Park any negative thoughts you may have about Tony Blair. His first cabinet was filled with big beasts who enjoyed broad public recognition. Gordon Brown, obviously. John Prescott, Robin Cook, Margaret Beckett, David Blunkett, Mo Mowlam, Jack Straw, Frank Dobson, Clare Short and even Peter Mandelson. As Keir Starmer conducts his likely final major reshuffle before a general election, the same cannot be said for his top team.
The standout theme from this reshuffle is the ascendancy of the Blairites, cementing the repudiation of Starmer’s “Corbynism with competence and unity” 2020 leadership pitch. This means Labour now has a shadow cabinet dominated by politicians opposed to taxing the well-to-do, sceptical about public investment, fixated with expanding the private sector in public services and uncomfortable with the welfare state.
Take Liz Kendall, a key figure in understanding Starmerism. In 2015, she stood for leader on a platform that included backing welfare cuts, and secured a paltry 4.5% of the vote. This was a searing experience for her campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, who went on to run Starmer’s leadership bid. His new strategy was to play the long game: posture to the left in a leadership campaign, then crush the Corbynites, marginalise the soft left and promote the Blairites. Now Starmer’s chief of staff, his plan has been vindicated as Kendall is promoted to work and pensions shadow secretary, replacing the left-Brownite Jonathan Ashworth, who won lasting bitterness from his colleagues for refusing to resign during the 2016 coup against the then leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Pat McFadden, Blair’s former political secretary, is now the party’s national campaign coordinator, revealing Labour’s political direction on the final approach to a general election. Darren Jones once hailed Blair as his political hero: he is now shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. Peter Kyle, one of the most ardent Blairites on Labour’s benches, now holds the science brief.
The reshuffle represents humiliation for figures associated with the “soft left”. Take Lisa Nandy, whose loyalty to the rightward-marching leadership has been brutally repaid: stripped of levelling up, she instead takes international development, a junior ministerial position without a department. Journalists have been briefed that Starmer didn’t want her at all.
Rosena Allin-Khan resigned as shadow cabinet minister for mental health with a letter to Starmer pointedly declaring that “you made clear that you do not see a space for a mental health portfolio in a Labour cabinet”. Allin-Khan – a serving frontline doctor with actual first-hand knowledge of healthcare – was openly sceptical of Labour’s Blairite shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, and his support for expanding privatisation in the NHS, putting her at odds with the direction of the party.
There are two members of the shadow cabinet who have few friends among Starmer’s allies, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband, but both have their own power bases. As well as being deputy leader and getting Nandy’s levelling up portfolio, Rayner also retains responsibility for the party’s agenda on workers’ rights, its last remaining transformative set of policies. However, her oversight of workers’ rights are not attached to a government department-in-waiting, and are at heavy risk of being watered down in office. Miliband survives, for now – but even after the party’s £28bn a year climate transition fund was scaled back, he remains unfinished business as far as powerful Labour officials are concerned.
The message is clear. The soft left has no meaningful future in Starmer’s Labour party. The brand of politics now dominant is Blairism circa 2005, when the leadership became obsessed with marketising Britain’s public services. The problem is that the country looks more like it did in 1974, a period defined by turmoil and decline. Investment is desperately needed in failing services and to kickstart industry to help Britain grow. And unlike the Labour landslide of 1997, there is a resurgent labour movement and younger generations are more politicised: these are potentially powerful forces if a Labour government disappoints them.
Starmer rightly feels hegemonic now, but the opposition’s polling lead is entirely down to Tory self-destruction, and not because of any enthusiasm for the leader and his largely anonymous team. This brand of politics offers no meaningful answer to a nation defined by crisis. There are those who crave social, economic and environmental justice who indulge illusions that the party will be more ambitious in government but, like New Labour, it will only lurch rightwards. Many of them keep silent in the run-up to an election, rallying around the opposition as the only means to dislodge the calamity of Tory rule. When the reality of Starmerism – and the Blairite coup – becomes evident in government, it will be their disappointment that will be the bitterest.
• This article was amended on 5 September 2023 because an earlier version referred to Angela Rayner as “being deputy prime minister”. She is shadow deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the Labour party.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
