A Labour government won the largest parliamentary majority in a generation, and within months it had become the least popular prime minister's office since modern polling began. Paul Holden does not treat this as a puzzle to be solved. He treats it as a design flaw.
The Architecture of Power
The piece argues that the collapse was baked into the method. What looked like a political rebirth was, in Holden's reading, a long-con. The Starmer–McSweeney project traced its real origins not to the 2024 general election but to 2017, when Morgan McSweeney watched Jeremy Corbyn outperform expectations and decided the left wing of the Labour Party had to be dismantled.
Holden writes, "That leadership campaign was a brilliantly excellent exercise in premeditated misdirection, dishonesty, and bad faith. It was, in short, a well-executed fraud." Keir Starmer pitched himself as a left-wing inheritor of the Corbynite tradition — an eco-socialist who would take on corporate power and unite a fractured party. None of it held.
The mechanism, as Holden describes it, was a think tank called Labour Together that publicly convened earnest roundtables about party unity while privately running what McSweeney called "Operation Red Shield." Undeclared donations from millionaire donors funded data operations, endless membership polling, and a coordinated effort to inflame the antisemitism crisis that would eventually be used to push Corbyn out of the party entirely in October 2020. The irony is thick: the antisemitism crisis that McSweeney helped manufacture in secret became the instrument of his own undoing a few years later, when the Peter Mandelson appointment — and Mandelson's documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein — forced McSweeney from government.
"Starmer and McSweeney have achieved, in less than a decade, what a century of skullduggery on the part of organized capital could not."
The DNA Swap
Holden's central metaphor is biological. The Labour Party's operating code was rewritten. Left-wing candidates were blocked and humiliated — one excluded for sharing a Jon Stewart skit about the Israel–Gaza debate, another for liking a tweet from Nicola Sturgeon saying she had recovered from COVID.
As Holden puts it, "But, like all good body horrors, the short-term gain of good looks and social acceptance was bought with a long-term, systemic corruption." The party suddenly projected polish: nice teeth, sharp suits, moisturized skin. But the body politic was rotting underneath.
The policy shift followed. Within weeks of taking power, Starmer accepted nearly £100,000 in luxury gifts. Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced austerity measures that would cut winter heating allowances for pensioners and slash welfare provisions for people with disabilities — pushing 250,000 people into poverty, including 50,000 children. MPs who opposed these cuts had the whip removed, their public humiliation meant to signal to bond markets that Labour would not tolerate "soft-headed emotionality."
Gaza and the Moral Reckoning
The deepest wound, in Holden's account, came from the government's position on Gaza. Starmer's response to Israel's October 2023 military campaign — telling a radio interviewer that Israel had the right to shut off water and electricity to civilians, failing for weeks to express sympathy for Palestinian deaths — alienated a generation of natural Labour supporters.
"For many, it was the first time they came to understand that there was a deep well between a common, public morality, and the ideas of our political class," Holden writes. The government then escalated: expanding live facial recognition systems, introducing restrictions on the right to protest, proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, arresting over 2,000 citizens including vicars, blind and disabled people, and an 89-year-old protester for simply holding a sign.
The High Court, as of the piece's publication, ruled that proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group was unlawful.
Critics might note that Holden's account gives relatively little weight to the genuine security concerns that motivated some of these measures, or to the fact that governing a country after fourteen years of Conservative rule inherited real fiscal constraints that limited any government's room for manoeuvre. They might also argue that the claim of "entryism" — a Trotskyist tactic of infiltrating an organization to seize it from within — stretches the term beyond its useful meaning when applied to a mainstream political figure winning a leadership election through perfectly legal means.
And yet. The numbers do not lie. In Starmer's own constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, his vote count collapsed from 41,300 in 2017 to just 18,800 in 2024. On victory night, as the results circulated in whispered panic, someone in the crowd shouted "Lies!" at Starmer's promise of public service. The room laughed. Holden was there. He includes the moment because it captures something the polling averages cannot: the feeling that the project had already betrayed itself before it had even governed.
Bottom Line
Holden's indictment is not that Starmer and McSweeney failed at governing. It is that they succeeded at exactly what they set out to do — seize power through a campaign of calculated deception — and then discovered that power built on bad faith cannot hold. The Labour Party survived two world wars and the Tony Blair years. What broke it was the belief that a century-old institution could be remade by a handful of operatives, data models, and undeclared money.