How important is the post of Labour general secretary?

A briefing war has broken out over the appointment of a key official to work with Keir Starmer to prepare the party for the next election, writes John Rentoul

Jennie Formby quit the role by ‘mutual agreement’ this week (PA)

The Labour Party is looking for a new general secretary after the resignation of Jennie Formby. An advert published yesterday invited candidates to submit applications by midnight on 14 May.

Meanwhile a row has broken out about the longlisting and shortlisting procedure, which suggests that the appointment will be the focus of a factional struggle over the next few weeks.

That in itself is a clue to the importance of the role. Although its holders are not household names (apart from the party’s first general secretary, Ramsay MacDonald, in 1900-12, who went on to become chairman of the parliamentary party and prime minister), they are the junction box for the hidden wiring holding the party together.

Larry Whitty, who served for nine years under Neil Kinnock and John Smith, did a great deal to create the machine that would deliver Tony Blair to power, although Tom Sawyer, another former trade union official, put the finishing touches to it in the early Blair years, 1994-98, including the first election victory.

Iain McNicol was an adroit enough operator to survive in post for seven years, mostly under Ed Miliband but including the first three years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. It was not until 2018 that Corbyn was able to secure the appointment of Formby, one of his supporters.

In my lifetime, the post has been held by a Corbynite (or, as they used to be called, Bennite) only twice. Jim Mortimer was general secretary at the time of Labour’s drubbing in the 1983 election. The high point of his tenure was when he told journalists, just before the election: “The unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the leader of the Labour Party and speaks for the party.”

Formby is a more impressive organiser, but her primary loyalty was to Jeremy Corbyn and his brand of politics, which is not the same as Keir Starmer’s. Hence the parting of the ways – by “mutual agreement”, as Starmer put it this week.

Before she went, Formby commissioned a report by fellow Corbyn-supporting officials into the party’s handling of complaints of antisemitism. When this was leaked, as was presumably always intended, it turned out to be a book-length account of how she and her leader were frustrated at every turn by scheming Labour staff who were opposed to Corbyn’s politics.

This looked like a parting shot, a score-settling magnum opus designed to be the primary source for a rewriting of history to show how Corbyn would have gotten away with winning the 2017 election if it hadn’t been for those meddling Blairites.

Now it turns out there is more. The Corbynites are not finished yet. Starmer can be confident of the support of a majority of the National Executive Committee (NEC) – the party’s ruling body between sessions of its annual conference, which appoints the general secretary (or, technically, which recommends an appointment to the annual conference). But the officers’ group, a smaller group that controls NEC business, is still in the hands of Corbyn supporters, and it has been accused in anonymous briefings to journalists of trying to “stitch up” the appointment of Formby’s successor. “There’s no way we can let the officers do the longlist and the shortlist. It’s totally outrageous,” one NEC member told HuffPost.

These are murky waters – the internal doings of parties often are – because in the end this decision is in the hands of the NEC majority, which is likely to deliver the candidate of Starmer’s choice, regardless of who draws up the shortlist.

The only question ought to be: whom should Starmer choose to deliver the most effective election-winning organisation over the next four years?