A resignation, a reshuffle and a roaring headache for Keir Starmer

0:00Rafael Behr:This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, we're next for the Labour Party.

0:19It was only last Monday that Keir Starmer gave an interview heralding the next stage of government. We spent the first year sort of fixing the foundations, if you like, doing the hard yards. But we now enter into sort of phase two of the government, which is where we focus on delivery, delivery, delivery, and start to show what a difference a Labour government really makes. What a difference a week makes. By Friday lunchtime, Starmer had lost his deputy and his housing secretary. Sky News understands that Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is to leave. Resigned as deputy prime minister and housing secretary.

1:04She's also resigned as deputy leader of the Labour Party. This is a huge move for the Labour Party. And rather than simply replacing Angela Rayner, he decided to shuffle half the cabinet. So, of course, her departure has led to some changes in the prime minister's top team. and I have to say they are much more extensive changes than we were expecting this morning. It's a very, very comprehensive reshuffle. But there's one vacant position he can't simply fill with a friend or ally. Much as he may try. Who follows Rayner as the deputy leader of the Labour Party? Could either help Starmer achieve his goals or put the brakes on.

1:50And whoever it is, Will any of it be enough to get his government back on track? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, Starmer shuffles the deck.

2:07Raphael Bear, you are a Guardian columnist and a veteran Labour watcher. It's been quite a week, hasn't it, in Labour politics. If we were having this conversation last Monday, we'd probably be talking about how Starmer was saying, we're entering the second stage of government and that his focus was going to be delivery. And then by Friday, it's all in tatters. Angela Rayner is gone. His response is not simply to replace her, but carry out a major reshuffle of the great officers of state. What struck you most about who's in and who's out?

2:37Rafael Behr:Well, I think actually the most significant one has to be the move of Yvette Cooper from the Home Office to the Foreign office and Siobhan and Mahmood from justice to home. And the reason I say that, because the reality is the way the position this government is in, in relation to one of the most salient issues around, which is small boat crossings, migration, and then also more generally the question of crime, which is a home office brief. That is something alongside the economy on which this government will either survive or fall in a few years time. And if, as everyone seems to be saying, as I've been told privately, number 10 was getting quite frustrated with Yvette Cooper's performance in that job.

3:14Rafael Behr:Not necessarily that she was making the wrong political choices, but that she was indecisive and she wasn't communicating it well. She wasn't sort of getting on the front foot in the way that wanted to achieve what Downing Street wanted to achieve from that. And the thing with Yvette Cooper, she's a veteran minister. She's one of the few people who came into the Stalmer government having actually been in government before in the sort of Gordon Brown era. And it has a lot of support in the party. He couldn't just sack her. So suddenly he had this opportunity with the major reshuffle to give her a job that is suitable to her status within the Labour Party.

3:46Rafael Behr:In other words, make her the Foreign Secretary, great Office of State, to use the cliche, but also freeing up the Home Office for Shabana Mahmood. And Shabana Mahmood, to her credit, I think, has actually performed in the justice role pretty well. She's sharp. She's got acute political antennae. It was an absolute hospital pass of a job that won justice because essentially the first thing you have to do was, crudely speaking, let a load of people out of prison because the prisons were full. Now, that's not something any minister wants to read on the front pages for doing. And actually, she handled it pretty well.

4:13Rafael Behr:So she impressed number 10 on that front. And so now she has the even harder job of sort of pulling off the same axe, but with the Home Office. Yeah. And as if to illustrate just how difficult the job is going to be for her, on her very first full day in office on Saturday, more than a thousand people arrived on small boats. And at the same time, in central London, almost 900 people were arrested at the Palestine action protests. These are just two things in her intray, but what changes do you think we will see under a Shabana Mahmood home office? Well, exactly. What you just described there is this age-old phenomenon in politics, which is that the home office is the department where political careers go to die, essentially, very often, because there's just so much trouble domestically, everything that people feel is going wrong with the country one way or another, to the left or to the right, sort of lands on the desk of the Home Secretary.

5:12Rafael Behr:There's national security concerns. And of course, there's immigration. And I mean, the extent to which it makes sense to talk about left and right in politics is debatable. But would you say that Shabana Mahmood's appointment to the Home Secretary brief indicates a shift to the right for Labour on immigration, a more hardline approach? Not specifically in that department, I don't think, because I don't think anyone listened to what Yvette Cooper was saying at the Home Office or watched the actions that Yvette Cooper took at Home Office and thought, here we have a Liberal left Home Secretary. So from that point of view, I do think it's much more about both a sort of administrative alertness, a sort of agility in terms of getting the department to work, but also just being more in tune and a sort of a natural close ally to Keir Starmer.

