Who's Top Who's Not is back with a bang this week as the Prime Minister’s reshuffle shakes up the political landscape.
Top – Shabana Mahmood
Westminster is back with a bang and we’re straight in with a juicy slice of pure power politics!
Angela Rayner’s triple resignation precipitated a mass reshuffle of the government. It was perfectly possible to have kept things quite tight by just getting a new Housing Secretary, but Starmer decided it was time to go big or go home.
The PM has made much of how his government would be laser-focused on delivery, but this sentiment doesn’t necessarily chime with some of the new cabinet appointments. It is not obvious to WTWN that moving Yvette Cooper – who has lived and breathed home affairs policy for the last 15 years, and who has probably never ventured further than Calais in a professional capacity – from Home Secretary to Foreign Secretary is necessarily going to aid good government.
Similarly, Jonny Reynolds spent masses of time cultivating business relationships in the city pre-election and has spent his time as Business Secretary securing significant trade deals. Does this skillset make him a natural Chief Whip? Time will tell.
The big winners are Darren Jones who took the odd holding position of Chief Secretary to the prime minister before the full reveal a few days later that he would be running the cabinet office and joining up government priorities as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. And Shabana Mahmood gets the big gig as the new Home Secretary, tasked with taking the fight to Reform on small boats and immigration – best of luck!
Middle – Lucy Powell
Angela Rayner’s government positions of Housing Secretary and Deputy prime minister soon became untenable as the details of her stamp duty scandal came to light. But in the months to come will she regret also resigning from her party-political role as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party? That decision robs her of a platform and a powerbase from which she might have been able to make a political comeback in years to come, and it creates a vacancy in the soft-left-candidate-to-succeed-Starmer category.
But the Labour world keeps turning and so we get an exciting new election campaign for Deputy Leader. But those expecting fireworks may be a little disappointed. The short MP nomination timetable and high bar to qualification means that only Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and former Leader of the House Lucy Powell make the ballot.
With Phillipson representing continuity Starmer and the newly sacked Powell eyeing a long-term return to cabinet whilst having an axe to grind, some might be expecting a fiery hustings. But whilst Powell will inevitably track left, she might find it hard to attack the government too vociferously on controversial issues like Gaza and the 2-child benefit cap as she was a part of the cabinet that made these decisions, and she has the voting record to prove it.
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is a slightly odd position, odder still in government. There are few formal roles beyond having a seat on Labour’s NEC. Effective Deputy Leader’s carve out a role for themselves e.g. Prescott as a political counterweight to Blair, or Harman as a committed campaigner on equal rights and dogged queen of the electoral battle bus. Much has been made of the need for the next deputy leader to be northern and a woman; in part because that description fitted Rayner. But that is a superficial reading of Rayner’s talent and success. Much more intrinsic is that Rayner connected with people, was an authentic communicator, was charismatic and clearly good fun. These are the qualities that Labour needs in its next leader, not only to gee up the party troops ahead of forthcoming elections but also as an asset with the public.
Bottom – Peter Mandelson
It was third time unlucky for Peter Mandelson as he was sacked from his role as Ambassador to the US this week, coming decades on from his two resignations from Blair’s government.
In the end, the steady drip-drip of revelations about his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein – and his continued defence of the indefensible – proved too much of a distraction for Starmer who finally made the decision to fire him. With the Trump state visit next week, this story risked completely dominating this event, although it will still prove uncomfortable for the PM.
A combination of the Tory frontbench, the mainstream UK media, and left-wing backbench Labour MPs all combined in their shared aim of attacking the prime minister politically, using the Mandelson-Epstein relationship as a proxy to go after Starmer for his close relationship with Trump. The special relationship might be good for Britain, but it leaves Starmer vulnerable politically.