The real reason behind Keir Starmer's reshuffle

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. As the new Home Secretary, I will be looking to go further and faster because I am very clear I have one top priority in this job and that is to secure the borders. I will do whatever it takes. And for those who've worked with me already in government and in my previous brief, I think people can tell I'm not the sort of person that hangs around. That is the voice of Keir Starmer's new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, promising to do whatever it takes to stop the small boats problem. Is that what the reshuffle was always all about? Has it changed the entire tenor of the Starmer plan?

0:40And what will a brand new Labour deputy leader do to this project? Welcome to the News Agents.

0:52the news agents it's lewis it's emily and on friday when we left off and we were still sort of digesting the news of angela rayner's resignation and we were starting to get the first glimmers of the reshuffle which turned out to be a pretty dramatic reshuffle in the sense that not lots of new people joined the cabinet but it's certainly true to say that kia starmer really did shuffle the pack, including the top, well, two of the very top jobs. So Yvette Cooper became Foreign Secretary and was replaced by Shabana Mahmood, who was a Justice Secretary, very, very well thought of by number 10. I mean, actually, one of the most interesting things overall is that virtually every Home Office minister was removed and replaced.

1:33The focus of this reshuffle seemed basically to end up being about small boats. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. Other people getting new jobs. Steve Reid became the housing secretary, replacing Angela Rayner. He was the environment secretary that went to Emma Reynolds. Pat McFadden, who had been the kind of de facto deputy prime minister, became work and pension secretary. Liz Kendall became the science secretary, replacing Peter Kyle, who became the business secretary. Generally speaking, I mean, there were obviously people who kept their jobs, people like Wes Streeting at Health and John Healy at Defence.

2:04Generally speaking, I think you can say that this was a promotion for those on the right of the party, the kind of, for want of a better expression, the Blairite right of the party, which is making elements of the left of the party pretty uncomfortable, which is itself feeding into the deputy leadership race, which is now getting going already in earnest. Yeah. And I think there is a world in which, if I take you back to exactly this time a week ago, we were expecting a reshuffle to happen then. And there is a world in which Keir Starmer knew that he might have to replace Angela Rayner. I mean, we talked as if he started the reset last week and this all took him by surprise.

2:48But imagine for a second that actually he had contemplated that he might be about to lose his deputy. And actually everything that he did came as a result of knowing that that might be about to happen. And I think we cannot underestimate how central the changing of the guard at the Home Office was to this whole arrangement. And fundamentally, there is no, I think, nice way of saying this. Keir Starmer and the team around him decided that Yvette Cooper wasn't landing him the job. She wasn't up to the job in the way that she needed to be. And as soon as he realised it was about removing Yvette Cooper, he realised that he clearly didn't want to demote her.

3:37He didn't want the bad feeling that that would bring. The only job that is a step up from the Home Secretary is the Foreign Secretary. And actually, Keir Starmer is already his own Foreign Secretary. You know, he has the relationship with Trump. He has the investment with Zelensky. He does the summer trips to Croatia and meets the ministers even when he's on holiday. He knows Macron and the G7. So I don't know if she's going to have the most active role in that. But it seems to me that all the machinations and all the movements were about replacing his home secretary because he essentially wasn't hearing strong enough language, strong enough decision makings or even strong enough rhetoric for what he feels he needs now to fight off Farage.

4:20and David Lammy becomes, I think it's fair to say, his deputy in all but name. And Darren Jones, who was the one who was moved into that role on Monday, is essentially the sort of personal guard dog. You know, he gets out and he sells the Starmer message better often than the PM can himself. And so I think that moving Darren Jones to that role was the beginning of him recognising that Angela Rayner might have to go. Now, the whole question that you just raised about the deputy is the really thorny one, because they've just told us today that there will be a new deputy leader announced, but not until October the 25th.

5:06Now, that feels a long way away. It feels like the next six weeks are going to then be consumed by a race, which is all about Labour, Labour membership, Labour talking to itself. they've already said that whoever it is is going to need 80 votes to get elected. 80 votes will put, I think, a lot of people, a lot of MPs out of the running completely. But it does still seem then an incredibly lengthy process, which will be taking up most of the conference as well. They're going to do hustings at conference. And actually, if you wanted a symbol of Labour carrying on talking to itself instead of acting as the party of government and talking to the rest of the country, then that is how you do it.

