Mike's Minute: Labour don't prep for power

Author: Mike Hosking ,
Publish Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2026, 9:51am

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Labour Party leader Keir Starmer on the campaign trail in Macclesfield for Election 2024 29 June 2024. Photo / Supplied

You may remember that Morgan McSweeney was one of Keir Starmer's fall guys in the Mandelson scandal.

He ran the Labour Party's 2024 campaign that saw Labour land a comparatively small amount of the vote (37%) in exactly the right places to give them a stonking great majority and end 14 years of Tory rule.

It ended badly for McSweeney. It's ending badly for Starmer, and a bloke who never got elected by Britain is going to run the place in a few weeks, theoretically for the next three years.

I tell you this because McSweeney has never spoken before, until now.

What he says is fascinating. He claims the party didn’t prepare properly for power, didn’t think about how the world had changed since they were last in Government, didn't talk about it enough, and didn't plan, and that's why Starmer was such a disaster.

What makes it fascinating for us is:

1) It was Starmer and Labour that Chris Hipkins visited in Liverpool at their conference to get tips.

2) It's Hipkins and Labour, according to former MP and Speaker Trevor Mallard, who ended up at the Featherston book fair telling exactly the same story about his party.

So do we have a theme, or a trait? Are Labour groupings essentially lazy, or blind, or arrogant? Or a combination of all three?

Labour NZ 2017 set a record in working groups because they hadn't prepared for Government. They had nine years to do so. Labour in Britain had 14 years.

Perhaps as interesting is Peter Dunne's latest column in Newsroom where he reports that the recent Labour congress here was well staged but lacked anything new. Subsidies for apprenticeships are worthy, but dull, and reminds voters of the economic mess Labour last got us into.

Do labour movements lack imagination?

The two may be coincidental, but they might not be. Is Labour about simply waiting for the other lot to lose? At their heart, are they not actually up for a bit of hard work and prep?

New Zealand Labour were jettisoned for a calamitous record. British Labour would be on the verge of it if they didn’t have five-year terms.

McSweeney, Mallard, and Dunne all tell a similar story.

If you're a potential Labour supporter here, surely that story is worrying, if not frightening.