The Starmer ministry: some observations
The ministerial appointments have flowed, rather slowly, out of Downing Street over the last few days: some thoughts on junior ministers who may be under the radar
There has been a torrent of analysis about the new ministers being appointed by Sir Keir Starmer, some of which I have written myself, and it will no doubt continue until every last bottle-washing post is assigned. There is plenty to say, too, on a number of fronts: the high degree of continuity from shadow cabinet to cabinet; the abandoning of the words “Levelling Up” in the title of Angela Rayner’s new department; the appointment of non-party outsiders to some significant ministerial portfolios; the return to the colours of Blair/Brown veterans like Douglas Alexander and Jacqui Smith; even the failure to find a role for former shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry. At this stage, however, I thought I’d offer some brief observations on a few of the new ministers, including some which may have slipped under the radar of the casual observer/normal person.
Lord Livermore (Financial Secretary to the Treasury): the FST, as he is known within Whitehall, is effectively the third minister in HM Treasury’s hierarchy after the chancellor of the Exchequer, who runs the department, and the chief secretary, who has particular responsibility for public expenditure and spending reviews (and usually sits in cabinet). Livermore is in charge of the tax system and its administration, trade policy, Investment Zones and Freeports and retained EU law and Brexit opportunities. He is the first peer ever to hold the post, which was created in 1711, and indeed Treasury ministers in the House of Lords are rare beasts: there have only ever been 11 in the past, most of whom have served in the last 15 years1. Livermore was a special adviser to Gordon Brown in the Treasury, from 2005 to 2007 his chief strategy adviser and then the Downing Street strategy director until he left in 2008 to work for Saatchi and Saatchi. He was closely involved in Labour’s 2015 general election campaign, after which he was ennobled, and served on the opposition front bench in the House of Lords 2023-24. Only 49, he knows how the centre of power works, and had a significant role in policy development in the late 1990s, but it will not go unnoticed that he was never been elected to anything.
Sir Stephen Timms (Minister of State for Work and Pensions): it is understandable that Starmer has sought out candidates with ministerial experience, and Timms was briefly in Tony Blair’s last cabinet, as chief secretary to the Treasury 2006-07. Indeed, he was a minister from 1998 to 2010, and even that doesn’t tell the whole story: he was three times financial secretary to the Treasury (1999-2001, 2004-05, 2008-10) and three times a welfare and pensions minister (1998-99, 2005-06, 2008), his first stint so long ago that it was still at the Department for Social Security. He acted as shadow work and pensions secretary in the four-month interregnum between Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, and during the last parliament he was chair of the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee. In short, he knows the ropes of the welfare system and knows how to be a minister. He is 68 and has been an MP for 30 years, and was stabbed and badly injured at a constituency surgery in 2010. Likeable, serious and an evangelical Christian, he will apply himself with dedication to his brief and add experience and ballast to a secretary of state and a fellow minister of state who only entered the Commons in 2010.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Minister of State for Transport): a crossbench peer until last week, Peter Hendy began his career as a graduate trainee at London Transport (now Transport for London) in 1975 and moved up the ranks of the organisation. He was managing director of CentreWest London Buses from 1989 to 1994, when he led a management buy-out; from 1997 to 2001 he was deputy director UK bus for First Group; managing director for surface transport at Transport for London 2001-06; and commissioner of transport for London from 2006 to 2015, with overall management responsibility for TfL. In 2015, he was appointed chair of Network Rail, in which post he was serving until appointed a minister last week. His background in public transport is therefore enormous, and he was knighted for his work running TfL during the 2012 London Olympics. One of his biggest ministerial responsibilities will be overseeing to establishment of Great British Railways and bringing the rail network gradually into public ownership.
Georgia Gould (Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office): newly elected as MP for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale, Gould is New Labour royalty. Her father, Lord Gould of Brookwood, advised the Labour Party on polling in the general elections of 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 and wrote an insider’s history of the modernisation of the party, The Unfinished Revolution: How New Labour Changed British Politics Forever. while her mother, Baroness Rebuck, was chair and chief executive of Random House and is now chair of Penguin Random House UK. Before entering elected politics, Gould worked for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. She has been leader of Camden Council since 2017 and knows Sir Keir Starmer well. Having been active in the development of “mission-driven government”, a central plank of the new government’s offering, she is likely to be involved in delivering it from the Cabinet Office.
