After Tony Blair swept to victory in 1997, his aides set out to establish who some of their new and unexpected Labour MPs actually were.
Unlike them, Keir Starmer will have a clear idea. A group of his advisers led by his campaign chief, Morgan McSweeney, has maintained a vice-like grip on the selection of Labour candidates over the past two years.
Their aim has been to usher in a new generation of politicians who will bolster a dwindled parliamentary Labour party, with a view to quickly promoting some of them to ministers if they win. But the selections are also part of a political agenda to consolidate Labour’s shift to the centre.
On Tuesday, the party’s ruling national executive committee signed off a list of those contesting seats. Here are some of the rising stars who, if the polls are right, are expected to play a part in the next Labour government.
Sarah Sackman
Finchley and Golders Green (Tory notional majority: 6,629)
Starmer has a lot in common with Sackman, a public law barrister said to be one of his personal picks. They stood for parliament in 2015 in neighbouring north London constituencies.
Volunteering to give pro bono legal advice at Toynbee Hall convinced Sackman to go into politics.
“Under the gleaming towers of the City, I was working to support people who were facing eviction, mouldy homes, food poverty,” she said. “As a lawyer you can win individual cases, but winning power and the political process is how you change the laws.”
Finchley and Golders Green is the constituency with the largest Jewish population in the UK, and Sackman says Jeremy Corbyn’s name still comes up on the doorstep. For her, a vice-chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, victory here would be symbolic.
Satvir Kaur
Southampton Test (Labour notional 6,213 majority)
Kaur became involved in politics before the 2010 election after meeting the local MP, John Denham, while volunteering at a community event. She joined his campaign to defend his super-marginal seat, helping him cling on by 192 votes.
“I realised you, as an individual, can be part of something bigger and make a meaningful change,” she said.
After that, she became the first Sikh council leader and introduced Starmer before his speech at the Labour conference in 2022.
“Local councils have had shackles put on their feet and their arms while being told to climb Everest,” she said. “We need a change in government.” Her priority, if elected, would be housing.
Dr Zubir Ahmed
Glasgow South West (SNP notional 5,533 majority)
The son of a Pakistani taxi driver, Ahmed joined Labour in his mid teens and recalls how his family were grateful for the support of Scottish Labour MPs. Frank McElhone helped Ahmed’s mother join his father in Glasgow in the 1970s, and Donald Dewar helped his grandfather after his pension was cut off.
Ahmed decided to enter politics while working as a consultant surgeon during the pandemic.
“Since the late 90s and early 2000s, the country has been regressing,” he said. “It made me feel like I had something to offer.” He would focus on NHS reform and international development.
Hamish Falconer
Lincoln (3,514 notional Tory majority)
Falconer has spent the first part of his career in the Foreign Office, leading its terrorism response team and working in Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Sudan.
He comes from a political family – his father is the former Labour cabinet minister Charlie Falconer – and so when the selection opened in Lincoln, near where his mother is from, friends encouraged him to stand.
“Me and my dad are very close … and having had family involved in the Labour party, I grew up with a sense of how important politics is,” he said.
If elected, he will be one of only a few MPs with foreign policy experience. “The intersection between foreign and domestic policy is getting closer … I think it’s going to be a bigger theme for us to grapple with than most people realise.”
Kanishka Narayan
Vale of Glamorgan (2,566 Tory notional majority)
Born in India, Narayan moved to Cardiff with his parents when he was 12. He spent a year at Cathays high school before getting into Eton on a scholarship, going on to study at Oxford and then Stanford before joining the civil service.
He joined Labour out of a passion for social mobility. “You grow up in south Wales and see the difference in opportunities that people around you have,” he said. He recalls returning home and seeing his community unpicked by public spending cuts.
“Wales has this amazing culture of compassion,” he said. “The way we can retain our compassion is through a path to prosperity – bring back sustained economic growth.”
Mike Tapp
Dover and Deal (12,421 Tory notional majority)
One of several ex-military candidates, Mike Tapp served in military intelligence and went on three tours to Iraq and Afghanistan before working for the National Crime Agency and the Ministry of Defence.
“I harboured this ambition for politics but I was waiting for the right time,” he said. “If you look at Labour values, they line up perfectly with military values: integrity, service, discipline, fairness.”
He joined Labour in his early 20s while in the army, and if elected his priorities would be security and home affairs.
Miatta Fahnbulleh
Camberwell and Peckham (Labour notional majority 26,553)
Fahnbulleh was seven when her family fled to Britain to escape the civil war in Liberia. She has built a career as an economist in London, working as head of cities in the policy unit in the Cabinet Office and then for the former Labour leader Ed Miliband. When she was selected, she was chief executive of the New Economics Foundation.
“The one thing that stuck with me being a first-generation immigrant in this country was just how tough things have been for people in my community,” she said. “There are too many stories of people doing everything and not being able to push through.”
Her priorities if elected would be housing, living standards and knife crime.
Samantha Niblett
South Derbyshire (Tory notional 16,483 majority)
When Niblett was 11, her mother tried to take her own life. Niblett left home at 17 and moved eight times during her A-level year. But it was not until she was in her mid-30s that she started noticing how politics was affecting her community.
One of her biggest motivations now is showing her 16-year-old daughter what is possible. “I had to wait for her to be a certain age before I could even consider this – but then, I can’t tell her she can do whatever she wants to do if I don’t show her.”
In 2020 Niblett founded Labour Women in Tech and wants to attract fintech companies to South Derbyshire. “Because I can remember what it’s like to really feel apathetic about politics and politicians, I really enjoy my conversations on the doors.”
Georgia Gould
Queen’s Park and Maida Vale (18,874 Labour notional majority)
Gould, the leader of Starmer’s local council, Camden, comes from a Labour family. She is the daughter of the former strategist Philip Gould, who modernised the party’s image under Tony Blair, and Gail Rebuck, the chair of Penguin Random House and a Labour peer.
In Camden she has championed devolution and pursued a “mission-driven” approach to governing, the same model Starmer has put at the heart of his pitch to voters.
She told the Local Government Chronicle last year that she wanted to “make the case for a completely different distribution of power”.
Josh Simons
Makerfield (4,955 Labour notional majority)
One of the most influential people in Starmer’s inner circle, Simons is now taking things a step further by running for parliament.
He is a former director of Labour Together, a thinktank dedicated to reforming the party after Corbyn, starting by making Starmer its leader. He has completed a PhD at Harvard on artificial intelligence and worked for Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
“We live in an age of insecurity. Now more than ever, people need to feel change … I think it’s so important we politicians speak plainly and honestly, levelling with the public, not promising false dawns.”
• Boundary changes mean the general election will be fought in altered seats, so all majorities are notional
• This article was amended on 5 June 2024. Josh Simons is a former director of Labour Together, but not its founder, as an earlier version said.
