Keir Starmer campaigned as changed Labour, and now he will govern as New Labour. It’s not difficult to imagine the consternation felt by Starmer’s critics on the Left at the news that some of the big beasts from the eras of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are making a comeback. Most significant is the return of Alan Milburn, Blair’s health secretary, who will advise his successor, Wes Streeting, on reform of the NHS.
Milburn was the newest of New Labour, pushing through reforms that were anathema to the party’s Left wing, like patient choice and an increased role for the private sector. His return to a position of influence will merely confirm critics’ worst fears that the Starmer era is no more than Blair 2.0.
Confirming their fears, Jacqui Smith, Blair’s chief whip and Brown’s home secretary, is to return as an education minister via an appointment to the Lords, while Douglas Alexander, who served in cabinet under both Blair and Brown, becomes a business minister, having returned to the Commons on Friday after a nine year absence.
That Starmer feels confident and emboldened enough to appoint those he wants in key roles, and not listen to the siren voices who would steer him in a different direction, is in many ways encouraging. Of course, having won a majority of 170 a few days ago, there are few who would deny him the right to appoint whoever he pleases.
Milburn in particular is a bold choice and good one; there are few in the party’s parliamentary ranks who can bring such a sharp and pragmatic analysis to the many problems besetting the NHS, and none who will have the courage to prescribe the necessary medicine without fear of being labelled a sell-out.
On the other hand, what does it say about the lack of real-life experience of this new, gigantic cohort of Labour MPs that, despite winning 411 seats, our new prime minister has made these appointments?
Even before the election, there were whispers that, since there was more ministerial experience in the middle ranks of the front bench – and indeed on the Opposition back benches – than there was in the shadow cabinet itself, Starmer would have to draft in dozens of former ministers.
This in itself would have been unremarkable; the longer any party spends in opposition, the fewer ex-ministers populate its front bench. But the contrast with 1997 is an instructive one. After 18 years in opposition, Tony Blair’s first cabinet was bursting with the big beasts who now populate Labour mythology. It’s important to remember that for Gordon Brown, Frank Dobson, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, George Robertson, Jack Straw and Blair himself, this was their very first taste of ministerial office.
And Blair also reached out to beyond parliament to seek help in governing, recruiting his former boss Derry Irvine as Lord Chancellor.
But Starmer’s appointments feel more of a statement of intent, as well as perhaps an acknowledgement that much of the key experience and skills he feels he needs are simply not available in the Commons.
It will be in time. As the weeks and months pass, new ministers will be either exposed for their shortcomings or revealed as arch Whitehall manoeuvrers. Reshuffles will come and go and slowly Starmer will find he has crafted the cabinet and the ministerial ranks he would ideally have started off with.
But time isn’t necessarily on his side. The gloomy economic environment coupled with national expectations of delivery by this new administration place burdens on Starmer that did not apply to Blair. And coupled with an acute awareness that that enormous Commons majority disguises a historically low level of popular support, is the fact that there are always elections coming down the line.
By appointing Milburn, and, to a lesser extent, Smith and Alexander, Starmer is continuing the strategy he pursued in the more recent, more successful phase of his leadership, when he made it clear that he was uninterested in the criticisms he would receive from his party’s Left, and that his own policy intentions would not be derailed by those seeking a purer form of governing ideology.
Those critics will have to learn to take Starmer at his word. When he declared, on the steps of Downing Street, that his government would be “unburdened by doctrine”, a cold shiver of dread may have settled in the stomachs of many on the Left. But also the Right. By choosing to apply solutions – and to recruit individuals – that are categorised according to their effectiveness rather than their ideological purity, Starmer could be making his government a harder target for the Conservatives to attack, while making it clear he will not buckle to criticism from the Left.
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