412 Seats, and Nobody Whose Job the Plan Was

Two years ago this week, Labour won 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, the largest majority any party has assembled since Tony Blair's in 1997, achieved against a Conservative Party in a state of genuine institutional collapse. Two years on, almost to the day, Keir Starmer has resigned as prime minister, Labour is choosing his successor, and Morgan McSweeney, the strategist who built the machine that won the landslide and then followed Starmer into Downing Street as chief of staff, has told whoever will listen that the government was not ready to govern.

There is a case for him, and it is worth stating plainly before it is dismissed. Labour's rise was sharper than anyone in the party had planned for. A fragmented state, inherited mid-collapse, does not come with an instruction manual. The "missions" framework Starmer launched in February 2023 was deliberately built around outcomes rather than delivery mechanics — clean power by 2030, growth to the top of the G7 — on the theory that fixating on means before you hold office produces manifestos full of detail and governments full of excuses. Slow, careful, mission-led government is a defensible strategy. Nobody sensible expects a change of government to run like a factory changeover.

But the manifesto did not promise patience. It promised foundations. "The starting point for delivering these missions," Labour's own governing document said, "is to ensure the foundations of good government are right." Translated out of manifesto-speak, that sentence means: before we do anything else, the machinery will work. Two years later, the man who wrote the campaign that sold the sentence is confirming, in public, that the machinery did not work, and treating the confession as insight.

This is not an excuse, and it should not be received as one. Starmer became Labour leader in April 2020. He had four years, not four weeks, to build a transition operation, and he was not improvising in the dark. The Institute for Government had been running a podcast series called Preparing for Power since February 2024, publicly interviewing former officials and advisers about the machinery of taking office, because the problem of transition readiness is old, well-documented, and entirely foreseeable to anyone paid to foresee it. A party that spent four years drafting five missions apparently could not spare a fortnight for a delivery plan, and nobody has yet lost a job over the omission.

Which returns us to the only question this column ever asks: who decided this? Not who decided the missions — that was Starmer, in public, campaigning on them. Who decided that readiness itself was somebody else's job? McSweeney ran the campaign and became chief of staff; if anyone in the modern Labour Party held formal responsibility for turning a landslide into a functioning government, the organisational chart points at him. His admission is therefore an unusual kind of testimony: the man in charge of preparation confirming the failure, then handing the postmortem to a leadership contest he did not resign to enter.

Compare 1945. Attlee's government took office into a country that was bankrupt, rationed, and owed America more money than it could see a way of repaying, and it built the National Health Service and 200,000 houses a year regardless. It could do so because the civil service had been planning reconstruction since Beveridge reported in 1942, three years before the election that let anyone act on it.

The preparation was not glamorous. It was committees, drafts, arguments about hospital boundaries, done in wartime on no budget, years ahead of the vote that mattered. Labour in 2024 had the same lead time and a functioning peacetime civil service to plan with, and produced, according to its own chief of staff, insufficient foundations.

None of this would matter much if someone had been held to it. A failed transition is not a scandal in itself; every government since Attlee's has underdelivered against its own promises. What makes this one an accountability story rather than an ordinary tale of governing difficulty is the total absence of a name attached to the failure. Nobody has been sacked. Nobody has resigned over it, and Starmer's own departure has been framed around other pressures entirely, which is itself instructive. The admission arrives as diagnosis rather than confession, delivered by the one man best placed to have prevented the disease and least willing to say so plainly.

That is not repentance. That is positioning — an attempt to relabel a personal and organisational failure as a systemic inevitability, arriving at the precise moment a leadership contest is choosing who inherits the blame. It is a neat trick, and it will likely work, because the members voting for Starmer's successor have no mechanism to ask McSweeney to account for the last two years and every incentive to look forward instead.

Two years after 412 seats, the government's own former architect says the plan was never built, and the man saying it is still in the building.