The class of 2024: Labour's new (and old) blood part 2

Another clutch of likely Labour MPs after the general election who are worth watching as they fight for the Westminster limelight

I previously profiled five people who are likely, or at least possible, to be Labour Members of Parliament after the next general election, working on the hypothesis that Sir Keir Starmer wins a substantial majority. Two (Douglas Alexander and Pamela Nash) have previous Westminster experience; the same is true of some of the second clutch of potential influencers and decision-makers.

Heidi Alexander (Swindon South)

Cutting her political teeth as parliamentary researcher for Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewsham Deptford) from 1999 to 2005, Alexander rose through Labour London politics. She was a member of Lewisham Borough Council from 2004 to 2010, latterly as deputy mayor and cabinet member for regeneration, then succeeded Bridget Prentice as Labour MP for Lewisham East. Alexander served an as opposition whip under Ed Miliband (2012-15), unglamorous but vital work which teaches MPs an enormous amount, as well as acting as deputy to Sadiq Khan in his role as shadow minister for London from 2013 to 2015. She supported Andy Burnham for leader of the Labour Party in 2010 and 2015, but Jeremy Corbyn brought her into the shadow cabinet as shadow health secretary in 2015 aged only 40, admittedly at a time when many senior Labour parliamentarians declined to serve in Corbyn’s line-up.

She did not stay long. After the Brexit referendum in June 2016, she resigned from the shadow cabinet, telling Corbyn he wasn’t up to the leadership (and misdating her letter by a year). In an article in The Guardian that summer, she was stingingly critical of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as “so inept, so unprofessional, so shoddy”, and supported Owen Smith’s unsuccessful leadership challenge in August/September. The experience of being on the front bench seems to have scarred her, and her eyes moved elsewhere.

Alexander had chaired Sadiq Khan’s 2016 campaign to be mayor of London. When deputy mayor Val Shawcross retired in 2018, Alexander gave up her seat in the Commons and was appointed to replace her, taking on her responsibility for transport and serving as deputy chair of Transport for London. In three and a half years—she stepped down in December 2021—she had a number of challenges: the opening of Crossrail (now the Elizabeth line) was beset by delays, Hammersmith Bridge was closed by the local council in 2019 and has yet to re-open fully, and she negotiated repeatedly with Whitehall for additional funding to keep TfL running. Alexander was well regarded at City Hall as hard-working, diligent and savvy. When she left, she announced she was taking a short break to consider her future.

In July 2022, she was selected as Labour candidate for South Swindon, her hometown. She will face former justice secretary and lord chancellor Sir Robert Buckland, a clever and jolly Welshman who won in 2019 with a modest majority of 6,625 and must be regarded as in real danger of defeat. Labour taking control of the council last year suggests this is a very winnable seat. One of her particular areas of interests is urban regeneration and housing (she has a postgraduate degree in European Urban and Regional Change from the University of Durham) and will be relatively rare on the Labour benches in having experience of hands-on, executive management and policy delivery: TfL has 28,000 staff and a budget of nearly £11 billion. Affable and human, she is surely a string candidate for a ministerial job, if not immediately then in the first major reshuffle.

Mary Creagh (Coventry East)

Mary Creagh was another product of London local government. After Pembroke College, Oxford and the London School of Economics, where she was awarded a PhD in European studies, she worked as a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Cranfield School of Management and was a Labour representative on Islington Borough Council from 1998 to 2005, leading her party group for a time. At the general election of 2005 she replaced David Hinchliffe, long-term chair of the House of Commons Health Committee, as MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Creagh was parliamentary private secretary to Andy Burnham when he was chief secretary to the Treasury (2007-08) and culture, media and sport secretary (2008-09), then served as an assistant whip for the last year of the Labour government.

Boundary changes in Wakefield meant she only held on by 1,613 votes in 2010, but Ed Miliband appointed her shadow environment, food and rural affairs secretary (although she had backed his brother David for the leadership), and she campaigned against the sale of public forestry and (less successfully) the proposed abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, in favour of flood defences and for a ban on wild animals in circuses. She was shadow transport secretary from 2013 to 2014 before being given the international development portfolio in what was regarded as Miliband’s final pre-election reshuffle (her deputy was Anas Sarwar, now leader of Scottish Labour).

