Burnham's northern queens

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0:36hello and welcome to coffeehouse shots an early edition this morning where i am coming to you from home alongside two wonderful guests tim shipman and james heel also at home so i do apologize in advance if the sound quality is not quite up to its usual standard but we had to get in an early edition because there is so much to discuss. Last night, we discussed the four great officers of state. But since then, we've had a raft of new appointments and some very eye-catching ones at that. Gentlemen, what are your reflections on the final makeup of the cabinet?

1:14James Heale: I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here and some of it quite surprising. I mean, West Streeting had obviously done some kind of deal with Andy Burnham for a proper job. I doubt he or anyone in uniform was expecting West Street to end up as the Defence Secretary. Now, in part, that seems to be a commentary on Dan Jarvis, former Army officer, leaving alongside Rachel Reeves a large bill for Andy Burnham and John Healy to pay. So it's a proper job, but it doesn't feel like it's very well suited to West Streeting's talents. And we've also had a crop of comeback queens. So we've seen the return of Louise Haig, of course, that was announced earlier on, but also Lucy Powell to Education Secretary.

2:05And Angela Rayner is back in her old brief at MHCLG. James, were these a good appointment by Andy Burnham?

2:13Tim Shipman: Well, time will tell on that. I do think it is striking how much of this reshuffle is about undoing the wounds that were sort of opened by the September 2025 reshuffle. You're seeing people like Johnny Reynolds back at business. You're seeing Angela Rayner after a period necessary out of the limelight going back to her exact same brief MHCLG. I think it's a quite curious reshuffle. In one sense, it reminds me of Boris Johnson in 2019. Half the cabinet are new. I think of the 27 ministers who are overall attending cabinet, 15 of them are new faces in those roles. And I think we're seeing a rebalancing of the cabinet power away from London.

2:56Tim Shipman: There are only two London Labour MPs who sit in full cabinet briefs. they are Westry-Tieng and Mietta van Bulla. But we're seeing a significantly bouncing towards the Northwest, particularly Manchester and Yorkshire as well. So they're taking many more of the jobs. And I think that does show the focus on Manchesterism, which Andy Burnham has talked about. And I think that what we're seeing is quite a curious mix. It's sort of next generation and old faces as well. So you're seeing the likes of Hamish Faulkner and Kanishka Nariana getting bumped up to cabinet status in terms of attending cabinet.

3:28Tim Shipman: So they won't get the kind of paid cabinet verse but they'll get the extended cabinet status and then there's also some sort of um old hands uh returning as well so the likes of angela eagle who's obviously been around since the 1990s so a curious reshuffle in some ways the first half was particularly kind of striking and now we're seeing a mix of all the labor ranks together i think i should give a particular note to talk about northern women uh yes we've talked about louise haig on this podcast a lot before very much the brains of the burnham operation in the sort of parliamentary side but there's also Annalise Mitchley, who are long-term trade union fixers, heavily involved in Unite.

4:04Tim Shipman: Her status as a 2024 intake belies her importance in the Labour movement. She has had a remarkable rise. In two years, she's gone from being a candidate to a new MP, and now she's the Chief Whip. And I think that is a testament to the kind of political acumen she's demonstrated both before entering Parliament and since she's taken up the role as an MP. I also just want to quickly mention that with the announcement of Wes treating it as Defence Secretary, a source close to Wes this morning messaged journalists with his credentials, which included speaking in a House of Commons debate on defence readiness, launching a new programme to help NHS staff identify patients with armed forces backgrounds.

4:47and as a backbench MP enrolling in the Armed Forces parliamentary scheme. So make of those credentials what you will.

4:57James Heale: Look, I think there's several interesting positions here, and I think neither Wes Streeting nor anybody in the Armed Forces would have predicted that this is a job he's going to get. You know, as what you have just outlined depicts, Noah, this is not a man with vast experience of the Armed Forces or who has ever said anything particularly meaningful about them. And those of us that know West Streeting as someone who enjoys a drink and is not often the first cabinet minister to bed will wonder whether that raises eyebrows from a security point of view as well. I think if you look at some of the other positions, we're going to try and read a great deal into these.

