“Even Tony Blair didn’t have this many Blairites in his cabinet.” There, in 11 short words, a Labour MP gets to the heart of a shadow cabinet reshuffle that has proved beyond doubt Sir Keir Starmer’s authority and completes perhaps the most dramatic political metamorphosis in recent history.
That the leader of the opposition would begin this parliamentary term with a shake-up of the team that will take Labour into an election it looks very likely to win was no secret — so much so that shadow cabinet ministers whose unhappy fates were briefed to the media months ago had begun to complain privately of Starmer’s hesitancy.
Those criticisms have recurred throughout his leadership. They are now much harder to level with a straight face. A reshuffle that was widely anticipated to move few frontbenchers beyond Angela Rayner, Starmer’s deputy, has instead radically altered the balance and ideological character of a shadow cabinet that is likely to be in government within 13 months.
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It was Rayner’s future that had been subject to the most fevered speculation. And it is no wonder Starmer’s aides were so keen to stress that only her appointment to a new post in addition to her elected role as deputy would give them the space for broader changes.
In May 2021, just after Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the Hartlepool by-election, she derailed Starmer’s first reshuffle as leader and emerged emboldened with three shadow ministerial briefs and a 24-word job title.
This time, however, negotiations were conducted in private — with Starmer in a position of strength. Rayner’s move to shadow Michael Gove at levelling up — a sprawling domestic brief roughly analogous to that held by John Prescott under Tony Blair — was executed without a peep of dissent.
Lisa Nandy ended up as collateral damage, demoted beneath full shadow cabinet rank to international development. That a former shadow foreign secretary and leadership candidate accepted with good grace and made no public fuss of her appointment to a brief that is unlikely even to exist as a standalone ministry under a Labour government is another testament to Starmer’s stature and authority.
Yet these moves — first revealed by The Times in June — were merely the precursor to a far more consequential story whose conclusion is now beyond dispute. Starmer was not elected as New Labour, but he will govern as New Labour. Quite literally: five of his shadow cabinet were special advisers under Blair.
The former prime minister’s most loyal disciple, Pat McFadden, has been promoted to run Labour’s campaigns, with a Brownite deputy in Jonathan Ashworth, the new operation’s designated attack dog.
Liz Kendall, whose campaign for the leadership in 2015 ended with 4.5 per cent of the vote, is now responsible for a welfare policy that reliably offends the statist sensibilities of Labour’s activists and affiliated unions. And Hilary Benn, one of the few survivors of the Blair and Brown cabinets, has been given responsibility for Northern Ireland.
Fresher faces like Darren Jones, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, and Shabana Mahmood, the highly-regarded shadow justice secretary, are also firmly on the Labour right. The left is vanquished, the soft-left enfeebled. Taken together with the handful who stayed put, such as Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, and Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, this is a team that will mean what it says on fiscal rectitude and reform of public services.
But it is not the sort of team Starmer appointed in 2020. Nor is he the leader his most powerful shadow cabinet ministers wanted at the time.
Of the close personal allies he appointed to senior roles three years ago only Nick Thomas-Symonds, now entrusted with preparing for government as a shadow Cabinet Office minister with Sue Gray, is anywhere vaguely proximate to something resembling power. Some suspect this reshuffle really bears the hallmarks of aides much surer of their factional allegiance than their principal. But those tensions will only emerge in government, if at all.
That Starmer could make such sweeping changes without resistance reveals just how sure the Labour Party is that he will end up in Downing Street.