Senior members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet have been meeting with top Whitehall mandarins and former cabinet ministers as part of the party’s growing preparations for government, the Observer has learned.
Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser who helped guide the government through the pandemic, as well as former New Labour cabinet ministers James Purnell and Patricia Hewitt, are among those to have attended a series of informal dinners designed to brief Labour frontbenchers on life in government. Former Blair-era adviser Sarah Hunter has also attended.
With Labour still enjoying a double-digit lead in the polls, Starmer’s most senior advisers remain obsessed with guarding against complacency as the election draws nearer. However, the growing likelihood of a Labour-led government has seen shadow ministers step up their preparations for power.
The dinners have been chaired by Baroness Sally Morgan, one of Tony Blair’s key advisers at the height of New Labour’s popularity. They have also been attended by Sue Gray, the Whitehall veteran who is now Starmer’s chief of staff.
The events are one element of the private preparations being made by Labour shadow teams after orders from the leader’s office that they had to begin thinking like a “government in waiting” rather than a campaigning protest group.
It comes soon after the Observer revealed that Starmer has now met cabinet secretary Simon Case for the first round of so-called “access talks”. Such talks take place with opposition leaders ahead of elections to allow Whitehall to prepare in advance, in this case should Labour gain power.
The private dinners and meetings have not been organised by the party itself but by the influential Labour Together group, a pro-Starmer thinktank that has played an increasing role in boosting the Labour party’s capacity in opposition. The group’s former director, Morgan McSweeney, is now Starmer’s highly influential campaigns director.
Several of the group’s 50-strong staff, recruited from across Whitehall and the private sector, have been seconded to Labour’s shadow teams to help draft and stress-test policy ideas in the run-up to the election. Staff have been seconded to the shadow Treasury, shadow justice, shadow foreign office, shadow home office and shadow cabinet office teams, as well as Labour HQ.
All shadow teams have also spent much of the start of the year drawing up what their departments would like to see in a Labour manifesto should an election be called for May. Last week, Rishi Sunak ruled out holding an election on the same day as May’s local elections.
Labour Together has drawn its support and resources from business figures previously alienated from Labour during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. They include Trevor Chinn, the Jewish community leader and retired businessman; Gary Lubner, the former Autoglass boss who was also the Labour party’s biggest donor last year, and Martin Taylor, a hedge fund manager who first donated to Labour under Ed Miliband. In 2021, the group was fined £14,000 for failing to properly declare donations worth more than £700,000.
Josh Simons, the Labour Together director, said that the group was transparent about its funding and its desire to see Starmer installed in Downing Street.
“I’ve sometimes heard us described as ‘shadowy’, but we’re anything but that,” said Simons. “Much of our work the wider world never sees, but that’s because what we care about is Labour winning and governing well, not how many people know about Labour Together.”
