When John Spencer, the West Wing actor who plays Leo McGarry, President Bartlett’s chief of staff, visited the UK he was surprised to find senior politicians gushing at him. One told him that his visit was “one of the greatest moments of my life”. Jonathan Powell, then Tony Blair’s chief of staff, even made time to meet him at No 10 to get his advice.
In reality, no one beyond the Westminster bubble would have heard of the Downing Street chief of staff until Dominic Cummings made the headlines under Boris Johnson. More recently, the role has been in the spotlight again after Sue Gray lasted less than 100 days in government.
Gray officially left because she had “become the story” – but in reality Starmer acted to reset his government after a fraught start. The history of chief of staffs in the US – outlined in Chris Whipple’s book The Gatekeepers – reveals much about the task facing Morgan McSweeney.
The first job for McSweeney is to give definition to the government’s project. Starmer must know, alongside all the unavoidable challenges that occur, what he wants to achieve. President Carter’s advisor, Landon Butler remembers what happens if this doesn’t happen “It [only] takes twenty-four hours in the White House for all the problems to converge…to know you’ve got to have someone to sort through this thicket [and] define what priorities you [are going] to set”.
Based on these, McSweeney must then control how Starmer uses his time and what information he gets. Only then will the Prime Minister be able to make the right decisions at the right time with the right people in the room. As Whipple notes: “A [leader’s] time is his most valuable asset”. Various presidents, most notably Clinton, attempted an open-door policy with multiple key advisers as equals – but all concluded it led to scattered decision making and poor information flows.
Disagreements in government are inevitable and necessary. The chief of staff can, indeed must, have an opinion – but they also need to be an “honest broker”, bringing all sides to the table. When this goes wrong, the chief of staff is undermined. President George HW Bush ended up setting up a secret mailbox at his house for his cabinet to get information to him because his chief of staff blocked the views of those he disagreed with.
But chief of staff is not just a political role – the occupant must oversee delivery in government. Bob Haldeman, president Nixon’s chief of staff, is credited with creating the so-called “staffing-system”, which, for the first time, allocated clear roles and responsibilities for delivery: “our job is not to do the work of government, but to get the work out to where it belongs”. This will be a learning curve for McSweeney who hasn’t worked in government before.
Finally, there are two pitfalls that all chiefs of staff must avoid at all costs. Never lose the trust of the leader. Everyone has to believe, in the words of president Nixon, that “when he talks, it’s me talking”. And, don’t become the story, as Gray discovered to her detriment. James Baker, perhaps the most revered White House chief of staff of all time, sums it up: “The people who don’t succeed… are those who like the chief part of the job and not the staff part”.
All of this is testament to a simple fact: chief of staff is perhaps the toughest and most complex role in government. But it is also one of the most important. It is where politics, policy and delivery come together. It can, and often does, make or break a government. As the historian Richard Norton Smith has observed, “every [leader] reveals himself by the person he picks as chief of staff”. Now we must wait to see if McSweeney can rise to the challenge – and what his appointment reveals about Starmer’s project.
