moved in to Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister, an operational position that may have stifled his mission.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cor blimey Starmer likes a pint, doesn’t he? Gripping account but gives a loooot of time over to Sue Gray - who unlike McSweeney is never guiding the agenda enough to really warrant so much focus imo. Angela Rayner stuff all really interesting and well told.

[Mark Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about Keir Starmer taking control of the Labour Party and transforming it from a left wing radical party to a more centrist, or some might argue right wing organisation. The climax of the book is Labour winning a landslide victory at the 2024 parliamentary election. There is also an Epilogue that describes Labour’s less than successful first 100 days and the sacking of Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Sue Gray.

Morgan McSweeney is the back-room adviser who plots Starmer’s path to power, though Starmer is not by any means his puppet. It is not a smooth path, many mistakes are made along the way. Indeed, one is left with the impression that Labour didn’t win the election, rather the Conservatives lost with a determination that is still hard to believe in retrospect. It’s a very interesting book. I loved reading about all the backroom interactions, deals and deceptions. The authors are two political journalists who have had incredible access. A few things stopped me giving the book five stars. It’s too long. The book needed an editor, or perhaps a better one. It’s obviously been written in a hurry. Books like this lose their relevance very quickly. So they had to get it out there. But the book gave credence to Mark Twain’s quote, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Also some of the text is difficult to follow at times, and I think more careful editing would have sorted that. There are many characters, who we don’t really get to know very well, and as a consequence I was often confused about their position and relevance, not everybody knows these Labour apparatchiks The workings of the Labour Party rule book are also a bit mysterious, and perhaps could have been explained better. Nevertheless, this is a book that I recommend reading and soon before it’s too out of date.

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