MORGAN McSWEENEY’S resignation will not be enough to save Keir Starmer. It will only expose the emptiness of his political project and how unfit he is to steer Britain through darkening economic, social and international crises.

In these circumstances sacrificial lambs are usually junior figures discarded to shield their superiors. Technically, that applies when the chief of staff falls on his sword to save the Prime Minister. But everybody knows Starmer was the monkey and McSweeney the organ grinder.

The PM will struggle without him.

Not because, as an anonymous Labour source briefs the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, he was “the most talented campaigner in modern politics.” We should cut through some of the Westminster set crap. McSweeney’s campaigning record is distinctly underwhelming.

This is the genius who ran Liz Kendall’s Labour leadership campaign in 2015, finishing in last place with 4.5 per cent of the vote. In charity we should note that this was not primarily down to poor campaigning. Rather, her — and his — pro-privatisation, pro-deregulation conservatism was wildly unpopular with Labour members.

Britain’s monopoly media are past masters at entrenching misleading narratives in the public imagination.

It’s received wisdom that Labour lost in 1983 because it moved left, rather than because the right-wing Social Democrat breakaway split the anti-Tory vote. That 2019 was a damning public verdict on Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist policies — despite these having massively increased Labour’s vote two years earlier — rather than a “Get Brexit Done” vote, though this was all Tory leader Boris Johnson said for the entire election campaign.

McSweeney now gets credit for turning Labour’s defeat in 2019 into its landslide victory in 2024. He deserves none.

Given the catastrophic self-destruction of the Tories — through partygate and Liz Truss — and an inflationary crisis that hit millions of households in the pocket through soaring energy and food bills, the signature McSweeney-Starmer achievement of 2024 was actually managing to lose votes compared with 2019. Labour’s “new management” made the party less popular, not more, a reality disguised by Conservative implosion and an unrepresentative electoral system.

In office, this supposed master operator has run an inept Downing Street operation lurching from U-turn to U-turn, at the head of a government that shows no capacity to address any of the big issues, from a dysfunctional privatised water supply to an acute housing crisis, from a stagnant economy to a world being dragged to the brink by the gangster-president of the United States.

The only thing it does know how to do is attack the left. McSweeney’s strategy from 2020 onwards involved forcing Corbyn and his supporters — whom he had cynically courted through Starmer’s leadership campaign by pretending his candidate would retain socialist policies — out of the Labour Party.

It did so through banning debate and purging members on the flimsiest grounds, reducing the party’s size by hundreds of thousands and leaving the hollowed-out husk we see limping in the wake of Reform and the Greens today.

Starmer will struggle because that has been the whole of his project. It was drawn up by McSweeney to destroy Corbyn. It was by its nature restorationist — aimed at crushing a challenge to the status quo — and has no answers now the status quo has become intolerable.

Labour’s only hope is a new start, and for that we need to change policy, not just personnel. Mandelson’s compromising fingerprints are on it all, from Labour’s rigged internal processes to the decision to hand NHS patient data to the sinister US surveillance experts Palantir, who we now learn were a client of his lobbying firm.

With McSweeney gone, we need to unpick his whole rotten operation. Bold action — nationalising water and energy and cutting bills, ending private-sector infestation of the NHS, standing up to Trump — could still cut through with voters. But is the Labour Party capable of it?