Hello and welcome to Coffee House. I'm Tim Shipman. And I'm James Hill. And today we are going to be talking about Morgan McSweeney's resignation from number 10. And frankly, not much else. Can Kirstama survive and who might replace him? Tim, the only news of the day is Morgan McSweeney is out as number 10 chief staff.

Was it a shock or a surprise?

I think that's always the great distinction in politics.

It wasn't a surprise, but it's always still a shock when these big things happen.

So people have been muttering for weeks about Morgan Moscow,

Morgan must go, half the Labour Party in the House of Commons seemed to want that.

And it always seemed very likely that Stama would at some point have to sacrifice him, or he would decide that he should go to

save Stama, or that he might go, because he's just had enough of bleating Labour MPs,

moaning on about him wanting to align Labour with the views of the electorate rather than the views of

the left of the Labour Party. And I think ultimately it was probably a combination of all those

things. There were multiple conversations on Friday between McSweeney and Stama, reports of meetings

that McSweeney wasn't in as well, where this was clearly being war-gamed.

And then finally a conversation on Sunday where, sort of around about lunchtime,

where they kind of mutually agreed.

And I think they probably did mutually agree, but that didn't mean that it was particularly happy, I don't think.

There were a lot of people immediately hitting the WhatsApp.

Downing Street was quite concerned that McSweeney's allies would brief against the Prime Minister.

And I don't think that particularly happened, but there was certainly a lot of people briefing in favour of McSweeney.

He's got a lot of allies in there there and this is easily forgotten by MPs.

You think, oh, this man was a menace and he was telling us what to do and it's all terrible. But in the building, the man was very popular and amongst that sort of carder of special advisors who were dotted all the way around Whitehall, they are gutted about this. They rated him very highly. that they only one large parliamentary majority because parliamentary majority because of him. Clearly that's arguable. The Tories have made a mess of it, but you still need to get it over the line. You still need to make the right arguments and convince the public and convince enough of them. He ran a clever campaign that targeted the right sort of voters in marginal seats. And that is why Stalmers walked off with a big majority.

And there's a lot of people think, well, we've lost that now, and that's a big deal. And I think it's a really interesting divide that you touch on there, which is that there are a huge number of advisors who came up through the Labour ranks, people who worked in the attack unit, people who were really inspired by him in that. I think if you looked around in 2020, No one in the Labour Party thought they could win a majority next time.

Morgan McSween was virtually the only one who thought that.

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