5:35James Heale: But Lucy Powell taking the education brief from Bridget Philipson is an act of raw sort of power play. She beat Bridget Philipson for the deputy leadership and then she said, I want her job and Andy Burnham's given it to her. Interestingly though, she's not become deputy prime minister and Louise Haig is clearly the more important of those northern queens and is now the first secretary of state and that means that we will be treated to her at prime minister's questions in the absence of Andy Burnham, which should be an interesting ride. I think we're all wondering what Miata Van Bulla becoming Energy Secretary means.

6:15James Heale: She is an absolute devotee of Ed Miliband, and I think that's a signal that the net zero love will continue. But what that means for North Sea drilling, which we were told that Andy Burnham wanted to kick off again, is anybody's guess. We predicted in The Spectator a lot of these positions, including Annalise Midgley. I think if you look down the list, Stephen Kinnock as Wales Secretary, you'll remember from Burnham's speech on Friday that Neil Kinnock is one of his three great Labour movement political heroes. So putting his son in as Secretary of State for Wales is interesting. Though my Welsh Labour narcs is one of the least enthusiastic about Welsh devolution of anyone in the Labour movement.

6:59James Heale: So that will raise some eyebrows, I think. and Yvette Cooper to the Department of Health. I mean, that is probably within the Labour Party, the most senior job outside of the big four. So in that sense, if you're going to fire a foreign secretary, it's good to give her a proper job like that. And I'm assured by people around her that she's content with that post. But she's not someone who's renowned for making big decisions quickly. And that doesn't matter quite so much in the Foreign Office where foreign affairs tends to be led from Downing Street. But if you're about to engage in a major reorganisation that will lead to a sort of change in the health and social care system, she's not necessarily the obvious person to put in that job.

7:48James Heale: And then Hamish Faulkner gets the Europe brief, and that'll be very interesting to see if he plans to do anything different from Nick Thomas-Simmons. I guess the Thomas-Simmons loyalists would have said, well, look, why lose him? He's got a huge amount of expertise and he knows everybody around Europe. I guess the point being that having been in the Foreign Office, that Hamish Faulkner has a reasonably good Rolodex himself for phone number stuff with numbers. The other one that amused me was Lisa Nandy, who we sort of predicted as a massive northern woman loyalist of Burnham might get a promotion.

8:24James Heale: She's ended up staying exactly where she is at the Department of Culture, which suggests that they think that that is a good spot for her and she doesn't necessarily warrant further promotion. And as James says, putting Kanishka Narayan inside attending Kavanaugh is interesting. that does raise the sort of salience of AI within the government. But it's not a sort of separate department. And, you know, you wonder how much of a difference that will actually make. But the final headcount was 11 Starmorite corpses bleeding out on the pavement. So this was a pretty robust piece of knife work by the standards of these things.

9:08so James this morning we all woke up to Andy Burnham's first announcement on the cost of living and that is that he is going to shave VAT off energy bills saving households 45 pounds a year or three pounds a month so perhaps a free coffee a month for us all so to speak what do you make of the announcement is this going to change any lives or is it gonna how's it gonna land with the public?

9:36Tim Shipman: So look, it's an indicator of future priorities. This is just one very small step. But it'll be part of a whole package of measures that Team Burnham hopes to roll out over the current months. As you say, Noah, it's not a huge amount,£3 a month. But I think it's striking that the first message I had about this day was from someone senior in reform, pointing out that they were proposing a similar, albeit a much bigger package of these kind of measures of cutting VAT on energy bills. And I think that does show that people want to be associated with it. There is that sense of Trump day one, wanting to develop a whole series of policies that make people's lives better from the get go.

