The Whitehouse Communications team's take on the latest goings-on in Westminster in this week's Who's Top Who's Not.
Top: Angela Rayner
Former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner takes the top spot this week by leaning into Labour’s internal bad mood and positioning herself as the clearest articulation of the party’s growing impatience. With Andy Burnham publicly suggesting Labour should be listening more closely to her, Rayner’s voice carries weight beyond the usual factional noise and reinforces concerns about the pace of change that are no longer confined to the party’s fringes.
Her speech at the Mainstream reception in the belly of a Whitehall pub on Tuesday was a statement of intent and shows that Rayner is comfortable occupying the space between party loyalty and critique. By warning the Home Secretary of the direction of her proposed asylum reforms, she aligns herself with a growing and increasingly organised branch of internal discontent on the soft left.
At present, Rayner is listening and responding to colleagues while avoiding direct confrontation with the leadership. However, this form of pressure carries its own implications. For the Prime Minister, criticism from senior ranks is harder to contain. It also raises a question of whether this emerging pattern of intervention by Rayner is laying the groundwork for a future leadership bid? And if so, does she have the numbers to follow through? There are some in Labour who are not so sure.
Middle: Rachel Reeves
If Angela Rayner is giving voice to Labour’s internal impatience, Rachel Reeves represents the counterweight as she occupies the middle ground through the steady entrenchment of her ‘securonomics’. Reeves’s attempt to combine fiscal discipline with a more interventionist, resilience-focused economic strategy, continues the slow and methodical work of building Labour’s economic framework. Her push for fiscal devolution to rebalance economic power away from Whitehall has drawn support from figures including Andy Burnham and is genuinely interesting from a policy perspective. This agenda may gain more traction in mayoral cities in the coming months, especially if it can help to generate that lesser-spotted economic growth ministers have been searching for.
Reeves’s Mais lecture served as a platform to reinforce her messaging: economic stability remains the government’s anchor. Reeves’s emphasis on discipline and predictability is designed to reassure both markets and moderate voters that Labour will not deviate from its fiscal credibility agenda. Politically, this places Reeves in a steady but unflashy position as she focuses on constructing the conditions for long-term delivery.
Bottom: Nick Thomas-Symonds
Nick Thomas-Symonds lands at the bottom this week as the government’s carefully choreographed “Brexit reset” risks being defined by the kind of dispute it was meant to move beyond. This was meant to be a coordinated push to demonstrate progress, and a clear narrative that the UK is rebuilding a more constructive relationship with Brussels. Instead, attention has been on EU pressure to lower tuition fees for European students, which could overshadow progress made up to this point. This is a classic example of how the post-Brexit settlement operates: leverage, trade-offs, and competing priorities. While the UK is seeking movement on areas such as trade and emissions, the EU is holding firm on youth mobility and associated demands. In other words, the reset is a continuation of negotiation by other means.
That is the political difficulty for Keir Starmer’s government. Expectations have been set around smoother relations and tangible progress, but weeks like this expose how conditional that progress is. But could this end up being a political diamond in the rough? Political rows can be good and the government thinks it is on the side of public opinion that Brexit has damaged the UK and that a closer relationship with Europe would be good for UK PLC. Time will tell.