They always generate friction with their colleagues, sometimes act as lightning conductors by taking the blame for the boss’s failings, and occasionally cause the kind of power surge that blows the fuse box or threatens to set the whole system on fire.
These unelected “superadvisers” have been a feature of almost all recent governments. They first get talked up by the press as being more important than cabinet ministers or more fascinating than the prime minister. Then the trouble starts.
The latest figure from whom sparks have been flying is, of course, Downing Street’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. According to legend, he almost singlehandedly transformed the Labour party in opposition, before guiding it to election victory. Yet his growing legions of critics say that in government he has allowed a vicious culture of machination to develop. Certainly, the seemingly endless drumbeat of anonymous media briefings against ministers and civil servants from inside No 10 has drowned out or even contradicted Keir Starmer’s once-stated ambition for a politics that “treads more lightly on people’s lives”.
The complaints about him came to a head two weeks ago. Although he wasn’t the government source who accused Wes Streeting, the health secretary, of plotting a coup, no one denies McSweeney was involved in a spectacularly inept briefing operation across many media outlets. This succeeded only in turning whispered rumours about the prime minister’s potential ousting into front-page news.
Reports that this would trigger McSweeney’s removal are, like much of what’s said about him, probably exaggerated. Such is the fragile condition of this government that his departure now would be regarded as an omen as bad for Starmer as, so fable has it, the ravens leaving the Tower of London portend for England itself. Yet in that dread phrase that has so often proved career-ending for superadvisers, it’s acknowledged that McSweeney has “become the story”. And his position as the government’s most prominent adviser now offers the kind of job security more commonly associated with coaches of struggling football clubs.
McSweeney’s predecessor was the former civil servant Sue Gray. She was heavily briefed-against in almost unprecedented fashion by political aides and officials alike, in an early sign that some of those working for the government were less interested in the real politics of changing the country than the office politics of their job titles and pay grades. Her tortured tenure ended after just 93 days when Starmer put an end to her misery by saying: “Sue wasn’t the right person for this job.”
But such episodes of mayhem are far from unique. Under Boris Johnson, the de facto chief of staff for a time was the self-consciously mercurial Dominic Cummings, whose ego was too large to be contained by any rules, including those for Covid lockdowns. He flounced out of Downing Street having served there for only 16 months, leaving through the front door carrying a cardboard box of documents in full glare of the cameras, and then explained he had always felt contempt for the prime minister who appointed him. A few years earlier, the double act of Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy provided some shock and awe for Theresa May. But they too departed after less than a year, amid complaints about their “high-handed” attitude.
Before them there was Steve Hilton, briefly the dominant government adviser when his friend David Cameron became prime minister. But Hilton swiftly found his ideas, such as sacking 99% of civil servants so the remainder could fit into the building they used in the 19th century, were being ignored. Barely 18 months after entering Downing Street, he declared the PM had “betrayed” him and moved to Silicon Valley, where he is now running as a Trumpian candidate to be governor of California.
During the last Labour government, Gordon Brown’s time as prime minister was soiled by the much-feared Damian McBride, who was ejected from No 10 after being caught spreading the kind of smears that once seemed to be his stock-in-trade. Even Alastair Campbell, the undoubted “king of spin”, whose alpha style has so often been caricatured and copied, eventually left Downing Street when he concluded the hostile media attention surrounding him meant he had become more of a hindrance than a help to Tony Blair. But Campbell points out that whatever else he did, “I never pursued my own agenda or undermined the prime minister – anything like that is just lethal for everybody”.
On one level, all these stories resemble a very old one about power being wielded by hidden – or sometimes rather too visible – hands behind the throne. Whether it was Flavius Aetius in the final years of the Roman empire, Niccolò Machiavelli in Renaissance Florence or Grigori Rasputin in tsarist Russia, it rarely has a happy ending, and McSweeney would obviously not enjoy comparison with any of them.
Yet it also seems to be a peculiarly British obsession – no other modern democracy so consistently elevates political advisers into a position that appears close to parity with the head of government. Even in the US, where Karl Rove was once described as George W Bush’s brain and the likes of Stephen Miller exercise huge influence over Donald Trump, it is much rarer for individual advisers to become so prominent.
Explanations for this range from the UK’s political system, which concentrates executive power in an antiquated Downing Street, its corridors filled by intrigue, to a facile who’s-up-who’s-down “inside Westminster” style of reporting politics. Neil Kinnock, who watched Peter Mandelson evolve from Labour’s director of communications during the 1980s into the “Prince of Darkness”, suggests it has to do with an English habit of treating politics as a game played out by “courtiers” in a royal castle. He says: “Though it may be sometimes be inevitable that advisers start being seen as more interesting or powerful than the elected leader, it’s not sustainable.”
What all these superadvisers have in common is that their perceived power and notoriety have grown in direct proportion to their proximity to the media – and journalists who tend to inflate the importance of those to whom they gain access. Until a few years ago, the advisers who became famous were all “spin doctors” in one form or another. When Margaret Thatcher was in power there were several powerful figures behind the scenes, such as Charles Powell and Alan Walters, as well as her titular chief of staff David Wolfson. But only her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, was given the accolade of having an unauthorised biography written about him by Robert Harris, who was political editor of this newspaper before turning to fiction. He wrote that Ingham was “so devoted” to Thatcher, “and she so trusting of him, that he was almost an extra lobe to her brain”.
