British Socialists | The man who brought down Corbyn

It wasn't Keir Starmer who ousted the left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn through a smear campaign. It was a red-haired Irishman. Hardly any voters know him, but Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, journalists for the London Times, claim in their book "Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer" that Morgan McSweeney is one of the most influential figures in contemporary British politics. He is currently Chief of Staff in Downing Street under Starmer, whom he helped win over the Labour Party.

The first sentence states that Jeremy Corbyn was ousted from power through a "conspiracy." The meticulously researched book proves that McSweeney was the architect of this "unprecedented deception." The 48-year-old from County Cork in southern Ireland apparently cooperated extensively with the two authors. McSweeney came to London as a 17-year-old and worked as a laborer on construction sites. He later spent three months on an Israeli kibbutz, which he describes as a formative life experience. He then earned a degree in politics and marketing from Middlesex University.

When Jeremy Corbyn and his allies seized control of the Labour Party in 2015, McSweeney responded by founding a so-called think tank called Labour Together. He deceived Corbyn, posing as a supporter. In reality, however, Labour Together was an unscrupulous group whose goal was "to delegitimize and destroy Corbyn by any means necessary (...) and to bring the party's right wing back to power," the book states. Their primary weapon was the accusation of antisemitism , which discredited Corbyn far beyond Britain.

The first victim was "The Canary," a pro-Corbyn website with 8.5 million monthly hits, which McSweeney slandered to advertisers as anti-Semitic. The Canary was later acquitted by the regulator, but by then its staff had shrunk from 22 to just one. At the same time, McSweeney leaked fake news about pro-Corbyn Facebook groups to the Sunday Times, where it was published on April 1, 2018, under the headline "Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn's Hate Factory."

The money to finance Labour Together came largely from multimillionaire Trevor Chinn, who had become wealthy through a company that rented out garages and parking spaces. He was a "Jewish philanthropist," write Maguire and Pogrund, who "had grave misgivings about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader."

Finally, his opponents set a trap for Corbyn: the official response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission's report on antisemitism in the Labour Party included the words: "Those who deny this is a problem are part of the problem."

In his response to the report, Corbyn stated: "One anti-Semite is one too many, but the scale of the problem has been dramatically exaggerated for political reasons." This was "little more than a statement of the obvious," the two authors write, but it set in motion a chain of events that led to Corbyn's expulsion from the Labour Party in 2020.

As Corbyn, who had supported Brexit, was headed for election defeat in 2019, McSweeney decided to champion the ambitious Starmer as his successor. Starmer had the advantage of having served Corbyn loyally and therefore had better prospects among the party's left wing. From then on, Starmer's political statements and speeches came from McSweeney, who ultimately propelled Starmer to the party leadership.

Following the Labour Party's defeats in the Hartlepool, Batley, and Spen by-elections, McSweeney began purging the party of leftists. In 2021, McSweeney ambushed the 2021 party conference with a revised constitution aimed at permanently disempowering Corbyn supporters. No one outside his inner circle of staff knew about the plan until the last moment, not even Starmer.

He botched the first TV debate before the 2024 elections, but was fortunate that Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the fatal decision to withdraw from the World War II commemorations early. Starmer now had a united party, faced a discredited Tory government, and enjoyed largely friendly press. He received 9.7 million votes and became Prime Minister.

In 2019, Corbyn, hamstrung by Brexit, facing a united opposition, and hostility from the entire press and most of his own parliamentary party, received around 10.3 million votes.

McSweeney's achievement was to concentrate the party's votes under Starmer through a clever, focus-funded election campaign so that Labour won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats with a third of the vote.

The portrayal of Starmer as a pawn in McSweeney's hands is downright humiliating. Yet perhaps, given Labour's dramatically declining support, McSweeney has decided that Starmer is already a failed man. Why else would he contribute to a book so damaging to his boss? He has drawn a lot of resentment in doing so—not least because he ousted Starmer's chief of staff, Sue Gray, and took over her job.

His merciless crackdown on the remnants of Corbynism has opened up a significant political space to the left of the Labour Party. A number of left-wing initiatives and coalitions have already formed, appalled by the Labour Party's record after one year in government. At least 200 councillors across the country have left the Labour Party.

At the end of July, Jeremy Corbyn announced that he would form a new political party with Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, who had been expelled from the Labour Party for rebelling against benefit cuts. He said he wanted to "build a democratic movement that can take on the rich and powerful—and win."

Corbyn won a significant victory as an independent in last year's elections. Polls suggest his new party could receive 18 percent of the vote.

Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund: Get In: The Inside Story of Labor Under Starmer. The Bodley Head, 384 pages, born €30.95