Getting the band back together: is Starmer too reliant on Blair veterans?

Mandelson, Powell, McFadden, Milburn: is the PM making good use of talent and experience, or is he a prisoner of Labour's past?

It has become a commonplace that Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister has indulged in a degree of political and parliamentary archaeology, resurrecting faces from the party’s increasingly distant Blair-era past to bolster his administration. The issue is particularly pertinent this week with formal confirmation that Lord Mandelson, with Tony Blair the great architect of New Labour, is the United Kingdom’s new Ambassador to the United States; his appointment was announced shortly before Christmas, but had an audience with the King and kissed hands this week.

Starmer and Blair

If Mandelson is the ultimate Blairite—is Tony Blair a Mandelsonite? Discuss—there are other people at ministerial, official and advisory level in Starmer’s government who were very closely associated with the former premier. Pat McFadden, formally Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations but effectively Starmer’s Whitehall “fixer” and dubbed by some “the real deputy prime minister”, was Blair’s Political Secretary in Downing Street from 2002 to 2005. He acted as a vital conduit between the Prime Minister and the Labour Party, having previously worked for Donald Dewar in Scotland and then for John Smith as Leader of the Opposition. Having served in Gordon Brown’s cabinet (latterly as Mandelson’s deputy and House of Commons representative at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills), he failed to be elected to Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet in 2010 but was made Shadow Minister for Europe in 2014, sacked from that post by Jeremy Corbyn in 2016 and recalled to the front bench when Starmer became Leader of the Opposition in 2020.

In ministerial terms, four other members of the cabinet had served at that level under Blair or Gordon Brown: Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband, Hilary Benn and John Healey. None, however, was especially closely linked to Blair, and Miliband was very much regarded as a Brownite, as a special adviser at HM Treasury from 1997 to 2002 then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in 2004-05.

Peter Kyle, Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary, worked as a special adviser on social exclusion in the Cabinet Office briefly in 2006-07, at the end of Blair’s time in office (two of the junior ministers were McFadden and Miliband). One other minister with a Blair connection, who was unexpectedly recalled in July 2024, is David Hanson, MP for Delyn from 1992 to 2019. He was the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary from 2001 to 2005, acting as Blair’s link to the Labour Party in the House of Commons, but lost his seat in 2019. When Starmer formed his government last summer, Hanson was granted a life peerage and appointed Minister of State at the Home Office.

It is among officials and special advisers that Starmer has drawn more heavily on a Blairite cadre. The most prominent is former Health Secretary Alan Milburn, who held a slightly nebulous advisory position to his successor Wes Streeting until he was formally named as Lead Non-Executive Director on the board of the Department of Health and Social Care. He will “provide independent advice and expertise to inform the department’s strategy, performance and governance” and “additional support to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in his role as chair of the board”.

Milburn is joined at the DHSC by another veteran of health policy, Professor Paul Corrigan, employed to “work on emerging policy and delivery issues”, particularly the NHS 10-Year Plan for Health. Corrigan was a special adviser to Milburn then John Reid as Health Secretary from 2001 to 2005, then moved to 10 Downing Street as Blair’s senior health policy adviser 2005-07. Probably no other figures had more impact on the NHS under Blair than Milburn and Corrigan.

Jonathan Powell was Tony Blair’s chief of staff first in opposition (1995-97) and then in Downing Street for the full 10 years of his premiership, the only person apart from John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Blair himself to serve in the same post. When Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, he cancelled the appointment made by Rishi Sunak of General Gwyn Jenkins as National Security Adviser. Initially the competition was to be re-run, for reasons which were never fully clear, but two months later it was announced that Powell would take up the role. As I explored at the time, however, his appointment has involved a substantial change to the position of National Security Adviser, as he is classified as a special adviser rather than a civil servant, with the limitations that inevitably entails.