6:01Let's talk about David Lammy. So he has moved from foreign secretary to the Ministry of Justice, and he's also been made deputy prime minister. Has he been promoted or demoted? And why do you think Starmer's moved him and pointed him to these roles?

6:14Rafael Behr:Well, this is a really great question, because he has been promoted and demoted in an interesting way. In terms of the official or sort of quasi-constitutional status of things, the Foreign Office is a bigger job than the Justice Department is. As I said before, it's one of these things that are called the great offices of state. But that, in a way, foreign policy strategy is directed by number 10. And that has been the case for a while. It's definitely the case now. So actually, there is something quite functionary and ceremonial about the Foreign Office, which makes it less of a big job than its grand status in the constitutional order of things suggests.

6:54Rafael Behr:Whereas the Justice Department, there's actually some quite hard stuff you've got to do there. That's a much grittier bit of department. You've got prisons, you've got sentencing, you've got all sorts of things coming down the track on that review in terms of how they're going to manage the prison population to be implemented. so it's a I think it's a harder job actually in many respects and as for the deputy prime minister title look you know plenty of prime ministers haven't had a deputy prime minister again it's quite ceremonial there's not a sort of order of precedence vice president type thing that's not the way the UK politics works what's interesting and we might come on to talk about this is when it's detached from the deputy leadership of the Labour Party does that make it an even more ceremonial role so look I think David Lammy I think he was liking the foreign office job and a lot of people say he was very good at it.

7:41Rafael Behr:So, you know, I'm not sure it would have been his favourite move for what has happened, but he's taken it and he's still got a very important part to play in the government.

7:57We're talking as the Labour Party right now are working out exactly how they are going to vote for Keir Starmer's deputy, what the timeframe will be. And it is a slightly curious thing, isn't it, about the Labour Party that the Prime Minister doesn't get to choose who's going to be the deputy leader of the party. The party members get to choose and the unions. And it looks as though they'll vote later this month with a deputy in post, probably by mid-October, so after party conference season. Talk us through the runners and riders so far.

8:25Rafael Behr:Well, yes, I mean, the first thing to be said about this is it is a peculiar situation, but that's also a legacy of the fact that not that long ago, at least I can certainly remember, when you had elections for the whole of the shadow cabinet and the Labour leader had to choose his shadow cabinet in opposition from a list that was given to him through voting. So that arrangement only stopped in 2011. So the sort of the deputy leadership, I mean, obviously the leader is elected, but the deputy leadership as part of that process is sort of a remnant of that bit of party democracy. And party democracy, you know, often gets, you know, is sort of trimmed away when you have quite powerful, strong, centralising leaders who basically worry about what happens if you give activists and members too much of a say in what's going on and which brings us to what's going to happen now because when you have a very centralized institutionally powerful leadership which you have now but that is also quite unpopular with activists and particularly left of the party people who feel in the most extreme iteration of it very betrayed because they feel that they don't see much in the starma project that really speaks to their most powerful sense of what a sort of ethical left project would look like.

9:36Rafael Behr:And in other cases, just really disappointed that the government's polling around the low 20s on a good day and doesn't, you know, seems to be adrift. So from that point of view, they have this danger that, well, I think the very real prospect, in fact, from Starmer's point of view, that the deputy leadership is going to be a bit of a referendum on how Starmerism has performed, but also trying to put someone in that post who will be a kind of counterweight to Keir Starmer. Yeah, in the way that Angela Rayner was. How do you replace her? Well, I think the first thing to say is there will be very, very strong pressure for this to be a woman.

10:14Rafael Behr:The Labour Party doesn't have a good record of electing female leaders, as in never. So I I think there is a default assumption that it'll be a woman. I think there will be, because of the way the system has been shaped in terms of how many nominations you need to get from the parliamentary party, so you need 20 % of the parliamentary party to be nominated, that's by 80 MPs. The way the Starmer machinery arranged the selections for candidates before the last general election means that actually the pool of, there are a lot of MPs, there aren't that many of them from the old radical Corbynite left of the party, which means that particular faction probably won't get represented on the final list.

11:05Rafael Behr:But that doesn't mean you won't have someone who speaks to and for the left more generally. I think the names that are around Emily Thornberry, who is a veteran served loyally under every Labour leader, including Keir Starmer in opposition and then was not rewarded with a job in government again I think as a standard bearer for what's called the soft left of the party. So who else are we hearing? I know that Jess Phillips was touted as an early contender but she ruled herself out on Monday citing personal reasons. The other name so Rosina Allen-Kahn less well known but very very smart considered to be you know very articulate.