After Labour’s slightly unexpected defeat in 2015 and Ed Miliband’s decision to step down, Creagh announced she would stand for the leadership, but after a month she only had the backing of 10 MPs, well short of the 35 needed for nomination, and withdrew from the contest. She left the front bench when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, joining the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, and in February 2016 succeeded Huw Irranca-Davies as chair of the committee. (Six other Miliband-era shadow cabinet refugees chaired committees in that parliament: Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper, Harriet Harman, Meg Hillier, Rachel Reeves and Stephen Twigg.)

She was a vocal critic of Corbyn, and in February 2019 was approached by the breakaway centrist claque The Independent Group (later Change UK) but decided to stay within Labour. She advocated for her party to support a second referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. But at the general election in December 2019, she lost Wakefield to Conservative challenger Imran Ahmad Khan by 3,358 votes. It was difficult timing. She had turned 52 less than a fortnight before, but with Boris Johnson winning an 80-seat majority, Labour’s prospects even in the medium term looked bleak.

In 2020, Creagh took on a full-time role as chief executive of walking charity Living Streets, founded in the 1920s to promote pedestrian safety. She pledged to put “walking at the heart of the nation’s green recovery” and help Living Streets fulfil “its historic mission to create a walking nation”. Under her leadership the charity advised on creating a pedestrian-friendly environment in Ilford and worked on a “healthy streets” project in Cardiff. She also returned to Cranfield as a visiting professor, and was awarded a CBE in 2021 for parliamentary and political services. She also became chair of responsible business practice at Lexington Communications.

In 2023, she applied for the Labour candidacy in Coventry North East, the city in which she was born and educated. The revision of constituencies by the Boundary Commission announced in June 2023 redrew the seat slightly as Coventry East, and Creagh won the nomination in February this year. Her website identifies her priorities as “a better NHS”, “warm, affordable homes for all”, a “safer city” and “the best start in life”. Colleen Fletcher held the predecessor seat by more than 7,000 votes in 2019, so Creagh, who will face Conseravative Sarah Cooper-Lesadd, a former civil servant and parliamentary aide, should win comfortably and return to the House of Commons after a single parliament away.

What will Creagh want to do if and when she returns to Parliament? She will be nearly 57, senior but with experience more in opposition than government. Her successor as chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, Philip Dunne, is standing down at the general election, and his appointment broke with the tradition since the committee was set up in 1997 that it was always chaired by an opposition MP (a practice which derived from it being modelled, perhaps optimistically, on the Public Accounts Committee). Perhaps, then, Creagh might seek to resume her position. As a seasoned MP, intelligent, informed and with an academic bent, she would fit neatly back into the worthy role of environmental scrutineer, and her odds of doing so are probably higher than those of being offered senior ministerial office. After defeat in 2019, she is, in some ways, lucky to have even the possibility of choice.

Emma Reynolds (Wycombe)

Emma Reynolds is another former MP hoping to return to the House (a “retread”, in the unflattering argot of Westminster). Her background is of an establishment insider: she read philosophy, politics and economics at Wadham College, Oxford, which produced F.E. Smith, Sir John Simon and Michael Foot as well as the current Baby of the House, Keir Mather, and was a small business lobbyist in Brussels before becoming an adviser to the Party of European Socialists from 2004 to 2006. She was a special adviser to Geoff Hoon as minister for Europe (2006-07) and government chief whip (2007-08), then spent 18 months as senior consultant for a Peterborough-based public affairs consultancy.

In 2010, Reynolds was elected MP for Wolverhampton North East, but she had less than five months on the backbenches before Ed Miliband appointed her a shadow Foreign Office minister as part of Yvette Cooper’s team (Cooper was replaced by Douglas Alexander, who also hopes to return to the Commons this year, less than four months later). She took on the Europe brief in October 2011, only five years after being a special adviser to the then-minister, Geoff Hoon, and then became shadow housing minister two years later. It was an impressive rise, and her place as a star of a future Labour government seemed assured: she was firm and determined at the dispatch box and showed no signs of stinting on hard work.

Corbyn changed everything, as for so many Labour MPs. She had been interim shadow communities and local government secretary from May to September 2015 but did not serve on Corbyn’s front bench, saying he needed “space to build his own team”. She supported Owen Smith the following year when he challenged Corbyn for the leadership, and served on the Health and Social Care Committee (2015-16) and the Committee on the Future Relationship with the EU (2016-19). At the 2019 general election, Conservative opera singer Jane Stevenson beat her by 4,080 votes.