The final Blair veteran in a significant position is Starmer’s Downing Street Director of Communications, Matthew Doyle. From 1998 to 2005, he was Head of Press and Broadcasting for the Labour Party, then, following a brief stint as special adviser to David Blunkett at the Department for Work and Pensions, became Deputy Director of Communications in 10 Downing Street. When Blair stepped down from the premiership, Doyle followed him into the private sector and was Political Director of the Office of Tony Blair from 2007 to 2012. Starmer appointed him as Labour communications chief in June 2021, initially on an interim basis before making the role permanent.

What conclusions should be drawn from these appointments? Has Sir Keir Starmer sensibly picked some key figures with experience at the highest level to compensate for the fact that the Labour Party was in opposition for 14 years and that he himself was only elected to the House of Commons in 2015? Or, as critics would prefer to believe, is this evidence of an ideological commitment to “continuity Blairism”, pursuing the New Labour “project” in a semi-covert way but relying on—perhaps even being manipulated by—powerful advisers who are loyal and committed Blairites?

Cameron: reviving the court of Queen Margaret?

It struck me that it would be worthwhile and perhaps instructive to find a comparator. When David Cameron formed the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in May 2010, his party had been out of power for 13 years, almost as long as Starmer’s Labour. The previous Conservative prime minister but one, Baroness Thatcher, occupied a similarly iconic and ideologically charged place in his party as Blair does in Starmer’s, although her successor, Sir John Major, had served in Downing Street after her fall for twice as long (1990-97) as Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown (2007-10). Therefore the question was worth asking: did Cameron draw as heavily on those with strong Thatcherite credentials to form his ministerial and official team?

Only three ministers in Cameron’s first cabinet had experience at that level: Kenneth Clarke, Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, William Hague, First Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary, and Sir George Young, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons. The last two had only joined Major’s cabinet at his final reshuffle in July 1995, serving less than two years, though Hague had then gone on to lead the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001. Clarke, however, had held a series of cabinet appointments under Thatcher and Major: Paymaster General (1985-87), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1987-88), Health Secretary (1988-90), Education Secretary (1990-92), Home Secretary (1992-93) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1993-97). He was the biggest of big beasts, and had three times stood for election as party leader.

Clarke’s relationship with Thatcher was complicated. Once Europe became a fault line in the Conservative Party, they were cast as polar opposites, and in November 1990 he had been the first cabinet minister to advise Thatcher to resign after failing to win by a sufficient margin in the first round of the leadership contest. Yet for three years he had been deputy and Commons spokesman for Lord Young of Graffham, one of Thatcher’s favourite and most trusted colleagues, at Employment (1985-87) and Trade and Industry (1987-88). Promoted to running his own department, he found favour with the Iron Lady, who wrote in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, that he was “an extremely effective Health minister—tough in dealing with vested interests and trade unions, direct and persuasive in his exposition of government policy”.

If Thatcher and Clarke respected each other and agreed on more fundamental ideological tenets than we now remember, they were never close allies. Of the other cabinet survivors, Hague had only been elected to the House of Commons in 1989, 18 months before Thatcher’s departure from office, while Young had been an opposition whip from 1976 to 1979 and a junior minister at the Department of Health and Social Security (1979-81) and the Department of the Environment (1981-86) before resigning because of the looming adoption of the Community Charge. In July 1990, as part of a last-ditch attempt to unify the party, Thatcher had rehabilitated Young as Comptroller of the Household and third most senior government whip, but they were cut from very different cloth: he was a liberal-minded aristocrat and a stalwart of the Tory Reform Group for whom the poll tax had been the last straw.

Two other members of Cameron’s first cabinet had Thatcherite bonds. Oliver Letwin, who became Minister of State for Government Policy in the Cabinet Office, had struggled in front-line jobs like Shadow Home Secretary (2001-03) and Shadow Chancellor (2003-05). He was a broad and deep thinker, with a first-class degree in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, a year as a Procter Fellow at Princeton and a doctorate in philosophy from Darwin College, Cambridge, his thesis entitled Emotion and Emotions. His parents, Professor William Letwin and Shirley Robin Letwin, had been influential free-market conservative intellectuals and Oliver had worked in the Number 10 Policy Unit from 1983 to 1986. While Sir George Young had resigned from Thatcher’s government over the Community Charge, Letwin had advised using Scotland as a test-bed for the policy. He had gone on to co-author (with John Redwood) a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, Britain’s Biggest Enterprise: ideas for radical reform of the NHS, which had advocated greater involvement of the private sector in delivering healthcare.