5:47I think the deputy leadership race, as I was getting at on Friday and we start to see the glimmers of, I think it's a complete nightmare for number 10 in all sorts of ways. Come back to that in a second. I'm just on the Home Office thing. I think it is worth dwelling on it. It seems to me that obviously number 10, Keir Starmer, did not want this reshuffle in this way. They didn't want Rainer to go. But it's very clear, as you've alluded to, I think, that Morgan McSweeney, in particular has decided not to let a crisis go to waste and to try his best and starman to try his best to convert it into an opportunity and that opportunity was clearly centered around the home office i mean it's not just a vet as i was saying i mean you know every minister being replaced tells you everything right i mean it's a slightly sort of uncomfortable position to be in right which is um you know we've been doing a great job on small boats home secretary was doing a great job on small boats we just changed everybody who was responsible for it um and We've got a whole lot of new people in.

6:43But it's very clear that Mcmood, Shabana Mcmood, we're hearing the clip at the top of the show. Shabana Mcmood has basically been sent in, well thought by Number 10. They think that she got a grip at justice in a way that other ministers don't. In particular, they've been impressed by the fact that, and I think this is quite interesting and is a credit to her political skill. Obviously, what they've tried to do from the beginning is pin everything, their inheritance and their problems, on the Conservative Party, which they've largely actually really struggled to do. They haven't managed to pull off the trick that George Osborne so successfully did in 2010, which was basically to say every terrible thing that we're doing is basically as a result of Labour.

7:20Blame them. Labour have not been able to pull that trick off. We've tried to do it with the£22 billion backhole. It's just sort of fallen nowhere. Other government departments as well. MacMood actually is the one who has really landed it. You know, when she was in charge of prisons, I think you can generally say that it's kind of accepted within Westminster, within kind of elite opinion media, that that was the Tories fault. And number 10 think that Mahmood has quite uniquely really actually been able to land that message. So they think she's a good media performer. They think she gets things done.

7:51And you know, this can be a bit delicate in a way. But I think that they think that as a very, very prominent Muslim woman, she can go into the Home Office and she can say and do things and act in a way that maybe other politicians, including Yvette Cooper, can't. And she can turn to the liberal left and say, look, you can't say to me that I'm a racist. You can't say to me I'm this, that and the other. I'm going to think that I'm thinkable on this because we need to in order to see our farage. So it is a deeply, deeply political move at a moment of maximum vulnerability on this particular issue of small boats.

8:23Yeah, I mean, she is definitely going to places that Yvette Cooper just couldn't. Or wouldn't. Or wouldn't, exactly. I mean, she's already said this morning she might suspend visas from countries that we don't have returns agreements with. We should say on her first day in the job, 1 ,097 people arrived in small boats. So she's facing this head on. She's saying that it's the most important mission. They have rewritten their goals now to include the stopping of small boats and the immigration issue as part of the top three. She has mooted that she wants to remove all asylum seekers from hotels and put them into disused parts of sort of military barracks.

9:04Again, sort of staring a lot of people in the face. and yeah I mean it is a really delicate question but you wonder if Starmer isn't coming to it from a sort of like who could be my Suella now Suella was deeply unpalatable to Labour when they were in opposition but right now they're probably looking for the person who is prepared to say nothing's off the table we'll do whatever we need to do I mean I even caught myself wondering if the Rwanda agreement had been up and running, you know, before the election, if they had got the first flights off the ground, the Tory governments, if they hadn't been stopped, would Labour really have stopped that?

9:46If they had watched it, if it had worked as a deterrent, would they have gone, it's still preposterous, you know, we know the king hates it, we're going to stop it anyway? Or would they have just gone, well, it's not what we would have chosen to do, but we're not going to waste more money on undoing it? I don't know. But I feel like there has been a shift. And obviously, it's a shift that has taken the form of reform rising in the polls, people gathering outside the asylum hotels in Epping and elsewhere. And this idea that they cannot now not make it their priority, whether in their hearts, they truly believe it is or not.

