In the evening sunshine on the House of Commons terrace on Wednesday, Keir Starmer took some of his closest aides for a drink. Just three days into the new parliamentary session, and with a successful reshuffle under their belts, they were upbeat.
Earlier at prime minister’s questions, the Labour leader had likened Rishi Sunak’s government to a group of “cowboy builders” over the schools concrete crisis. With the government on the back foot, Labour aides couldn’t believe their luck.
“It’s been a good week,” admitted one usually cautious adviser. “But we can’t be complacent. We still have a long way to go and anything could happen.” However, the expectation is growing, inside and outside the Labour party, that Starmer will be the next prime minister.
It rounded off a promising start to the new parliamentary term for Labour after a summer during which the Tories struggled, despite repeated efforts to shake off the narrative that they were in meltdown. On Sunday, the day before MPs returned, Starmer met his closest team to put the finishing touches to his long-awaited reshuffle.
Early the next morning, he gathered his new chief of staff, Sue Gray, on her first day in the job, Alan Campbell, the chief whip, Luke Sullivan, his political director, and Jill Cuthbertson, the leader of his office, into the Harriet Harman room in his Westminster offices.
“The list we began with is the one we ended up with. That’s a rare thing for a reshuffle,” one senior aide said. Others credit Gray with its efficiency. John McTernan, a political secretary to Tony Blair in Downing Street, said: “It was done quickly and slickly and I saw the hand of Sue Gray in that. It’s important to do these things well.”
“I also saw clear judgment being made,” McTernan added. “You were demoted or fired from the shadow cabinet because you were underperforming, and promoted because of your talent. It really sent a message that Keir is choosing to use his authority.”
The reshuffle, months in the making, was viewed by many as a return of the Blairites, with half a dozen Blair-era former ministers and advisers – including Liz Kendall and Peter Kyle – getting top jobs, and the Daily Mail and the Sun marking the rightward shift of the new-look shadow cabinet.
It is true that Starmer receives advice from Peter Mandelson, one of New Labour’s architects, and talks to Blair himself regularly. Senior aides do not deny that his first reshuffle since November 2021 represents a march of the Blairites, but one added: “That shows a march of experience, doesn’t it?”
Many on the left of the party remain uncomfortable. “It’s an entirely factional takeover,” said one shadow minister. “It’s all the Blairites and they’ll all be champing at the bit to prove themselves. It’s definitely a shoring up of the right of the party.”
There is unlikely to be much public criticism, however, with even internal critics recognising the need for discipline this close to an election. “It’s not brilliant but everybody is so focused on winning, we’re all staying very disciplined,” said another shadow minister.
The reshuffle underlines the influence of Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign director. “Morgan and the Matts cooked it up,” said one aide, referring to the director of communications, Matthew Doyle, and Matt Pound, a senior adviser at Labour headquarters. “I think Morgan has strengthened his authority as the leader of the Labour party,” they added, with a dose of sarcasm.
A friend of McSweeney brushed off the sniping but did not deny that his fingerprints were all over it. “It’s a reshuffle of his doing but the Labour party is not an autocracy,” they said. “Ultimately it was Keir’s call. Morgan, like all of us, answers to him.”
The focus of the reshuffle was on middle-ranking jobs, with Starmer opting to keep his senior team – Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson – intact. He also left two big beasts of the soft left – Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband – in high-profile roles.
“It’s not a Blairite takeover. It’s a balance of experience, talent and ability,” claimed McTernan. “Keeping Ed Miliband in is an acknowledgment that a plane flies with two wings, you need a left and a right. Keir, Angie, Ed, they’re all of the soft left.”
Rayner is undoubtedly a winner of the reshuffle, having been offered and accepted the levelling up brief while also managing to hang on to Labour’s new deal for working people. One insider said this was “an absolute red line” for her in job negotiations and that “some forces wanted to take it off her”.
Those around Starmer are full of praise for Rayner, who has her own mandate from the party membership, complimenting her “political maturity and growing importance” and flagging how she is “particularly appealing” in focus groups to the so-called hero voters – “red wall” voters who swing directly from the Tories – that Labour is focusing on so relentlessly.
The fate of Miliband, the shadow climate change secretary, was the subject of much speculation in the run-up to the reshuffle amid a new Tory focus on using green issues as a political dividing line.
Yet party insiders reject the internal kremlinology and insist that Starmer and in particular Reeves, the shadow chancellor, share his view that Labour’s £28bn-a-year plan to invest in green industry will be central to the next Labour government’s fortunes, with its focus on the cost of living as well as climate targets.
There was unease even among Labour rightwingers over the demotion of Lisa Nandy, widely valued as one of the party’s best communicators, from levelling up to international development. “I’m a massive Lisa fan,” said one of those involved in the decision to demote her. Others say her talents were outweighed by a failure to translate her analytic skills into a solution in her brief.
The political side of the operation has been bolstered, to the relief of supportive internal critics who question Starmer’s political instincts. The promotion of Pat McFadden, a former political director to Blair, to national campaign coordinator will bring experience, discipline and judgment. He will be supported by the triumverate of Jonathan Ashworth, Ellie Reeves and Nick Thomas-Symonds.
One former Labour cabinet minister believes it is inevitable that the party will win the next election unless it makes an unforced error. “The government is in meltdown, there’s no coming back from this,” they said. “Governing parties lose elections, oppositions don’t win them.”
Alastair Campbell, a central figure in the New Labour project that won the 1997 election, believes that leaving the Tories to implode will not be enough. “Complacency is very dangerous,” he said. “The only way Labour is going to win big is if they fight like they’re going to lose.”
He added: “Keir is on a marathon not a sprint. From now on in he’s got to absolutely be setting the weather. He can’t win on the back of the government being rubbish. The new shadow cabinet has got to bang the drum about changes and how they’d be different from the Tories. That way when you get in it feels like you’ve got a mandate to do those things.”
One official at the new shadow cabinet’s three-hour long awayday at Church House in Westminster on Tuesday revealed that while there was a lot of “positivity and energy” in the room, and glee at the Tories being on the ropes and Labour’s punchy attack ads in response, there was also a recognition that “this isn’t the norm”.
Starmer’s aides insist that he understands he needs to provide hope as well as reassurance. He has talked often about his three phases back to power: transforming the party, taking the fight to the Tories and setting out what Labour would do differently.
“We’re very much in the third phase now,” one senior adviser said. “The shadow cabinet’s job is now about answering the question: if not them, why us?”
The ultimate test of this reshuffle will be whether this team can do that.
