Labour’s reshuffle: a winning team?
“Who knew that Keir Starmer was capable of such ruthlessness?” said Robert Hutton in The Critic. The Labour leader launched a shake-up of his top team this week that was notable both for its scale and for its timing, which seemed calculated to undermine his deputy and rival Angela Rayner. News of the reshuffle emerged just hours after she had told an interviewer that she was not aware of any such plans, and at the precise moment she had begun delivering a much-trailed speech on standards in public life. The reshuffle was partly a tidying-up exercise, clearing out some extraneous shadow cabinet jobs that have proliferated in the recent year, such as the Young People and Democracy brief. But it was also used to install some of the party’s big hitters, such as Yvette Cooper – who returns as shadow home secretary – in key front-bench roles.
It’s about time, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Labour has for too long failed to field its best team. Cooper is sure to be more effective at taking her Tory counterpart Priti Patel to task than her predecessor Nick ThomasSymonds, who never made much of an impact. Picking Lisa Nandy to shadow Michael Gove’s “Levelling Up” brief is another smart move. As the MP for Wigan and a champion of northern towns, Nandy is well placed to take full advantage of this role. David Lammy, a “passionate and articulate defender of human rights”, is also a promising choice as shadow foreign secretary. Starmer’s team is finally beginning to resemble “a governmentin-waiting”.
The appointments certainly look good on paper, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. Whether they pay off in practice, though, is another matter. Starmer might have been wiser to let Cooper remain as chair of the home affairs select committee, a role in which she has proved “a very effective opponent of the Government”, rather than reinstalling her in a post where, under Ed Miliband, her record was more mixed. Her then opposite number, after all, succeeded in becoming not just the longest-serving home secretary of modern times, but also PM. It will take more than just a “change of personnel” to make Labour electable again, said The Times. The party needs to win back the voters’ trust in areas such as defence, security and education, and to distance itself from what Tony Blair described last week as “the wokeism of a small but vocal minority”. That last task will bring Starmer into further conflict with the Labour Left, but this week’s reshuffle suggests he’s up for the fight. “British politics will be the better for it.”