Morgan McSweeney has broken his silence. In a podcast interview with Nick Robinson, Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff admitted that during planning meetings in early 2024 he “did start to realise that we hadn’t done enough to prepare for government”.
Understandably the focus was on perfecting the politics of opposition, defeating the then Conservative government, rather than preparing a detailed prospectus for government. It was only in early 2023 that Labour’s lead in the opinion polls began to consolidate and there was a widespread expectation it might actually win. The UK has a winner takes all electoral system where the opposition party is often out of office for more than a decade. Consequently, most of its shadow ministers have relatively little experience of managing and leading large organisations, let alone running a government in the hostile and volatile geopolitical and domestic environment that is the Fifth Industrial Revolution.
Despite these enormous challenges, Britain has no coherent machinery for preparing the main opposition parties to govern, and transitions are usually improvised from scratch. How well they go depends almost entirely on the efforts of whoever happens to be around the incoming leader.
Consider what that preparation rests on. An opposition expecting to win can request access talks with the civil service, but these often come late, cover less ground than we might expect focusing on headline manifesto commitments, and take place only at the discretion of the sitting prime minister. Nothing requires a party within reach of office to prepare at all, and the record shows how little the system guarantees. Even 1997, remembered as a relatively smooth transition, was not as effective when seen up close: ministers from that government have said they arrived feeling ill-prepared, while flagship positions, such as abolishing the NHS internal market and grant-maintained schools, were later effectively reversed after false starts. The opposition generally thought best prepared in recent decades is the Conservative side of the 2010 Coalition.
The Institute for Government was founded in part to be exactly the body to support oppositions through the transition to power, and its work to support opposition parties is serious and widely available. The gap is not the absence of an institution. It is that everything we have is advisory and voluntary. A think tank can publish guides and run seminars, but it cannot compel a leadership team to use them, and it has no formal role in the handover. Voluntary support depends on the engagement of the team it is trying to help.
Formal machinery helps, but is not sufficient either. The United States has transition arrangements set in law: funding, office space, security clearances and agency briefings, months before inauguration. Bill Clinton came to office through all of that in 1993 and his first year was still famously chaotic. Structure gets an incoming team information and resources. It cannot supply what the team does not have.
That points to a deeper problem. The gap between the skills needed to win power and the skills needed to govern has grown markedly. Campaigning rewards message discipline, opposition attack, shutting down vulnerabilities (as Labour did with disastrous consequences on tax), and the painstaking assembly of a viable voting coalition. Governing a complex, polarised society requires a grasp of statecraft: managing large institutions, weighing trade-offs, driving through legislation, making the machine move to deliver key priorities. Almost nothing in a modern political career teaches that set of skills, and many politicians arrive in office neither trained in the art of statecraft nor aware of how much they simply don’t know. The transition is where this gap is exposed. McSweeney’s team was not unusually careless. It was typically underpowered.
The cost is now a matter of record. The Starmer government’s early period was marked by decisions it came to regret, and first impressions of a government form fast and set hard. A team that arrives without a plan spends its opening months reacting, and the opening months are when authority is at its peak and the space to act is widest. On the evidence of the past two years, wasting that period can define everything that follows.
Within days, a new prime minister will walk into Downing Street. How can they best be supported? The answer is not more advice, of which there is plenty already. It is to create an effective formal transition machinery for the UK that permits serious preparation for government: access talks as an entitlement, starting earlier and going deeper; the support of the civil service to assist the main opposition in devising policy programmes and preparing the ground for delivery; and real investment in the craft of governing among those who will in due course be in power.