Good morning. Morgan McSweeney is no longer Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Will it save Starmer? I don’t speculate because as George Eliot wrote, “among all forms of error, prediction is the most gratuitous”. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

Starmer is unusually reliant on advisers and aides because he is not a natural politician. If he – and Labor – is very lucky, then his post-McSweeney period will resemble Theresa May’s post-2017 period, where, with Gavin Barwell as her chief of staff and David Lidington as her de facto deputy prime minister, she managed to govern effectively and helped pave the way for the Conservatives to be re-elected in 2019.

If he is unlucky, then it will be like when Boris Johnson fired Dominic Cummings in 2020 – his government would never have found its feet without Cummings and the Conservatives, of course, fell to a record defeat in 2024.

For now, I want to discuss the case for and against McSweeney and both Labor camps on that issue.

The two-child limit exposes the flaw in Labour’s strategy

At the 30th anniversary dinner for the Blairite pressure group Progress a few weeks ago, the speakers repeatedly returned to two themes: how good it is that Labor is back in government and how good it is that the Labor government scrapped the two-child benefit limit, removing hundreds of thousands of children from poverty.

The first is the success that Morgan McSweeney’s supporters have touted in the government and the wider Labor Party. The latter was something McSweeney had to be dragged, kicked and shouted at to do.

McSweeney’s defense case is the result of the general election in 2024. Yes, of course, it helps if your opponents do bad things like make Liz Truss prime minister, but by making Labor non-threatening, by eliminating any promise or position that might have spooked the horses, McSweeney has positioned Labor perfectly to benefit.

No matter how you feel about the two-child limit, that activity is a good case for prosecution. Opposition Labor has made a promise it won’t keep unless the two-child limit is lifted. All McSweeney – and Rachel Reeves, who is the other biggest opponent – have achieved in the fight is that it wastes taxpayers’ money on policies with a limited evidence base, such as universal free breakfast clubs, in a clearly defined attempt to weaken the Parliamentary Labor Party to maintain the benefit cap.

In the long run, the heavy-handed and blatantly contemptuous approach to parliamentary party management has created a situation where the 2024 intake – the product of the most controlled and micromanaged set of parliamentary selections in British history – is now mutinous and difficult to manage. Securing support for any radical change from this parliament now looks very difficult.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s a similar presentation of the two cases, because I don’t think it’s a case that a jury should spend a lot of time on. The problem with the Starmer/McSweeney approach is that it eliminates ideas that are good but unpopular.

But many popular ideas are bad! While Labour’s “nationalise it, then magic happens and the railways will just get better” plans are popular, in the real world this could mean that the government is handing over a worse set of railways to its successor, whoever it may be, than its successors. The “balancing of the minimum wage for under 21s” is popular but it may contribute to the growing number of young people who are Neet (not in education, work or training).

And then measures like scraping the cliff in our tax system if you earn more than £100,000 or regulating to benefit our strong areas of financial services and pharmaceuticals are, in my view, good but unpopular.

Neither David Cameron nor Tony Blair just looked the other way and asked “what are they doing famously?” They ask “what about them is better than what we have to offer?” Labor under Starmer and McSweeney is only superficially interested in learning from what the party that beat them did right, and that superficial interest is why Labor’s vote is a party on the brink of death. Maybe, with a new chief of staff, Starmer will find a seriousness that has so far eluded him, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Now try it

As some of you may have guessed from the quote above in the email, I spent more than half of my life pretending to read George Eliot. MiddlemarchI finally started reading Middlemarch. The good news is that it’s as good as I pretend I think it is. If you haven’t read it yet, start now!

Today’s top stories

• Mandelson’s payment is pending | The Foreign Office is payout review of up to £40,000 to Lord Peter Mandelson after he was sacked as the UK’s ambassador to the US last year, as the scandal deepened over the colleague’s links to Jeffrey Epstein.

• War for survival | Now Keir Starmer will try to take back the initiative, as the threat of election losses looms. Allies said the prime minister had “ordered officials to move swiftly to deliver change”. People close to Starmer said they were concerned that Morgan McSweeney, a Peter Mandelson protégé, will incur more damage in the coming days with the release of documents related to the colleague’s tenure as US envoy last year.

• Protecting academics | UK universities have been told by the government improve their defenses against threats and censorship from China and other states, while the security services launched an advisory scheme for threatened researchers.

• Nothing to see here | The Ministry of Justice has ordered the removal of a large archive of court records, raising open justice concerns, the Times reports. Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, the government ordered its archive to be deletedwhich provides an essential tool for journalists covering the justice system.