A little later than usual on this one, apologies, but I figured the reform conference and the reshuffle happening on the same weekend warrants a bit more attention given they’re two of the biggest events on the political calendar and it would be better to let all the balls in the air land before we begin with the haruspicy.
Shufflebored
By Adam Wren @G0ADM
Yvette Cooper: Home Secretary → Foreign Secretary
One of Labour’s most senior figures, Cooper is traditionally a home affairs heavyweight, moving her abroad could be read as Starmer wanting someone he trusts to handle global diplomacy, but it could also be a move to salvage her reputation. Polling right now suggests Labour are staring down a defeat at the next election, her seat is projected to go to Reform and there’s no more poisoned chalice in government right now than being the person in charge of the border.
Shabana Mahmood: Justice Secretary → Home Secretary
There’s no more difficult job right now than Home Secretary. The government is trapped between an electorate demanding deportations and an ideological commitment to human rights treaties that prevent them from happening. Whoever they put in the hot seat is bound to have an awful time. Mahmood is an interesting choice because her seat is basically already lost.
She held on by a hair at the last election, almost losing to Akhmed Yakoob, the Pakistani Saul Goodman running as an independent. By the time the next election rolls around they’re going to be much better mobilised and motivated, especially with Reform as a foil and Labour’s perceived failures on Gaza.
There have been some attempts to portray Mahmood as a hardliner, and there’s some truth to this, it was only a few months ago that she was floating chemical castration for paedophiles, a policy that sounds like it could have been stolen from UKIP. But the truth is that whatever her personal opinions, the government is trapped on immigration by legislation and it doesn’t particularly matter who occupies the Home Office unless they’re willing to amend it.
David Lammy: Foreign Secretary → Deputy Prime Minister
Lammy has been a high-profile voice at Foreign Affairs, and he’s certainly been enjoying the flights and banquets. His shift to Deputy PM is ambiguous. It boosts his status inside Cabinet but strips him of the big global stage. Angela Rayner, the outgoing Deputy PM, and former Corbyn outrider, held the position seemingly on a ‘keep your enemies closer’ basis. She was the biggest threat to Keir’s position, Lammy isn’t close to the same kind of threat.
I do wonder if he was given the position to mirror Vice President Vance, the two have apparently struck up an unlikely friendship and navigating the whims of Trump’s tariffs is going to be one of the great challenges of this government, maybe him holding an equivalent position to Vance with no other foreign responsibilities could help.
Jonathan Reynolds: Business and Trade → Chief Whip
The clearest demotion. Reynolds loses Business & Trade, a front-rank portfolio, for the behind-the-scenes discipline role. It could be read one of two ways:
Either Starmer values his loyalty and organisational skills and wants someone he believes to be competent and trustworthy when he attempts to face down his backbenchers again on spending cuts.
He’s fucked up. Reynolds has been regarded as one of the more competent ministers, which suggests his demotion might be something to do with his personal life. A bust up behind the scenes? An incoming scandal? His false claims at being a solicitor were months ago and are surely forgotten now.
Peter Kyle: Science and Technology → Business & Trade Secretary
A big promotion. Kyle has a reputation for pragmatism and is a good communicator. He was well regarded at DSIT, and it suggests Starmer wants a confident, media-friendly figure to sell Labour’s ‘growth agenda’. Though the problems Labour are facing down are structural: an intimidating budget deficit, and the announcement weeks ago that the UK now has nearly a million NEETs are not issues solved by slick communication, and it’s not clear that Kyle, a man whose CV is a long list of NGOs and charities and not a single private enterprise is the man for the job.
Liz Kendall → Science & Tech Secretary
A very curious appointment. Considering how constrained every other sector of our economy is, tech will be central for any growth that Labour attempts to squeeze out. Educated at Cambridge with a first in History, she built her career in public policy and social care rather than the private sector or technology.
She started at the Institute for Public Policy Research before becoming an adviser to Harriet Harman and later Patricia Hewitt where she was responsible for healthcare policies like the smoking ban. She led charities including the Maternity Alliance and the Ambulance Services Network. Elected MP for Leicester West, she held shadow roles in health and social care. After stepping back under Jeremy Corbyn, she returned to prominence under Keir Starmer, serving as Shadow Minister for Social Care, then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, before entering Cabinet in 2024 as Work and Pensions Secretary.
In the little leagues of junior ministerial roles, the standouts are:
Satvir Kaur, previously a council leader and made history as the first Sikh council leader. She introduced Keir Starmer at Labour’s conference in 2022 and has a focus on housing as a central priority has gone to the Cabinet Office.