Reynolds did not sit idle. In June 2020 she became managing director for public affairs, policy and economic research of TheCityUK, the trade body for financial services and allied professions, a relatively unusual berth for a former Labour Member of Parliament but a serious and weighty role. The organisation has been extremely active in tackling the City of London’s position as the UK left the European Union. Her ambitions still lay in front-line politics, however, and in September 2022 she was selected as Labour’s candidate for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, where “Brexit hard man” Steve Baker had a majority in 2019 of only 4,214.

The constituency is largely unchanged under the Boundary Commission’s review, losing only the ward of Hazlemere to neighbouring Chesham and Amersham. Baker is a high-profile figure but a substantial swing to Labour is likely to see Reynolds overwhelm him and return to the House of Commons. It would be very surprising not to see her offered some kind of role by Sir Keir Starmer: she is only 46 and has spent four years in the heart of London’s financial industry.

As a candidate she has highlighted to cost of living crisis and problems with public services against the backdrop of Buckinghamshire’s relative prosperity, so she might serve Labour as capable bridge between the commercial engine of the UK and the pressing concerns of voters. Equally, it is worth noting that the Treasury currently has five Commons ministers (including the chancellor and the chief secretary) but there are only four shadow ministers, so an additional role would be easy to contrive. Watch this space.

Olivia Bailey (Reading West and Mid Berkshire)

Olivia Bailey is a political insider: after reading modern history and politics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, she spent a year in public relations with MHP Group then was women’s officer for the National Union of Students (2009-11), national chair of Labour Students (2011-12) and, after a year at the BBC, a political advisor for the Labour Party from 2013 to 2015. Then it was research director for the Fabian Society (2015-20) and back to the Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership as head of domestic policy.

From 2022 to 2023 she was a director at Public First, a “policy, research, opinion and strategy consultancy” which “test[s] public opinion and attitudes across the globe and link[s] that to effective public policy”, almost a mission statement for the Starmer brand. Another return to Labour for nine months as senior advisor and head of community and security was followed by a new role at Public First as a partner after she was selected as Labour candidate for the new constituency of Reading West and Mid Berkshire. She was born in Reading and had cut Alok Sharma’s majority in the predecessor seat of Reading West to 2,876 in 2017.

The new seat has been identified as a Labour “battleground”, and with Sir Alok Sharma leaving the House of Commons, Bailey faces another locally born hopeful, Conservative leader of the opposition on West Berkshire Council Ross Mackinnon. Two-thirds of the seat come from Reading West, which, unaltered, would surely have been a prime Labour target, but the rest is drawn from the safer Conservative seats of Wokingham and Newbury. Nevertheless, Bailey must stand a strong chance.

Her insider status and experience of Labour’s higher reaches meant she is regarded as someone who can “get things done”. One local news platform commented with ambivalence, “She is clearly passionate—but perhaps also rather corporate”. Her professionalism and prgamatic approach will have struck a chord with her former boss Sir Keir Starmer, who holds her in high regard. Bailey herself says that she favoured diplomacy and robust but good-humoured engagement rather than rancour or insults from an early stage when she was bullied at school for being gay. “I was worried that people don’t like me or that they’re making fun of me,” she admitted, “and I always carry with me the idea that I’m not good enough”.

One can overdo modesty and self-deprecation. An Oxford education and 15 years in policy and research give her an impressive CV and connections to the leadership. Bailey is, predictably, sometimes prone to the agonising blandness of the Labour leader:

Politics is how you change a country. But fundamentally you have to be involved in it to make a difference. Progress is made by having arguments in a polite and respectful way.

She also falls back on this-but-also-that formulations which can leave the audience wondering if she has conclusions at all. On cancel culture, she said even-handedly, “Freedom of speech is not straightforward, but we must look at evidence for arguments, and everyone has a right to be heard”.

In fairness, she is fighting a relatively marginal seat for a party which has been in opposition for 14 years and which still had traumatic folk memories of the “lost” victory of 1992. Starmer’s caution may be instinctive but it is also a sensible approach to the circumstances in which Labour finds itself. Liv Bailey, if she is elected, may have to wait beyond the first wave for a role in the new administration, and it can be a strange culture shock for insiders who suddenly have to distance themselves when they seek their own personal mandate. By the mid-point of the next parliament, however, it would be surprising if she were not in office in some capacity, perhaps drawn towards the Downing Street/Cabinet Office/Treasury nexus of power at the centre of Whitehall. There is a reason insiders stay on the inside.