10:22It's kind of been thrust upon them. And I think they've just decided that Shabana Mahmoud is the one who isn't squeamish. You know, maybe that's the word. She's just she's just quite blunt about it. She doesn't flinch when she talks about sort of, you know, returns and what it takes. And maybe that's what they think they need now. Yeah. And it isn't just her. I mean, like I say, I mean, they've also put in, for example, Mike Tapp, who is the MP for Dover, a very hard line on these issues for kind of self-evident reasons. so it's this kind of whole new sort of approach i think of course you can't overestimate what difference any individual home secretary or individual minister is able to affect on small boats very quickly you know the fact is if there were a simple solution it would have been done by now there are so many structural reasons why not just britain but all of europe is struggling with this problem an interior minister after interior minister in different european countries are struggling with this problem i think as much as anything this is a communications thing and it is Number 10 attempting to do a kind of soft reset of small boats and sort of say, well, you know, here we are, we've got this new person in.

11:25And I think there's a lot of frustration in Number 10 that Cooper wasn't seen to be more on the front foot with these things, you know, wasn't out there doing media stuff, which we've already seen from McMood, about, you know, basically setting up prefabs in army barracks and just being seen to be doing more rather than doing stuff internally, which is, I think, more Cooper's style. But of course, if there are significantly new kind of authoritarian kind of moves from Mahmood and from others, and that is, I think, generally speaking, what is perceived is going to happen, that is going to feed into the, you know, pretty fragile politics of the deputy leadership race.

11:59And we already saw that unfolding over the weekend, you know, Andy Burnham being out there as sort of critic-in-chief of the Starmer government from the outside, talking about the idea of needing to listen to members more. We saw Emily Thornberry as well, who she said herself is considering standing for the deputy leadership, saying we need to stop making these mistakes and so on. I did laugh at the weekend yesterday. The Guardian headline was, Labour figures tell Starmer, stop making mistakes. Thanks for that. It reminds me of an old deputy editor at Newsnight, an old colleague of ours, who occasionally used to tell me when doing packages, just make it not shit.

12:32It's like, okay, thank you very much. That's very, very helpful. I mean, look, we should say that the Andy Burnham thing was I think we need somebody from Manchester, says Mayor of Greater to Manchester, who is also very close to Lucy Powell, who is also from Manchester. There is a world in which he is positioning himself or her as the deputy in case he ever tries to take a stab at the leadership, which would be quite useful. And Emily Thornberry knocked that down pretty comprehensively on the BBC yesterday where she said, well, yes, and if you're from Scotland, you probably want somebody from Scotland.

13:06If you're from Wales, you want somebody from Wales. If you're from Islington South. Exactly. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, the Thornberry place? Because in one way, she is, although from a completely radically different background to Angela Rayner, she is sort of the closest thing you get to the Rayner voice of authenticity. You know, she does that wonderful sort of big sigh before she sort of starts speaking. But you know that it's going to be pretty unvarnished and it's going to be pretty upfront. and she doesn't shy away from the sticky stuff. And I could imagine that she will try and go for the deputy leadership.

13:46You know, she's still not in the cabinet, sort of second time running. And she needs to be or they need to be quite high profile because, as I say, you need 80 MPs backing you and 5 % of local Labour parties or three affiliates, two of which have to be trade unions, which is a pretty high ask. Now, I don't know if Emily Thornberry has that behind her, but I don't know who on the sort of the harder left, let's say, has that either with the ability then to get 80 MPs. And so I think you're talking about a fairly select kind of contest at this point, aren't you? They have to be very well known. They have to have an awful lot of backing in the parliamentary party and they have to have trade unions behind them.

14:34And I guess it's who else, you know, manages to get their act together and get around the country and raise the money before conference, which is at the end of September. Yeah, these rules were designed to ensure that basically you need pretty high levels of institutional backing. You know, they were designed post the Corbyn period to ensure that that would never happen again, either for the leadership or deputy leadership. Starmer has also expelled quite a few left wing Labour MPs. So that reduces their numbers again. And I find it very hard to see how there will be a candidate of the left. What I think is likely, though, is it's hard to see how there isn't a candidate of the kind of soft left, the sort of critics of McSweeney and Starmer in particular.