Alistair Carns (Minister for Veterans): another newly elected MP, for Birmingham Selly Oak, Carns is a former colonel in the Royal Marines who won the Military Cross in Afghanistan in 2011. He spent 24 years in the armed forces and was regarded as an officer who might rise very far: he was due to be promoted to brigadier at the exceptional age of 44 this year but left the Royal Marines to stand for Parliament. Much of Carns’s career is shrouded in official secrecy but he has enormous experience of operational service and of staff jobs, and is the highest-ranking former officer in the House of Commons (a distinction held in the last Parliament by Colonel Bob Stewart, Conservative MP for Beckenham). He has been given ministerial responsibility for veterans, a brief that has grown enormously in prominence over the last 25 years, and succeeds the mercurial former Royal Artillery officer Johnny Mercer. Carns’s expertise is not in doubt, though he will have a steep learning curve in navigating Whitehall, but two aspects of his job should be noted. The first is that he is a parliamentary under-secretary of state, the lowest level in the ministerial hierarchy, while Mercer was a minister of state who attended cabinet. That is a night-and-day difference. The other element is that Carns’s post is based wholly within the Ministry of Defence; Mercer worked in the Cabinet Office, at the centre of government, and before that held his position jointly in the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence. Reducing the minister for veterans to one of the most junior MoD ministers is at best a poor presentational move: but as the brief includes health, housing, welfare and community engagement, it suggests a return to a more siloed mindset. There are many veterans, equally, who take the view that the Ministry of Defence is to some extent being asked to mark its own homework when it comes to veterans’ affairs and the Armed Forces Covenant. A brand new MP on the lowest rung of the ministerial ladder, however impressive and extensive his military career, is not a good sign.
Baroness Merron (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care): Gillian Merron is a great Labour survivor. She was MP for Lincoln from 1997 to 2010, and during the Blair/Brown years she served as a government whip (2004-06) then a junior minister at Transport (2006-07), the Cabinet Office (2007-08), International Development (2008) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2008-09) before a final stint as minister for state for public health (2009-10). After being defeated in the 2010 general election, she was chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 2014 to 2020 and a sharp critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Sir Keir Starmer nominated her for a peerage in 2020 and she joined the opposition front bench in 2021. Returning to the Department of Health and Social Care, albeit at a lower rank, she has plenty of ministerial experience on which she can draw as she takes on responsibility for patient safety and life sciences, and has a brisk, effective manner which should allow her, within reason, to get things done. As ever in the House of Lords, much of it will be away from the public gaze.
Fleur Anderson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland): the MP for Putney since 2019, Anderson was appointed as Hilary Benn’s deputy in opposition last September and transfers the role across to the Northern Ireland Office in government. Her background is in campaigns and charity work, having worked for Christian Aid, the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs, CAFOD and WaterAid before being elected a councillor in Wandsworth. From 2021 to 2023, she was part of the opposition Cabinet Office team, latterly shadowing a succession of four paymasters general. I say this not as a personal slight against her, but it is disappointing, if predictable, that yet another Northern Ireland Office minister is selected who had shown no discernible interest in the province before being assigned the brief. Indeed, a cynic might read something into the choice of someone who has worked with aid charities in developing countries. It is certainly true that the new secretary of state, Hilary Benn, is a genuine heavyweight, but Anderson’s appointment is in stark contrast to the “experts” like James Timpson, Patrick Vallance and Richard Hermer whose arrivals have been greeted with such fanfare.
I will leave it there for the moment, though I reserve the right to return to this subject. Of course, ministers are all still bedding themselves in: some will surprise and some will disappoint. But the more we know, the more accurately we can assess them.
OK, if you insist: Ministers of State Lord Cockfield (1979-82), the Earl of Caithness (1989-90), Lord Simon of Highbury (1997-99) and Lord Agnew of Oulton (2020-22); Commercial Secretaries Lord Sassoon (2010-13), Lord Deighton (2013-15), Lord O’Neill of Gatley (2015-16) and Baroness Neville-Rolfe (2016-17); Financial Services Secretary Lord Myners (2008-10); and Parliamentary Secretaries Baroness Penn (2022-23) and Baroness Vere of Norbiton (2023-24).
This post can be a helpful resource to refer to as names pop up in the media.