Letwin’s superior was Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. As MP for North Warwickshire from 1983 to 1992, he had been a rising star of the Thatcher and early Major governments: Minister for Corporate and Consumer Affairs at the DTI (1987-89), Minister for Europe (1989-90) and Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1990-92). Maude was robustly Thatcherite and would almost certainly have been promoted to cabinet after the 1992 general election but lost his seat, only to return as Member for Horsham in 1997. He, like Letwin, had parental connections to Thatcher. His father, Angus Maude, later Lord Maude of Stratford-upon-Avon, had been a key player in Thatcher’s election as Leader of the Opposition in 1975, after which he had served as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and Chairman of the Conservative Research Department (1975-79). He had then been appointed to Thatcher’s first cabinet as Paymaster General so that she could, as she put it in her memoirs, “benefit from his years of political experience, his sound views, and his acid wit”.

One extraordinary survivor of that first Thatcher cabinet returned to junior ministerial office under David Cameron. David Howell, then MP for Guildford, had been Energy Secretary (1979-81) then Transport Secretary (1981-83) before spending a distinguished stint on the backbenches, latterly as Chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1997 he had retired from the Commons aged only 61 and become Lord Howell of Guildford. Hague had appointed him as a spokesman on foreign affairs in the House of Lords in 2000 and Cameron then made him Shadow Deputy Leader of the House in 2005 (perhaps aided by the fact he was Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s father-in-law). When the coalition was formed, he became Minister of State for International Energy Policy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and served until 2012.

Howell was not a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite. A pamphlet he had written for the Conservative Political Centre just before the 1970 general election, A New Style of Government: A Conservative view of the tasks of administrative, financial and parliamentary reform facing an incoming government, had featured the first use in British politics of the word “privatisation”, but he was initially a close ally of Thatcher’s predecessor, Edward Heath. On taking office in 1970, Heath made Howell Parliamentary Secretary to the Civil Service Department, an ostensibly junior ministerial rank but working in a new organisation, created 18 months previously to help the Prime Minister manage the Whitehall bureaucracy.

If Kenneth Clarke was by many political instincts in tune with Thatcher, he was much closer in temperament and habit to her successor John Major, in whose cabinet after 1992, as Home Secretary then Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was one of the most powerful figures; only Michael Heseltine in his post-1995 pomp, as First Secretary of State and Deputy Prime Minister, had the same kind of weight or authority. Major’s premiership is now a Tory watchword for division, failure and drift, and, while I wrote in 2022 of its noble intentions and solid beginning, I think it will remain a study in calamity for the foreseeable future. It is hardly surprising, then, that the court of John Major was not mined for experienced figures in the same way that those of Blair and Thatcher have been.

It is true that Francis Maude, having lost his seat in 1992, was head of the government’s Deregulation Task Force between 1994 and 1997, overseen by Heseltine first as Trade and Industry Secretary then as Deputy Prime Minister with responsibility for competitiveness, before returning to the House of Commons. David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science under David Cameron, had flitted briefly through Major’s orbit as a young MP, serving in the Cabinet Office as Parliamentary Secretary (1995-96) and Paymaster General (1996) and carrying out a policy co-ordination role. He had also served in Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1984 to 1987, overlapping with Letwin. One other minister who had been close to Major was Lord Hill of Oareford, Minister for Schools 2010-13 then Leader of the House of Lords 2013-14. As Jonathan Hill, he had worked in the Number 10 Policy Unit (1991-92) and had then been Major’s Political Secretary from 1992 to 1994.