15:14And this is why the sort of paradox of this race is that for precisely the reasons you say, Emily, and precisely the fact that a lot of newish MPs within the PRP will still on some level want to try and stay on side with the Starmer government, You kind of need, the arithmetic would suggest that basically a candidate of number 10 would be well placed. They would have the structural backing. But that would also be the kiss of death. Because right now what the Labour Party is not, if everything were going really well, then the Labour Party might want to hear that. What the Labour Party right now, and this is why this contest is dangerous for Starmer, the Labour Party right now has got questions, profound questions, existential questions with the rise of reform, about the future direction of the government and what has gone wrong so far.

15:57And the reason this contest is dangerous for Starmer is those conversations, of course, have been happening behind the scenes, sotto voce, two journalists between different MPs, different institutions of the Labour Party, sometimes aired in public at particular moments, but generally sort of under the surface. This contest quite literally licenses those conversations to be made public. There will be hustings. The conference will be dominated by those questions. And you're going to have each particular candidate, leader, whoever it happens to be, or candidate for the deputy leadership, being asked repeatedly and searching and scrutinising what the government has done so far and what the government might yet do.

16:36And the premium will basically be on a critical voice. That basically legitimises all of that dissent that we've seen so far. And if you think about, I'm just thinking about two of the most likely candidates, the sort of political delicious irony and pain for Starmer is this. Two of the most likely candidates, Emily Thornberry, you've already mentioned, Lou Haig as well, who of course left the cabinet. These are people who in one form or another have been dismissed by Keir Starmer, have become sort of critics of him, and might end up having to, walking into number 10, being elected by the Labour Party basically to stick it up in.

17:06And what a delicious irony that will be. Yeah. And I think when you look at the shape of the cabinet and you talked about the sort of the Blairite wing or whether it was looking more sort of Labour right, I guess one of the things that we shouldn't overlook is the movement of Pat McFadden, who is really seen as close to Starmer, one of the sort of original grownups in the cabinet, now moving to the Department of Work and pensions. I think there's a feeling pretty much in the open, recognised now, that they failed. You know, they failed on the welfare mission. They failed to get the party in step.

17:40They failed to deliver something that looked like a proper cut or a proper reform. And Pat McFadden's come back to kind of knock heads together, to put it bluntly. And I think part of the problem here is a wider one, which is they keep on linking reform with cost cutting. And actually, if you are invested in policy and reshaping policy, and if your idea is to, you know, to get people back to work, because it's fundamentally better for them, better for the country, better for the whole shape of the workforce, that can sometimes kind of knock up against just the need to cut costs. And I think you can understand why they've done it, but they've sort of elided reform and cost cutting, reform and cost cutting.

18:25And it's not always worked. And I think they've sort of thrown it back now at Pat McFadden and said, right, you do it. You take this up. We're going to have another go. And I think all these, in their own way, are an admission of, as you say, failure. You know, they didn't manage to make it work at the Home Office. They didn't manage to make it work with the welfare reform. They didn't manage to do the things that they wanted to do in the first year. So it is quite a hard story to tell. There isn't a tick by those boxes. There's a big red X and they've got to start all over again whilst pretending that nothing's actually gone wrong.

19:01Well, I have to say something I was surprised by was the fact that, you know, normally in reshuffles, you get some new blood. And generally speaking, there was almost no new blood in this cabinet. This was literally a reshuffle in the sense that it was a shuffling of the pack. It was giving a lot of the same people different jobs. And the sort of obvious critique of that is, well, if you didn't think they were being terribly successful in their old jobs, why do you think they're going to be terribly successful in these new jobs? You know, giving the same people different jobs is not really a kind of refresh.

19:25There was more significant movement in the junior ministerial rungs with lots of the new 2024 MPs, rising stars sort of coming through that we'll hear a lot more from, I think, in the next sort of year or so. But yeah, I mean, look, we've talked about it so much on the show. And, you know, in Westminster and, you know, people like us, we get very excited by reshuffles and it's all quite interesting. But of course, you know, structurally speaking, everything in terms of the direction of the government, with a possible exception of the Home Office, is much the same as it was before. If you talk actually to ministers, most of them will say the defining thing about this government is previously, and maybe this will change now, who knows, but previously there has been relatively little direction from number 10.

