The Return of the Blairites: Why Keir Starmer should tap into Labour’s past

The prime minister may not be New Labour by instinct, but he has proved to be ruthless – and willing to learn from his party’s past success, John Rentoul writes

The most striking of the comments from Sue Gray’s anonymous detractors before her departure from No 10 was this: “If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know.”

It was at that point that the departure of Keir Starmer’s first chief of staff became inevitable – indeed, it duly followed two weeks later.

Of all the necessary fictions maintained by Labour during the election campaign, the pretence that it was “ready for government” was the most overlooked. The party was more surprised than it pretended to be by Rishi Sunak calling an early election. Most shadow ministers assumed that they had the whole summer to get themselves organised.

The best-prepared of Starmer’s incoming cabinet was Ed Miliband – unsurprisingly, because he and Hilary Benn were the only ones who had served as secretaries of state in the last Labour government. His plan to decarbonise electricity generation may be unworkable, but a lot of work had gone into it, and he was best placed among his colleagues to deploy the cliche about “hitting the ground running” after the election.

However, most of his colleagues scrambled to hit the ground reviewing, consulting and wondering what had just hit them.

They were not helped by a No 10 operation that seemed underpowered and ineffective, supporting a prime minister unsuited to the speed of decision-making required.

One of Starmer’s strengths, however, is that when he makes mistakes, he tries to learn from them and to put things right. It was painful for him to realise that appointing Gray as his chief of staff – which seemed like a coup at the time, not least because poaching her from the civil service so annoyed the Conservatives – had been a mistake. She was too much like him: a bureaucrat rather than a politician.

But Starmer has a political side too and acted ruthlessly, replacing her with Morgan McSweeney, a campaigner who is focused on winning the next election.

Now Starmer is also making other personnel decisions that he should have made before he came to power. He is bringing back Blairites who have a deep understanding of one of the most successful periods of government in recent history.

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, was appointed on Friday as national security adviser. He was immediately attacked by the Conservatives as the negotiator who had “given away” the Chagos islands, although it was the Tory government that accepted the rule of international law and started the talks in the first place.

More significant is the depth of his experience at the heart of No 10, at Blair’s side for the entire decade of his premiership, including peace in Northern Ireland and war in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also important is the return of Liz Lloyd, Blair’s deputy chief of staff, as director of policy delivery and innovation in No 10. She worked with Michael Barber, who is also back in No 10, in his case for one day a week. He was head of the prime minister’s delivery unit in Blair’s second term, one of the most copied public service reform projects in the world.

The critical issue of “delivery” is the NHS, and Lloyd and Barber in No 10, allied with Wes Streeting, advised by his predecessor Alan Milburn in the Department of Health, and armed with a decent funding settlement from the Treasury, are beginning to look like a team that can get waiting lists down.

Blair himself didn’t get it right straight away. He is often quite harsh on his record in his first term when he comes to talk to my students at King’s College London, saying that he wasted a lot of time thinking he was making decisions but discovering that little was actually happening. It took him a long time to get to grips with what Barber calls “deliverology”, and it is a shame that Starmer wasted four months when the Blairite crew, who learned the lessons the hard way, could have been brought in from the start.

Still, they are in there now, and cabinet ministers took part in an “away day” on Friday to discuss “sharpening up” the five missions of Labour’s manifesto. Apparently the prime minister is about to launch a document on “priorities for change”, known internally as “P4C”. With any luck, it will whittle down the five missions to two: living standards and waiting lists.

Meanwhile, Peter Mandelson and David Miliband are leading candidates to be our ambassador to the US, possibly to be decided in the next few days. Even Nigel Farage, who has ruled himself out of the job, praised Lord Mandelson on Friday: “He’s an intelligent figure who knows his brief well, as I saw when he worked with the European Commission. While I’m not certain he’s the ideal fit for dealing with Trump directly, his intellect would at least command respect.”

There will be many excessively online opinionators who will complain that bringing back the hated Blairites from decades past is hardly the “change” that Starmer promised. They are wrong. Bringing about real change, as Starmer now understands, requires deep experience in the tedious grind of deliverology, and he is right to bring in people who have done it successfully before.