Conclusion

Can we argue, then, that as Starmer is to Blair, so Cameron was to Thatcher? Cameron’s priority on assuming the leadership of the Conservative Party was to “detoxify” the brand after the catastrophic election defeat of 1997, just as Starmer faced the task of undoing the apparent electoral and reputational harm done to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn which had culminated in the party’s worst electoral performance since the 1930s. Both were personally untested in government, though Cameron had been a special adviser to Norman Lamont as Chancellor of the Exchequer while Starmer had served as Director of Public Prosecutions.

Each leader also sought to present himself as relatively “unideological” and pragmatic. When Cameron characterised the British people in 2016, he said:

We are obstinately practical, rigorously down-to-earth, natural debunkers. We approach issues with a cast of mind rooted in common sense, we’re rightly suspicious of ideology and sceptical of grand schemes and grandiose promises.

In a similar vein, Starmer, in his first speech as Prime Minister on the morning of 5 July 2024, said that he stood “for stability and moderation”.

From now on, you have a government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by a determination to serve your interests; to defy, quietly, hose who have written our country off. You have given us a clear mandate, and we will use it to deliver change, to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country.

Both saw it as a key part of their job to take the heat out of politics and reassure the electorate that they were anything but radicals.

Thatcher’s reputation among Conservatives remains much higher than Blair’s within his party. It is currently hard to imagine a celebration in 2044 of the 50th anniversary of Blair’s accession to the leadership equivalent to this week’s commemoration by Policy Exchange of Thatcher’s elevation. For an ambitious Conservative explicitly and emphatically to disavow the foundations of Thatcherism would be a risky, perhaps fatal, auto da fé, whereas a rising Labour star who condemned Blair and Blairism would create an instant constituency of support. In that sense, therefore, it was easier for Cameron to shore up his administration with figures who recalled the Thatcherite past; indeed, given that he chose to enter a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the first peacetime coalition since the 1930s, it was arguably an essential element of reassuring the right of his party that he was still, to use one of the Lady’s favourite phrases, “one of them”.

Starmer’s circumstances were different. While his party’s share of the vote at the last election was far from overwhelming—33.7 per cent, only 1.6 per cent higher than Corbyn had won in 2019—he delivered a huge parliamentary majority of 174 for the Labour Party, almost as commanding as Blair’s in 1997 and among the largest in the history of the House of Commons. Prima facie, therefore, he had far greater room for manoeuvre and much greater authority over his party.

Careful examination of the historical record is always valuable for placing events in context, and almost always reveals them to be less dramatic, less revolutionary, less ground-breaking than we initially believe. We crave novelty and drama, and our familiarity with history is increasingly weak and impressionistic: whenever you hear something described as “unprecedented”, it should always be a warning and an occasion for a moment’s pause to reflect. Accordingly, if we set the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 against the current government, we can see clear parallels in the way each has appealed to the past for experience, authority and imprimatur.

Yet, frustratingly for the historian, vibes matter. The sense that Starmer is somehow in hock to Tony Blair and the New Labour project is a much more widely held and politically potent view than any accusation that Cameron was pursuing warmed-over pseudo-Thatcherism. It is true that in 2010 Baroness Thatcher was an ailing and rarely seen 84-year-old, while Sir Tony Blair is a vigorous and voluble man of 71, as active as at any point in his post-premiership career. Perhaps it is inevitable that Blair, energetic and divisive within his party, looms larger and more negatively over Starmer than Thatcher, retired and iconic to Conservatives, did over Cameron.

In the end, the judgement may come according to results. As I argued in a recent article for The Critic, some of the major policy issues facing Blair two decades ago have resurfaced—NHS reform, immigration, integration and cohesion, identity cards, criminal justice—and it should hardly surprise us that the current government is working in the shadow of its Blairite predecessor. If Starmer can draw on that legacy to achieve meaningful results, for example in healthcare, then his approach will be much harder to characterise as a “Blairite tribute band”. A failure to make progress will conversely be blamed in part on a sterile obsession with the past. It may be, in a way, a form of “payment by results”: the ultimate tribute to New Labour.