10:10Tim Shipman: But I would make the point that we're talking, Tim mentions there about Saddam rights bleeding out on the floor. We've already had an intervention, an unhelpful intervention from Darren Jones, who says that it's good news that VAT is going to be cut on electricity bills. But he makes the point that the money for this is going to be coming from the supposedly scrapped digital ID program, which was unfunded in government. And now, of course, the fact that the money hasn't been found for that digitalized ski scheme means that you can't just say that, oh, we're going to reallocate that funds elsewhere.

10:43Tim Shipman: So the fact that Darren Jones has taken to Twitter to attack this policy does suggest that, as Tim alluded to, we're going to see a lot of angry starmites on the back benches. And as the Spectator Live blog reported first yesterday. Keir Starmast went straight from Number 10 to head to the pub and drown his sorrows in Kentish town. Various other Starmites, the court of the exiled king, all went there and sort of paid tribute to him. There were lots of toast and bonhomie. And I think that we may potentially be seeing a kind of James II situation here with the king over the water. Certainly, the thing about politics is you may get rid of your sort of angry and unhelpful ministers, but it doesn't mean they go away.

11:23Tim Shipman: They still sit there on the back benches. So Darren Jones is going to be there pointing out all the flaws in the Burnham homework. And I think the fact that he has so quickly come out before 8am on a Tuesday morning, the day out of the reshuffle, suggests he's not going to be the most helpful ex-minister on the back benches.

11:38James Heale: Yeah, I think James is right about that. And the significant thing about Keir Starmer is everybody always said he didn't have a faction. Andy Burnham's come along and said, well, I don't have a faction. And then there's almost created a Starmerite faction of 11 highly disgruntled people. If he'd fired three or four of them or moved some of them around, they wouldn't have had grounds for much grievance because every new prime minister is permitted to try and form a cabinet that supports their agenda and is almost in their own image. But when you fire half the cabinet, you're effectively creating a tranche of enemies.

12:12James Heale: And it's almost like, you know, Starmer might have disappeared into the night, but certainly the people who were close to him now look like they might have sort of grounds for bandying together to defend their honour. And that may be a bit of a strategic mistake by Andy Burnham. And the other post that I think is sort of revelatory a little bit, and, you know, we obviously talked about this yesterday. You guys talked about it last night. And I agree on the face of it with James's blog that John Healy is a sort of sensible, safe choice for Chancellor. But I think what that reveals is ultimately that Andy Burnham didn't want the hassle of picking Ed Miliband or Shibana Mahmood and living with the grief that he would have got from the other lot.

12:53James Heale: It was almost a decision to choose not to choose. And in that sense, while Healy is someone who's not going to rock the boat and obviously will quietly get on with the job, the best chancellors of the Exchequer that I've seen, Nigel Lawson, Gordon Brown, George Osborne, were highly political characters who effectively ran a large chunk of their government's domestic political strategy out of the Treasury. it doesn't look like that's the kind of Chancellor we're going to get at all. John Healy is not that kind of character. He's not a demonstrative individual. He's not a big sort of political strategist.

13:31James Heale: And, you know, I wonder whether Andy Burnham wanting to do all this big stuff would have been better, actually, with a more divisive but more activist Chancellor of the Exchequer. And in that sense, while a lot of spectator readers do not like the cut of Ed Miliband's jib, Everyone in government says that he knew how to get things done. He knew the Treasury inside out. And obviously, Shabana Mahmood is a doer, one who focuses on a mission and drives her civil servants to push it forward. I wonder in the long run whether we might look back and think that this was a bit of a cop out selection and that he would have been better going with something, even if it was more left wing, that was more dynamic and likely to deliver.

14:11well there is a lot more still to come today with junior ministerial appointments um still ahead which we will no doubt come back to discuss shortly but in the meantime thank you tim thank you james and thank you for listening to coffeehouse shots

15:02We'll be right back.

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