Get In: 'cracking read' on Labour's rise to power

Keir Starmer relegated to 'supporting actor' as book explores the true 'power behind the throne'

Book cover of Get In by Patrick Maguire
Maguire's book is packed with 'revealing details'
(Image credit: Penguin)

"You might imagine that the hero of a book about how Keir Starmer led the Labour Party from electoral disaster to Downing Street would be, you know, Keir Starmer," said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times.

But while Starmer is "certainly present" in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's "well-researched account of Labour's return to power", his role is that of a supporting actor. The book's hero is Morgan McSweeney, the PM's 48-year-old chief of staff, who is portrayed as the architect of Labour's triumph and the current power behind the throne. By this account, it was McSweeney "who picked Starmer and not the other way round": in 2019, he needed an MP to front his crusade to make Labour electable again, and he alighted on Starmer. "Keir's very bright and picks things up very fast," he told friends. "He's not completely unpolitical." Packed with such revealing details, "Get In" is a "cracking read".

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This is a "rattling tale, terrifically well told", but McSweeney should keep it away from Starmer, "because he will surely loathe it", said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. The PM emerges as "someone acting a part others have ghostwritten for him". As one insider puts it, "Keir is not driving the train. He thinks he is driving the train, but we've sat him in the front of the DLR" – a reference to the driverless trains of the Docklands Light Railway.