11:47Yeah she's the A &E

11:48Rafael Behr:doctor isn't she she still does the odd shift she ran i think because a lot of people hadn't come across her before she was quite surprised she came second to angela rayner when angela won the deputy leadership last time and that was a sign that actually sort of below the radar she'd impressed people uh by being by being pretty smart and again quite a good campaigner and she's got she's quite sort of taken on reform in her constituency in a way that i think is is sort of probably worth paying attention to people who are interested in how that sort of thing works so there are all sorts of you know that there might be others i apologize to any who are listening who haven't been named but look there's a there are some articulate uh talented serious capable women who are going to want to do this and there might be some men too but as i say i think for for historical cultural reasons there will be a very strong feeling that it has to be a woman

12:46let's talk a bit about the big battles that lie ahead for the Labour Party you've already talked about immigration and what Siobhan and Mahmood may or may not do now that she's in the home office there's a suggestion on the weekend that the government will speed up the closure of asylum hotels for example and put people in military barracks which is something that you wouldn't have thought Labour necessarily would have been advocating for. But another thing that's in the intray is this upgrade to workers' rights that Angela Rayner was due to push through. What do you think is going to happen to that?

13:17There's talk of the bill being watered down with Steve Reid as Housing Secretary now, but on Monday a government spokesperson was insisting that it would go through Parliament. This is an interesting one because at some level this is

13:33Rafael Behr:It's the workers' rights, representing workers' rights, something that was done that puts the Starmer project in a clearer place with relationship to the Labour Party's trade union roots. It's exactly that. It's an authentic labour thing to do. And as someone in the government said to me recently, there were only two people in the cabinet who owned things that were so obviously that you could say to people, look, this is a Labour government. And one was Angela Rayner and the workers' rights thing, And the other one was Ed Miliband and the climate stuff. Now, Ed is still standing. Angela Rayner isn't.

14:07Rafael Behr:And that will make a lot of people very nervous. Now, then you add to that the fact that the economy hasn't performed very well. The national insurance rise on the employer side of national insurance rise made a lot of people very nervous in business, saying that this actually was a tax on jobs. This is a terrible idea. There are all sorts of other reasons, plenty of reasons why people in business might want to complain about Labour government. But there's certainly a feeling that like you've sort of we weren't expecting that you hit us with that. And now you're going to do more workers rights to.

14:41Rafael Behr:And yet you claim to be on the side of growth. And so there is a lot of pressure coming from both sides, both to not dilute that at all, because that would be just another betrayal of the left, crudely speaking. and I'm not sure Starmer can necessarily inform to upset his party more on that front and also pressure in terms of, you know, from the sort of wider, at least the orthodoxy in terms of what you need to do to get the economy growing or rather what you need to not do if you don't want to add extra breaks on the economy. Ultimately, I think what it comes down to is, you know, does the Prime Minister consider it emblematic of what he wants to be seen to be doing as a government that it is protecting workers' rights because that's what Labour does.

15:26Rafael Behr:And that noise is still around the government. Yes, they've moved to the right on lots of things that upset people. But that one, I think they would be very, very reluctant to surrender that badge at this point. And then the other big headache is presumably going to be welfare reform. It's hard to see that being anything other than a really difficult issue for Labour. What do you make of the fact that Liz Kendall has been replaced at the Department for Work and Pensions with Pat McFadden, sometimes described as kind of Keir Starmer's enforcer, another bruiser? It's an interesting one because Liz Kendall did everything that was asked of her at that department.

16:05Rafael Behr:Yeah, she didn't always look like she was enjoying it, put it that way, and tried very hard to articulate it in the ways that said, look, actually, what we want to do is to help people back to work and to try to put a kind of compassionate spin on the cuts. And it didn't really work because everyone could see that the cuts were mandated by the from the Treasury, that it was about the essentially the OBR revising the growth forecast saying, oh, hang on, you've lost your fiscal headroom. We're going to need an extra stack of billions off your budgets. Oh, right. That's going to come from personal independence payments.

16:40Rafael Behr:apparently uh okay Liz Kendall can you do it uh and being loyal she did and so and then has been sort of burnt up in the in the furnace of what then happened in terms of the parliamentary rebellion yeah she might that she might be relieved to be sitting to be demoted to the science department whereas uh Pat McFadden as you say you know he his job previously was in the cabinet office really kind of thinking about delivery through the whole machinery of government again a veteran been around for a long time quite plain spoken quite good in terms of again as a performer at least in just sort of driving through a government's message without getting blown off course Coming up Will Starmer make it to the next election?

17:38I think even Labour's loyalists would struggle to argue that this looks like a stable, competent government that is getting things done. How on earth does Starmer steer the ship back on course?

