Britain’s new power list: 12 people you need to know in the UK Labour government

4 months ago 3

ARTICLE AD BOX

The bestie: Rachel Reeves

Labour’s chess-wizard chancellor will be the first woman to lead the Treasury in the U.K.’s history, and has moved in lockstep with Keir Starmer as he tries to reinvent the party to transmit economic responsibility and appeal more directly to business. Reeves has been on a quest over the past 18 months to repair Labour’s perceived Achilles’ heel on the economy with promises of fiscal restraint.

Having spent the election campaign refusing to make major commitments until she arrived in No. 11 Downing Street, the house next door to the prime minister’s residence where the chancellor traditionally lives, Reeves will immediately turn to the mammoth tasks of Labour’s first budget and spending review, expected in October. This will put her in charge of a host of unenviable decisions about the future of public services and welfare, with Britain facing huge fiscal challenges.

Reeves has long been Starmer’s righthand woman and the pair will be desperate to avoid the toxic rivalry which dogged Tony Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, through the years of the last Labour governments. But that doesn’t mean tensions between the two offices will be non-existent, with Reeves already having flexed her muscles by downgrading Labour’s flagship green investment plan.

The firebrand: Angela Rayner

Starmer’s outspoken deputy spent the first half of the year rebutting questions about her past tax arrangements, but when police said there was no case to answer she was back on the campaign trail with a vengeance. As the mouthy yin to Starmer’s somewhat muted yang, she is one of Labour’s most instinctive campaigners, boasting proud working-class roots as well as enduring links to the trade union movement and the left of the party.

Rayner is in a unique position as deputy leader since she is directly elected by the party’s membership, giving her an alternative base of power to Starmer and his appointees. Some of her interventions during the election campaign, such as backing left-wing veteran Diane Abbott as the party leadership tried to push her out, showed her ability to flex her muscles against the party line. History has shown she tends to get her way.

Labour is now waiting nervously to see how she approaches power, and juggles her outsized personal brand with the two huge assignments in her in-tray: pushing through left-wing reforms to workplace rights, and the complex but urgent task of devolving power from Britain’s over-centralized economy to regional mayors and town halls.

The godfather: Tony Blair

Starmer will forever live in Tony Blair’s shadow as the second Labour leader swept to power after a concerted effort to wrest the party away from the left. The pair have an open line of communication as Starmer moves on to the next big challenge — turning his campaigning success into effective government.

Blair championed the two men’s connection when he invited Starmer for an on-stage fireside chat at an event held by his influential think tank, the Tony Blair Institute, which is already furnishing the new government with both policy ideas and key staff. Starmer has said before that he talks to Blair “a lot” about how his predecessor prepared for power in 1997.

Blair’s reach within the current party can be overstated, with the Labour grandee immersing himself in blue-sky questions about what AI means for the future of humanity while Starmer battles more pressing demands. Blair has previously insisted he will not act as a “backseat driver” for his successor — though was notably quick off the mark with some public advice for Starmer on immigration policy in this weekend’s Sunday Times. The new PM is certain to find himself reaching for his predecessor’s guidance — whether directly or indirectly — when the chips are down.

The prince of darkness: Peter Mandelson

Labour peer Peter Mandelson was a key architect of the New Labour project alongside Blair and Gordon Brown, known for his ruthlessness and political savvy. One of former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s most scathing critics, Mandelson has since become a sounding board for Starmer as leader. He sits at one remove from the new No. 10 Downing Street operation, since he holds no official government post and wears several other hats: as a Labour peer, founder of advisory firm Global Counsel and a podcaster for the Times.

Yet his presence and visibility have grown as Starmer’s grip on power has tightened, with Mandelson spotted observing the Labour leader up close at Prime Minister’s Questions and bagging a front-row seat for his Labour Party conference speech last year. While there’s no shortage of distinguished Labour insiders vying for Starmer’s ear, Mandelson’s credentials on trade, diplomacy and business engagement may be difficult to resist.

The mastermind: Morgan McSweeney

In opposition, Morgan McSweeney was Labour’s campaign director: perhaps the most enigmatic figure at the center of Starmer’s world — and also the most crucial. After working in local government he joined Labour Together, a think tank and campaign group dedicated to winning the party back from Corbyn and the hard left. McSweeney worked on Starmer’s 2020 Labour leadership campaign after deciding he was the best-placed candidate to steer the party into a more electable position. He was right.

McSweeney is widely credited with driving Labour’s winning strategy through a combination of close attention to data and a conviction that the party needed above all to win back the disenchanted and the alienated, shifting back toward the center-ground. An Irishman married to one of Labour’s new Scottish MPs, Imogen Walker, he’s expected to play a central role in shaping the narrative of Starmer’s nascent government and targeting victory at the next election. His importance to the entire Starmer project is impossible to overstate.

