Burnham, Healey, Miliband & Mahmood become the big four

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0:38Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the spectators' daily and sometimes more than daily politics podcast. I'm Natasha Froese and I'm joined by Noah Hoffman and James Heal. And we were coming to you live earlier, but that was before the big four were announced in Burnham's cabinet. So we thought we simply had to bring the listeners an update as to who is in and who is out of the future cabinet of Andy Burnham. So Noah, tell us the list.

1:09Noa Hoffman: So what we have seen is a really quite astonishing purge of the Starmorites. Most of those members of the cabinet who really stuck with the Prime Minister, or ex-Prime Minister I should say, till the bitter end have been given the boots and we now have the big four so kudos to Andy Burnham's team who actually managed to keep such a tight lip on the announcement of the chancellor which is John Healy this was a very clever choice from Andy Burnham because he is universally respected within the Labour Party he has previous treasury experience and he's not seen as a factional character whereas with both Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood.

1:56They have their detractors within different wings of the Labour Party. That's not to say that John Healy is only there because he is some sort of compromise. He has skills in and of himself and a lot of benefits as well. And it was a smart choice. We then have Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary taking on a role once held by his brother. and Shabana Mahmood will be in the home office and that will come as a huge relief to a lot of MPs who were really worried about where Andy Burnham was going to take immigration

2:33Noa Hoffman: and just how influential the left-wing voices in the party against Mahmood's reforms were going to be. So even though we could still see a watering down of Mahmood's immigration proposals, the fact that she stayed in the home office shows that Burnham, to some extent, wants to sort out this issue. And James, could you talk a little bit about the choreography of cabinet selections? So we saw Ed Miliband and Shabana walk in together. What is the significance of that? And why do some get seen going through the front door, others go through the back door? Well, really, it's a question of winners and losers.

3:15Those who lose out typically are the first to make it clear that they've either resigned or been sacked from government. Those meetings tend to take place in the discretion of the House of Commons office traditionally or of the phones. That's more than why we saw this morning a whole flurry of these letters going out. People using the same kind of stop phrase, privilege of my life to serve. Then, of course, it comes the winners. And that is when you see the kind of Downing Street catwalk, the stride of pride, people taking up their posts. and it tends to start with the great officer state. I think this whole reshuffle in terms of the choreography of today has been longer than expected.

3:51It's been much later in the day than we hoped. And the big announcement was, of course, Noah says, John Healy is the chancellor. Often there's politics, you get two people competing for a post and the third option has to be found. I think John Healy is quite an imaginative way of resolving that tension between the kind of soft left and blue Labour standard bearers. What we know is that he's someone who is seen as a safe pair of hands, not particularly imaginative when it comes to policymaking, but has some housing experience in terms of opposition. That will be important to the social housing target for Andy Burnham's new government.

4:24He also has international experience and allies from his time at the MOD. Key thing, of course, is that big price tag. We're on course to hit 2.7 % GDP defense spending by 2030. John Healy wants at least 3%. So he's someone who knows both sides of the kind of spending review sat around in a big spending department as well as being in junior minister of the treasury. Ed Miliband, interesting at the foreign office, a useful way of kind of buying him off for the different greater office of state. He might be important to kind of tie together the domestic with the international, something that always was something that struggled for Keir Starmer and his government, who could never kind of make that case for why he had to be abroad so often.

5:04It's also interesting, of course, because David Cameron was appointed foreign secretary by Rishan Sinak, another former party leader over the Sunday weekend. Rishan Sinak wrote in the Sunday Times talking about how important David Cameron was in taking that burden off his shoulders. Ed Miliband, of course, will do the same. He'll have the stature by dint of his two spells, actually. I was reading over the weekend a book on Ed Miliband and talking about his first time at Copenhagen when he was Energy Secretary under Gordon Brown. He's obviously had significant international experience since then under Keir Starmer and will be seen as someone who has the pedigree to kind of compensate for a lot of those meetings.