17:51Rafael Behr:I think there are two really key interlocking parts to this question so the first one is the economy stupid as the saying goes look and and partly that's not really in the government's control is it I mean the story of the last 10-15 years has been global volatility you can you know there was a pandemic there was all sorts of reasons why the economy just isn't necessarily in the control of a chancellor. But if you don't get the economy growing, and there's not revenue coming into the exchequer, you cannot reform public services in the way that people actually feel like they're better, people won't have money in their pockets to spend, you won't get a feel good factor that this ongoing sense of malaise, both in terms of people's personal finances, cost of living crisis, and in terms of the state to the government provision of services feeling a bit degraded, that's going to carry on.

18:42Rafael Behr:So they really need to grow the economy. Right. Right. And the second problem with this is the Starmer project doesn't really have a sort of a left theory of growth. Very crudely speaking, what would the left theory of growth have been once upon a time? Essentially, you can spend, you can use the power of the state. You raise taxes, you spend, you can maybe borrow money to spend. You prime the pump that gets things moving. People have money in their pockets and then the economy starts growing. Right. Now, that is essentially not available because of the parameters the current government has set itself.

19:10Rafael Behr:It has foresworn that option that really I mean, they're going to raise some taxes. But they really need another theory of growth. And the sort of the other available theory of how you grow the economy is quite a conservative one. It's supply side, it's deregulation, it's cutting public spending and unleashing enterprise. Now, that's not a very whether or not that's right is a different issue. It's not a very labor way of doing it. And it means you're constantly going back to the Labour Party and saying, I'm sorry, you don't like this, but we have to do it for growth. Now, if you don't get growth, you're in serious trouble and you're just burning up more and more of your capital with the Labour Party and the left.

19:47Rafael Behr:So what Keir Starmer needs is he needs the economy to grow and he needs to prove to the Labour Party that he is he's one of them, that his heart beats on the left in some way that gives him the sort of the more benefit of the doubt to carry on trying it his way. Because if it doesn't, I mean, there's now a lot of talk quite seriously about the possibility that you just can't fight a general election with him as the leader. Well, that was going to be my next question. Is there any world in which someone other than Keir Starmer will lead the party into the next general election, which Nigel Farage, for reasons unclear to me, thinks will be in 2027?

20:25They don't have to do it for almost four years.

20:27Rafael Behr:look my working assumption on these things is based on the way that labor party operates in the past and the way that what that means is that and this is going to sound very bleak so i apologize in advance people listening to this podcast that what that tends to mean is you just get endless speculation about maybe replacing the leader and then it bubbles up maybe even a bit of a challenge but it goes off half cock and then everyone panics and goes no no we can't have a leadership contest because that will show division or the wrong person will win and the right go oh no we can't have a contest because someone from the left will win and left go oh that's the wrong candidate and that means the right will stitch it up and you know and so you get all of the cost of disunity and people being distracted by internal factional fighting trying to think should we change leader and you never actually get the bell around the neck of the cat and you never actually do it um so that is my central projection just because that's what's always happened with the labour nearly always happened with the labour party that said obviously there is there is the possibility because right now where this government is polling in terms of it's just a not I mean it's an interesting polling metric which is does Keir Starmer sort of beat Nigel Farage on a head-to-head on who would you rather have as prime minister that's sort of closer um he's still ahead isn't he a Farage just to be clear on that sort of measure yeah I think you know so if you had the forced choice there are enough people who think god please no not Nigel Farage okay I guess it has to be Keir Starmer.

21:53Rafael Behr:But that's, you know, are you going to roll the dice on that as a proposition going into a general election? And on all sorts of other metrics in terms of just sort of general approval of how the government's doing and approval of how the prime minister is doing. The territory you're in is, you know, it's cold, it's cold out there. He's gone like walked into the sort of territory, polling territory that sort of Nick Clegg was in after the betrayal and tuition fees, right? This is not a place that people necessarily come back from out there. The oxygen is thin, the temperature is cold. You can sort of curl up in a ball and just not really come back from out there.

22:26Rafael Behr:So at some point, and in fact, it's already happening quietly, but it's going to get louder. I think people are waiting to see what happens with the budget. And obviously now with the deputy leadership contest. But early next year, if things aren't really shifting in a better direction, if the dials aren't moving, you will start to get very noisy speculation as to whether realistically Kirsten has run out of road. Well we shall see Raf thank you very much Thank you

22:58That was Raphael Bear you can read all of his columns at theguardian.com and just before we go if you're interested in the direction of travel in British politics then I would always recommend our sister podcast Politics Weekly but the latest edition is particularly good with John Harris at the Reform Conference in Birmingham and talking to voters about whether they want Nigel Farage to be the next Prime Minister. And that is all for today. This episode was produced by Alex Aitak and Amelia Gill and presented by me, Helen Pidd. Sound design was by Rudy Zagadlo and the executive producer was Sammy Kent.