Joani Reid (East Kilbride and Strathaven)

Joani Reid is Labour aristocracy. Her grandfather Jimmy Reid was one of the most extraordinary and charismatic figures of the trades union movement in the latter part of the last century, who led the dazzlingly counterintuitive “work-in” at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971-72 after the consortium was put into receivership. (This Thames TV interview from the time gives a flavour of Reid’s power and eloquence. His rectorial address, full text here, at the University of Glasgow in 1971 was reprinted in full by The New York Times, which called it “the greatest speech since President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address”.)

Reid read modern history and politics at Glasgow before moving to London to study at Birkbeck. She describes her grandfather as “a massive influence and inspiration”, but she is no left-wing firebrand. After working for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in North Carolina in 2008, she stood for Southwark Borough Council in 2010 and was then elected to Lewisham Council in 2014 (where Heidi Alexander, above, had been deputy mayor a few years previously). Her view is that “politics is the best vehicle to make the world a better place”.

In 2018, the new mayor of Lewisham, Damien Egan (now Labour MP for Kingswood), appointed her cabinet minister for safer communities, responsible for addressing youth violence and justice, working with local with police, regulatory services, environmental health, noise enforcement and anti-social behaviour. It is the kind of nuts-and-bolts portfolio that can be a panoply of frustrations but addresses a swathe of issues which make a real and immediate difference to voters’ lives. Reid has been sharply critical of lacking of funding for local government and of the breakdown in trust between the Metropolitan Police and London’s communities. “There is lots of anger,” she argues. “Toward politicians, police, institutions.” She is surely right to some extent in her assessment of the problem.

She is firmly not of the party’s left. Her anger at Jeremy Corbyn’s failings was obvious and blistering. “Let’s just be brutally honest, part of the problem with Corbynistas, including the man himself, is that by and large they’re not very bright,” she tweeted after Labour’s election defeat in 2019. Two days before, she had boiled over with frustration.

So angry. Jonathan Ashworth knew it. Most labour MPs knew it. I knew it. Corbyn and his supporters put their own selfish ambition ahead of winning and actually getting rid of Tories.

At the beginning of March, Reid was selected as Labour candidate for East Kilbride and Strathaven in South Lanarkshire. It is a slightly redrawn seat but a spicy contest: the current constituency of East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow was snatched from Labour by the SNP’s Lisa Cameron by a huge margin of 16,527, and in 2019 her majority was 13,322. But in October 2023, facing a wrangle over re-selection, she walked out of the Scottish National Party and did the unthinkable, switching to the Conservatives. She said that she had felt ostracised in the SNP for a long time, experiencing a “toxic and bullying atmosphere”, and that it had “become narrower and narrower and narrower towards nationalism that I don’t even recognise the party I joined from 2014”. The SNP announced that Grant Costello, head of the party’s digital media, had been selected for the new seat, while Cameron will stand down.

What are Reid’s chances? Most expect the SNP’s level of support to take a battering, as Scottish Labour has drawn more or less level with them in the opinion polls. The candidate’s message to voters is stark: “it’s a Labour or Tory government in Westminster”, and therefore voting for the Nationalists would be a distraction. Electoral Calculus suggests the SNP will hold the seat, as does UK Polling Report, but the SNP’s poll lead is falling and the Scottish Government has faced a number of embarrassing setbacks in recent months. So East Kilbride and Strathaven is in play.

If she does reach Westminster, Reid has a practical grass-roots attitude which might serve her well. Occasionally slightly hesitant of camera, she is nonetheless frank and sincere, and 15 years in London have softened her rich Glasgow accent not a jot. With a background in cash-strapped local government, a willingness to carry the fight to the Left as well as to Nationalists and a track record in youth and community justice and anti-social behaviour, she has the kind of profile which Sir Keir Starmer might find suitable for a mainstream Whitehall department in the fulness of time. Like Liv Bailey, Reid would expect a year or two on the backbenches, especially in a House crowded with Labour newcomers, but diligence, an eye for publicity and occasional expressions of fealty to the leadership would put her in a strong position for promotion mid-parliament.

Well, there’s another five faces to watch, potentially. I may offer up another clutch as we move forward. And, as ever, (polite, robust and fair) feedback is always welcomed, especially, in this case, from people whose roots in the Labour movement are, ahem, rather deeper than my own—although sometimes you need an outsider to tell you what is obvious. Until then, keep drawing up your bingo cards in case the 2024 Parliament is dominated by a Labour majority.