5:35Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, finishing the job there. and those four, together with Louise Haig, who very much has been the kind of mastermind behind Andy Burnham's comeback, she takes the post to Cabinet Office Minister and also gets the kind of gong of First Secretary of State. She's a second Labour woman to take that. The first was her, Haig's hero, Barbara Castle, another diminutive redhead with a football-loving PM, John Healy at the Treasury, another Healy like Dennis beforehand. It's all starting to feel rather 1970s, isn't it, Natasha? Absolutely. and Noah are there any big characters we're yet to hear about a few weeks ago there was the big

6:10Noa Hoffman: spat with Mike Tapp well I wouldn't hold my breath for Tappers staying in the government although who knows that would be another imaginative move by Andy Burnham but the big beast so to speak that we are still yet to hear from but who we know will play a big role is Angela Rayner she was captured by cameras walking through Downing Street to number 10. Annalise Midgley just now as well. So we can expect those two, you know, northern queens, so to speak, although I think the official queens are just Louise and Annalise, but perhaps now Raina as well added into the mix to get big roles. Interestingly, we haven't heard anything from Bridget Phillipson yet.

6:57Noa Hoffman: And there was always talk of her role as education secretary being vacated to make way, perhaps for Angela Rayne and perhaps for Lucy Powell as well. So there are still a lot of tough dynamics to be. I mean, they could be resolved now, but to be presented to the public. I think what will be very interesting to see in the weeks and months ahead is just how hard the Starmerites take their sacking, because it was very clear that some of them who were fired today intended, if they could, to stay in post and serve loyally, so to speak, under Andy Burnham. And hell hath no fury like a disgruntled MP.

7:37Noa Hoffman: So that will be an interesting one. But yes, we're going to see a comeback from Angela Rayner. We still don't know where where streeting will go. And he will pretty much have to have some sort of position to keep him and his allies on side, even though you know there are some jokes about Streeting not having the 81 signatures needed to launch a challenge she does have a hardcore supporter base within the PLP and within the Labour Party more generally so there are some still some big names to come and with for their positions to be filled Yes James and on that point of Noah's that is quite a tough one for Andy Burnham to fire 10 of some of the most powerful cabinet members there are and to then have to face them as part of your party.

8:25Do you think that is wise of Andy Burnham to draw such a clear line under Starmer's government? Well, look, I think that it's a testament to how strong Andy Burnham currently feels right now. It was Asquith who said that a good prime minister needs to be a good butcher. And certainly Burnham has shown little compunction in wielding the knife today. he has probably listened to his voices saying that you're never going to be as strong in the future as you are right now. He wants to draw a clean break between the Stammer government and his current one. I think that it will be something that potentially comes back to haunt him at some point if the government's not seen his success.

9:01But Burnham knows he has to deliver. So the calculation he's made is that he's going to be damned either way. Better to have the kind of Stammerites on the backbenchers maybe than inside the tent. Not all his preeminent would have agreed with that statement. And I do think that when we talk about the personnel, you've also got these challenges which are not going in a way anytime soon. I think John Healy overall is a pretty imaginative appointment, but it doesn't change the kind of scale of the fiscal constraints facing him. And if Burnham does not actually start delivering in the coming weeks and months, then I think that it's fair to say that given how sort of transactional his relationship with Elements Study Party has been, the Starmerites will feel no compunction in turning around and doing exactly the same to him and knifing him in that way.

9:41We wait to see the rest of the appointment, of course. It's been, I think, generally quite well thought through Cavalry and Reshuffle in terms of paying attention to different factions within the Labour Party, ensuring that all those big beasts or more likely kind of aspirant big beasts are the ones having their needs met. And I think that that's the kind of tale of the Starmerites who've been thrown out today. Those who don't have a power base or those who've neglected a power base, someone like David Lammy, who's been around for 25 years they are the ones being thrown out and the ones who who maybe is regarded having more of a future are the ones being kept in listeners don't go anywhere because if you want to see all the rest of the appointments head to our live blog on spectator.com where we will keep you keeping you all up to date thank you noah thank you james and thanks for listening

10:37Thank you.

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