More recently, the adviser in government getting the most media attention has been the chief of staff, and the length of time each stays in the job appears to have shrunk accordingly. Jonathan Powell, who is generally regarded as the first proper occupant of the post, also held it the longest, and he avoided the limelight. Recalling how, for much of the 10 years he worked for Blair, the media did not even have a photograph of him, he says it would instead “include a mysterious black silhouette alongside any story they ran”. Powell, who has since quietly re-emerged as Starmer’s national security adviser and one of his most effective aides, has described the way he works in his memoir, The New Machiavelli. “It is only possible to do the job properly from behind the arras. You must be able to move silently if you are to carry out confidential tasks,” he writes, before adding that “some back-room boys aren’t satisfied with remaining in the back room, however, and want to go on stage in their own right”.
Ed Llewellyn, chief of staff for all six years of Cameron’s premiership, also managed to avoid attracting much media attention. Even though he had known the prime minister since Eton, Llewellyn didn’t make the mistake of treating the prime minister as a friend or equal. As Michael Gove puts it: “Ed was chief of staff, but he was always very clear that he was still just staff.”
Only one of the 10 occupants of this post since then has lasted longer than two years. This was Gavin Barwell, who, though previously an MP and minister in his own right, generally sought to avoid contact with journalists after joining May’s Downing Street team in 2017. “There’s no precise job description,” he says. “But the moment you become a public figure with your opinions being talked about outside government, your ability to represent the PM inside government becomes constrained.”
That began to happen to him only at the end, when May tried to fight back against hardline Brexiters who then identified him as having remainer sympathies. “I became part of the story for some of them,” he says, “and that meant I became part of the problem.”
Simon Case, the former civil servant who remained cabinet secretary during the first few months after the last election, was at times caught in the middle of the battle to oust Gray. While he says good advisers “can make the system move faster”, he warns that “disaster usually quickly ensues” when they “try to set up a power base of their own”. He adds: “If they want to be semi-public figures – if they spend their time talking to the media about their views and their roles – it doesn’t work. They need to be seen internally and externally as inseparable from their bosses, enhancers of their capabilities, not separate centres of decision-making.”
Such comments inevitably bring the focus back to the recent troubles around the current chief of staff. Yet as with so much else in politics, McSweeney does not quite fit the caricature that’s been built for him. This soft-spoken Irishman once told me he had been genuinely bemused and troubled when I wrote that, such was his “cult-like status” among Labour campaign staff last year, they started queuing up at a south London sandwich shop after discovering it was where he bought his lunch.
Nor does he exude the swaggering arrogance that made some of his superadviser predecessors in Downing Street such a magnet for the media. Although he has his own meeting room in No 10, decorated in the slightly chintzy fashion of a fading seaside hotel, most of his work is done in the brightly lit open-plan space outside Starmer’s office. Colleagues attest to his personal politeness and how he often defers to his two deputies, Jill Cuthbertson and Vidhya Alakeson, who perform many of the functions usually associated with being chief of staff. Others marvel at his ability to hold huge amounts of information in his head and still give clear advice on complex issues, even if some would like him to commit a few more of those thoughts to paper and a process by which decisions can be delivered.
It is also fair to say that McSweeney’s reputation is partly down to Starmer – who often says “I’ve got Morgan who does that” – sub-contracting much of the dirty work he so dislikes about politics. Even so, it isn’t healthy for either of them that the gap left by the prime minister’s similar distaste for rigid ideology has so often been filled by newspaper articles that tell readers more about what McSweeney thinks than what his boss believes.
Although McSweeney usually avoids being quoted directly, many formulations – ranging from “a senior Downing Street figure” to him “telling friends” – have allowed his views to reach far beyond those who work with him. Such is the volume and frequency of his media briefings that he is in danger of being blamed for just about every anonymised quote attributed to someone in the government.
Get In, a book written by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund about Labour’s road back to power, has been described by one cabinet minister as “Morgan’s autobiography”. It makes so much use of long quotes from what he told various Friday night dinners that Streeting, who in those days was still part of the gang, mocked up a blue plaque for the table around which they all met. At times, the book seems to relegate the Labour leader to a role that one source cruelly compared to the driver of a remote-controlled train.
Until a few days ago, this article too might have been filled with a lengthy description of the chief of staff’s thoughts on the role of superadvisers or, more likely, how he has come up with another new stratagem to turn the political tide. But no longer, or – at least – not now, because McSweeney is promising everyone that he will stop talking to journalists. It’s also pretty clear his vow of silence hasn’t been entirely self-imposed, with Starmer emphasising at last week’s cabinet meeting that only his communications team are authorised to brief the media.
After another week of messy leaks and chaos in the build-up to the budget, there is a strong desire to exude more of the calm reassurance that has always been more Starmer’s style than that of his chief of staff. Whatever else it means, a voiding all those calls to journalists will at least free up more time for McSweeney to do the job he was appointed to do.
Indeed, if he really can step back from “telling friends” in the media what he thinks all the time, McSweeney may yet help ensure that both he and Starmer remain in Downing Street longer than their lengthening list of enemies would wish, or many might now expect.
Tom Baldwin was a senior advisor to the Labour party for four years, but never a “super” one, not least because he never made it into government. He is the author of Keir Starmer: The Biography
Photograph by Observer Design, Leon Neal, PA Images/Alamy, Hollie Adams, Peter Macdiarmid,Tom Stoddart/Getty Images