Labour failed to prepare for power, admits PM's former top aide
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ByPaul SeddonPolitical reporterPublished2 July 2026, 13:00 BSTUpdated 7 hours agoSir Keir Starmer's former chief of staff has conceded that Labour failed to properly prepare for power in the run-up to its landslide general election win.
In his first media interview, Morgan McSweeney told the BBC's Nick Robinson he did not yet have all the answers for the prime minister's dramatic downfall just two years after he led the party back into office. But he admitted Labour had not given enough thought to how the world had changed since the party last took power in the 1990s. He added the party should have been "way more optimistic" in its first few months, and had been unable to deliver results quickly enough to satisfy voters.
He told the BBC's Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast: "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. "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.
"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." McSweeney ran Labour's successful 2024 election campaign and followed Sir Keir into office as his head of political strategy. He has kept a low public profile despite his instrumental role behind the scenes, but was thrust into the limelight earlier this year when he resigned over his role in Peter Mandelson's appointment as the UK's ambassador to the US.
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