Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet: Talking About a New Generation

Former Labour MP Ian Lucas explains how the party’s fresh frontbench team is not Ed Miliband revisited.

Arriving in Parliament is like arriving at school or at university – you make friends with those who arrive with you. The importance of ‘year groups’ is one of the most influential – and underrated – in politics and can be seen in the new Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer’s first Shadow Cabinet.

Starmer arrived at Westminster in 2015 and would have hoped to be an early entrant to Ed Miliband’s Government. That was not to be but, by 2015, he had certainly developed a relationship with Miliband, whose return as Shadow Business, Energy and Industry Secretary has, naturally, caught headlines. However, more significant are the promotions of those who arrived with him in 2015 – Nick Thomas-Symonds, Jo Stevens and Louise Haigh.

Those who are peddling the line that we have a re-jig of Ed Miliband’s team have got this badly wrong. Most influential between 2010 and 2015 were Douglas Alexander, Chuka Umunna and, despite tensions with the then leader, Ed Balls. For various reasons, all are now long gone.

The new Shadow Cabinet is largely – though not exclusively – young, fresh and seared by the experience of an ineffective official Opposition since 2015. This has been the lesson Starmer has learnt, with those who have been promoted appearing to be – in Clement Attlee’s telling phrase – “up to it.”

Some of those appointed in recent years were appointed on the basis of factional politics and were often put in post far too early. The result was bad for them, showing individuals uncomfortable in the House of Commons and with the media and preventing Labour Party representatives from being seen by the public as effective opponents to the Conservatives.

Those appointed by Starmer are, almost without exception, strong Commons performers who are good with various forms of media too. The hugely underrated Louise Haigh is a classic example but the same applies to Jo Stevens, Anneliese Dodds, Nick Thomas-Symonds and Jonathan Reynolds. They are also all trusted and respected by Starmer and, in a significant contrast to their immediate predecessors, by the Parliamentary Labour Party, which will have confidence in them.

What Labour needs now is to develop a Shadow team which mirrors the success of Tony Blair’s pre-1997 Shadow Cabinet – a group of individuals who specialised in their policy areas and became known to the general public, not just to members of the Labour Party  such as David Blunkett, Robin Cook, Margaret Beckett, Clare Short and, of course, Gordon Brown. They came to be seen in the country as a Government-in-waiting.

Starmer’s Shadow team does include survivors – John Healey, Andy MacDonald, Cat Smith, Nia Griffith – but they are all widely respected and have been placed in appropriate roles. It also includes both his leadership rivals, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, in senior positions. Neither are Stamer’s soulmates and it will be interesting to see how their relationship with the leader builds in the months ahead.

Importantly, Labour’s backbench also continues to include major players in the Commons – Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn, Angela Eagle – who will play an important role along with very effective members of my 2001 generation, Chris Bryant and Kevin Brennan.

But the fact that none of these are in the Shadow Cabinet tells us that this is not 2015 revisited but rather Keir’s generation.