The fixer: Sue Gray

Starmer’s chief of staff is a woman of apparent contradictions. She joined Labour last year after more than 40 years working her way to the top of the politically-neutral civil service. She is notoriously hard-nosed, yet also reportedly a great deal of fun. Her task so far has been to make Labour a more disciplined, tightly focused operation, earning her both diehard fans and enemies in the process.

Gray’s reach is an extensive one, covering the party’s relationship with top civil servants, trade union bosses and management of the shadow cabinet. She takes a special interest in matters of ethics, having previously served as the Cabinet Office’s most senior enforcer, and will be on hand to navigate any murky personnel issues as they arise for Starmer and his phalanx of new MPs.

The old hand: Pat McFadden

McFadden is a wiry, softly-spoken veteran of the Blair years, and one of the few people in Starmer’s inner circle with experience of ministerial office. He was political secretary to Blair in No. 10 Downing Street, and subsequently held several frontbench jobs under Gordon Brown’s premiership after being elected as an MP in 2005.

McFadden was one of the Labour campaign’s most visible faces, wheeled out on media round after media round to push the message that Labour victory was never a foregone conclusion. A key part of his fight against complacency has been his insistence that Labour must communicate fiscal discipline at all times.

The lifelong Bruce Springsteen and Celtic fan is also one half of another power couple: his wife Marianna played a key role in the campaign as McSweeney’s deputy.

The press whisperer: Matthew Doyle

Another New Labour survivor, Matthew Doyle has been around the block as an aide to Blair, a former Labour head of press and a special adviser to former Cabinet heavyweight David Blunkett. As Starmer’s director of communications since 2021, he has been through the weekly ordeal of grillings by Westminster journalists after prime minister’s questions, and has been a voice of extreme caution throughout the election campaign, helping to avoid any serious gaffes.

Doyle is aided by a cluster of younger press aides, notably Starmer’s personal comms chief Steph Driver and Sophie Nazemi, a well-known and well-liked figure around SW1 who — unusually for Starmer’s team — also served under Corbyn.

The future rival: Wes Streeting

Streeting, the baby-faced former president of the National Union of Students, is a man to watch on several fronts. Most pressingly, as health secretary he is now the person in charge of rescuing the beleaguered National Health Service as it creaks under the weight of demand. Health provision is the top concern for voters across the country, and honoring Labour’s promise to restore it to its former glories — with little extra cash to go round — will be no mean feat.

Alongside his daunting portfolio, Streeting is seen as one of Labour’s most reliable and pugnacious media performers — and one day, as a potential heir to Starmer. He is often discussed as a future Labour leader and his every move will be scrutinized for signs of separate ambition, especially as he wrestles for money for the NHS. Thus far, his every utterance has been scrupulously loyal.

The accountant: Darren Jones

Jones’ rapid promotion from the backbenches (and chairmanship of the business select committee) to the pivotal post of shadow chief secretary to the Treasury shows the high degree of trust placed in the Bristol North West MP by Starmer’s operation. Regarded as another solid media frontman alongside Streeting, his will be a voice Britain gets used to hearing over its cornflakes in the years ahead.

Jones has also been instrumental in honing Labour’s economic credentials as a central plank of its offer to voters. When shadow Cabinet ministers were seeking to get their pet policies signed off for the election manifesto, everything went through Jones before it even got to Reeves. Don’t expect any loosening of the purse-strings now that he and Reeves have taken up office.

The wonk: Torsten Bell

The Anglo-Swede is a well-known and well-liked figure around SW1, and was parachuted into a safe Labour seat just as the election got underway — despite repeated denials he was planning any such move. Bell served as Labour’s director of policy during Ed Miliband’s leadership before taking over the well-respected Resolution Foundation think tank, which offers center-left economic analysis of government policy. In that role he helped call attention to the U.K.’s recent decline in living standards, and was influential on the design of the furlough scheme during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bell is well-connected both inside Labour and across Whitehall — his identical twin, Olaf, is EU director at the Foreign Office. He is one of a clutch of VIP think-tankers entering parliament at this election, alongside fellow ex-Miliband aide Miatta Fahnbulleh and Josh Simons, a former Harvard postdoc who worked on AI ethics for Facebook and then led the Starmerite Labour Together. Expect all three to land big jobs in Starmer’s government before long.

The handler: Jessica Morden

While her name might be unknown outside Westminster circles, Morden is an important backroom operator in the new Labour government. The Newport East MP has served as Starmer’s parliamentary aide for the past year, effectively acting as his eyes and ears among the ranks of Labour MPs.

Before that Morden was a senior party whip, meaning she carries with her a vast amount of institutional knowledge — and she knows where all the bodies are buried. Significant channels of influence on the crowded back benches are likely to include Clive Efford, chair of the Tribune Group, the largest caucus of Labour MPs, and (conceivably) Diane Abbott, now the standard-bearer for the Labour left.