Reshuffle: Starmer’s Great Moving Right Show moves on. Some historical contexts
Keir Starmer has reshuffled his Shadow Cabinet in changes which the Guardian notes represent a further shift to the Blairite right of the Party. A narrow church it definitely is.
Two Blair era veterans Hilary Benn and Pat McFadden return. Their competence is hardly in doubt. The politics are rather different matter.
Others on the hard right of the party get new jobs including Thangam Debbonaire who will do well to hold her Bristol seat, Peter Kyle and Liz Kendall who got 4.5% in the 2015 leadership vote.
Lisa Nandy becomes the last of those who stood against Starmer in 2020 to be purged and is despatched to shadow a Government department that does not exist. Rosena Allin-Khan is also out. While generally a Starmer loyalist her insistence on principles and reality meant she had to go.
Does any of this make any difference? I doubt it.
As Harold Wilson noted in the 1960s Labour Conference could decide whatever it liked and he would get on and do whatever he liked, albeit he faced a Cabinet with a lot more political heft than Starmer’s team. The last period should have made clear that Starmer’s Labour Party is run by Starmer and no one else.
Angela Rayner takes on a new levelling up role but retains the New Deal at work job as well as being Shadow Deputy PM. She herself has compared the role to that of John Prescott. That is someone with working class roots, albeit by now distant ones. Blair a far more adept and competent leader than Starmer will ever be managed to peacefully co-exist with Prescott, more or less. We shall see if Starmer manages the same with Rayner in the next period.
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