20:02That's clearly something that Morgan McSweeney wants to change. It's not going to change in terms of we're never going to get, we've talked about it before, a sort of overarching kind of philosophy from Keir Starmer that's just not his style. And so the question then really does become about this question of delivery. But structurally speaking, the biggest change is not really the shuffling of the pack. The biggest change structurally, politically, is what is going on in the deputy leadership. That is the thing that will destabilise the Starmer project precisely at this moment of what was supposed to be of renewal and reset in a way that they would not and could not have anticipated.

20:33And I was saying on Friday, this is really unusual. You know, deputy leadership contests for the Labour Party very, very rarely happen separately from a leadership election itself, right? Particularly in government. This is a really unusual situation. It's almost inbuilt to be unstable and difficult. So it is going to dominate Westminster for the next month or two. We'll be back in a moment talking about what on earth was going on at the Reform Party conference.

21:10The News Agents.

21:15If that song has been going round your head over the last three days, rest assured you are not alone. It is Andrea Jenkins, the mayor of Lincolnshire, and she opened the Reform Party conference by singing it on stage. Simon, Garfunkel, McCartney, Lennon, Jenkins. What a tune. Yeah. So she kicked off the reform conference last week. And I guess the narrative has always been, oh, you know, poor reform. Angela Rayner's departure stole the headlines, made Farage rewrite his speech and move it up. And they were sort of slightly pushed back and off the headlines because of all the shenanigans at Labour.

21:59And the other way of looking at it is they were bloody lucky. I mean, when you actually see what came out of that conference, they were bloody lucky. More people weren't paying attention. We had the anti-vax conspiracist from Trump's Department of Health who decided to float a theory that perhaps King Charles's cancer was related to the Covid vaccination. Nice one. Let's just hear Miss Malhotra there. One of Britain's most eminent oncologists, Professor Angle, said to me to share with you today that he thinks it's highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor in the cancer of members of the royal family.

22:42Oh, sorry, members. So maybe it was Kate's cancer as well. Highly likely, right? There is no data. There is no graph. There is no evidence. There is just a bloke on a stage telling an entire conference, filling up Birmingham's NEC, that the royal family's cancer came from the COVID vaccination. And nobody seems to be talking about that. Nobody seems to be saying, what the actual are you saying here? And that wasn't it. I mean, they also decided to give a central slot on the conference stage to Lucy Connolly, who, of course, only recently released from prison for incitement to violence during a national riot.

23:25She was hailed as a political prisoner. This is completely ridiculous idea, which has been doing the rounds on the radical right. Somehow she was kind of Keir Starmer's personal prisoner and she was sort of sent to prison as a result of two tier justice rather than committing a crime. And it could have been even worse. It could have been even worse. We're told there was some reporting over the last 24 hours that Sarah Potchin, the MP for Runcorn, who was previously called for the burka to be banned in Britain, said that she had wanted to arrive on stage in a turquoise version of the Islamic headdress.

23:55and she was talked out of it by the deputy leader, Richard Tice. When Richard Tice is the one saying, let's just calm down here, let's steady on, steady on, Sarah, you know you're into kind of slightly weird territory. And I think this was, I think just overall, this was actually disastrous for reform. It's easily their biggest misstep after a period of continuous momentum, right? I have been told repeatedly, just like other journalists, talking to the people central to reform, this conference marked the kind of apogee of our professionalisation drive. We're not just doing the thing that we normally do when we were in UKIP or Brexit Party, you know, meeting at Doncaster races or the Winter Gardens in Margate and all of this sort of faded grandeur of the seaside.

24:32We're going to the Birmingham's NEC. It's this part of the professionalisation drive that we've been doing. And it is of a genuine, I think it reveals and adverts to the real paradox at the heart of reform, which is on the one hand, they are driving towards that professionalisation. They're trying to court more moderate voters who might be interested in some of the things that they're saying, but are a little bit concerned about, you know, Farage's past, some of the people who might be involved. And it averts to that paradox which is there, which is they're trying to do that on the one hand. But at the same time, they have got a load of cranks in their midst.