Josh Simons, a former director of the think-tank Labour Together, holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from Harvard & also worked for Meta has also been welcomed to the Cabinet Office.
Simons to the cabient office is curious, given his seemingly natural fit for science and technology, where the junior appointment is Kanishka Narayan MP, a man that’s received some attention online for his CV: born in India and then moving to Cardiff before attending Eton, Oxford and Stanford and then joining the civil service.
There are plenty more casualties including Frederick Ponsonby, 4th Baron Ponsonby, who, as James Heale points out is likely to be the last ever hereditary peer to serve in a Labour government, but I don’t want to take up too much space.
Overall the reshuffle is significant, one of the largest postwar reorganisations and any failures here will certainly vindicate Farage’s announcement this week that ministers should have deep domain expertise and he’d appoint people to the Lords in order to bring them in if necessary.
Reform The Agenda
By Adam Wren @G0ADM
Speaking of Farage. I wrote in the Critic about my time at the Reform conference in Birmingham this weekend. In a nutshell my experience is that reform is really two parties in a trench coat.
It feels both boardroom and Benidorm, a place where you can find serious men in suits with heterodox opinions on tax and energy policy rubbing shoulders with punters in Union Jack bucket hats and flag capes sinking pints.
Most of the coverage focused on the main stage, Andrea Jenkyns in a sparkling jumpsuit singing an original song, Lucy Connolly, or the afterparty with a surprise appearance of the two remaining members of the Jackson 5.
The coverage of the camp daytime-TV vibe of the conference seems to be acting as a kind of camouflage for some of their more radical ideas.
At panels I heard discussions of completely rebuilding our energy grid and mix, how many civil servants need to be fired on day one, or how reform must be prepared to permanently crush the unions within 6 months of taking office in the likely event that a general strike is called.
The biggest mystery then, is why there was so little corporate presence. Reform are leading in the polls and as of today are projected to have a monster majority. They have a radical agenda, and yet not a single big business that would be impacted by these generational changes to tax, energy, and finance policies were present.
Do they think four years is too far away to call it? Or have they, like many mainstream journalists and commentators been fooled by the camp camouflage into thinking reform isn’t capable of delivery?
There were just a handful of stalls at the conference, the only one I recognised being the bullion company that was the focus of a media storm a few weeks ago over the revelation of how much they were paying Nigel to pose with gold coins.
The only notable corporate presence was a woman there representing Octopus Energy, who kept asking the same question at any panel on business policy - ‘How can reform help octopus become the UK’s first trillion-pound company?’
A fair question.
I didn’t hear any compelling responses that didn’t amount to ‘We’re going to bring in the right people and figure that out’ and so maybe therein lies the answer to their absence. I expect next year’s event to be much bigger as the runway to government shortens, and corporations start taking them seriously.
I think that’s what reform wanted this event to be, hence ‘the next step’ as the tagline and the choice to host the event at an enormous exhibition space which, given their difficulty in filling it, clearly has not been taken yet.
I was hoping with this week’s letter I’d be able to contrast the cabinet reshuffle with whatever policies could be squeezed out of the Reform conference, but the only big announcements were that Zia is now head of policy and will be putting together a ‘small, elite team’ and that Farage intends to fill up to half the cabinet with Lords drawn from private enterprise that have the necessary experience, and will therefore know what to do.
Working in defence, I’m reminded of the decades of discussions that have been had about the merits of the defence chief being former military or not.
On the one hand, it’s an optics win to have someone that knows which way to point the rifle, but extracting someone from a hierarchy they’ve spent decades ascending -making plenty of friends, and enemies, along the way- comes with a host of problems, particularly in areas where they’re now in charge of procurement.
Overall my impression was that reform doesn’t have to decide whether it want to be the party of government or a party in the pub, it has more than enough energy to do both. The members were having a great time, they loved the music, the merch, and seeing the GB news celebrities.
The Journalists were happy to write about the bar opening early and the camp luminescent sparkle of the daytime TV aesthetic meant they didn’t have to go slumming it with the members for material to fill out their 400 words.
The most concerned people could be found sitting on the panels. Their main fears being that reform aren’t going to go far enough, are underestimating the challenges they will face from ‘the blob’, that the left are still very well funded and might reenergise under Sultana/Polanksi, or that “the best people for the job” turn out to be old chums of Nigel.
All valid concerns, but Reform is undeniably progressing, and many attendees were thrilled with the direction. They just need to take another ‘next step’, and another after that.