by Atul Hatwal

Have they put something in the tea at shadow cabinet meetings?

Because they seem to be a team transformed – in work ethic at least.

Despite doubts about Labour’s strategic positioning on the big issues, Ed Miliband’s new shadow secretaries of state have set about their task with a vigour not seen for months.

The days when Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander gazed down on their colleagues from a distant summit appear to be past. Instead there is a genuine competition across the top ten with any and all capable of mounting a challenge for top spot.

Jon Trickett’s herculean 162 written questions – a league record for a single month – ensure that he is clearly in first place for November.

From this avalanche of questions, Trickett should be able to unearth some useful stories. But almost regardless of what he achieves with the answers, the process will have been worthwhile.

The time taken to respond to this volume of questioning will have tied departmental staff down for days.

Tipping a bag of sand into the government machinery like this might not grab the big headlines, but if replicated every month, across the frontbench, it would go some way to redressing the massive research advantage the civil service gives the government over the opposition.

Below Jon Trickett, there are three stand-out performances in a keenly contested top ten – Caroline Flint, Liam Byrne and Peter Hain.

Following on from her impressive start on the energy and climate change brief, Caroline Flint is giving a good impression of the complete shadow minister. She has continued to pepper the department with questions and most importantly, started to convert research pressure into press stories.

Her PQs on the government’s cuts to feed-in-tariffs wheedled an admission out of the government that they are going to leave customers who had installed solar panels, in the lurch. The subsequent press release was that rarest of stories for an opposition –proactively generated.

Driving the news agenda is extremely difficult from the opposition benches. Government has all the power and when ministers make policy, people listen. It’s not like that for the shadow cabinet. The media are broadly uninterested in what most of them have to say, most of the time, unless it’s a split.

The normal fayre for the opposition is reactive comment, giving a quote about a government mistake and hoping that it gets reported.

If Caroline Flint can continue combining parliamentary and press activity as effectively in the coming months, then Chris Huhne’s tenure at DECC might be threatened by something other than the CPS.

Liam Byrne has jumped into the top ten after languishing in the bottom five most previous months. The extent to which his role leading the national policy review has taken his time is evident in the rebound in activity on his departmental brief in the past month.

45 written questions and a press release per week tell a story of a shadow minister who is now back doing the day job.

Liam Byrne is patently one of Labour’s most talented performers. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is one of the key political battlegrounds. But for most of this year, Ian Duncan Smith has had an absent opponent and one of Labour’s prospective stars has been deployed away from the frontline.

The national policy review is clearly important for the future of the party, but was it worth giving the Tories a pass on work and pensions? Did it require a shadow cabinet member like Liam Byrne to work on it virtually full time? And if it was that type of role, then why wasn’t there a contingency for shadowing DWP?

The leadership of both main parties is populated by former political advisers – Ed Miliband, David Cameron, Ed Balls, George Osborne and Liam Byrne to name but a few. Two of the defining characteristics of a good adviser are that they look after the detail for their boss and they never turn down extra work.

It seems old habits die hard.

One of the lessons of front rank politics is that there is no such thing as a successful politician-adviser. The choice is between being a politician or an adviser, both are full time jobs in their own right. For the party’s sake, hopefully Byrne can demonstrate his ability as the former.

Peter Hain posts the third of the notable performances this month. For the first time in the league, Hain has moved out of the bottom four and into the top ten. The reason? For the first time he has started asking written parliamentary questions.

Until November, Peter Hain had asked a grand total of four written questions this year. Then last month it all changed. 46 questions later, the Welsh office does not know what’s hit it. Hain remains the only member of the shadow cabinet who steadfastly refuses to issue his press releases as shadow secretary of state through the party press office, but by finally asking PQs, Hain has transformed his position.

As one of the shadow cabinet’s more active and able media performers, Peter Hain’s parliamentary inaction has always been anomalous. With a balance of action in parliament and in the press, the weakest Tory link in the cabinet, Cheryl Gillan, should now begin to feel the pressure of proper scrutiny.

It’s still early days for this new shadow cabinet. But the signs are encouraging.  If Peter Hain is asking parliamentary questions and Liam Byrne is devoting his full energy to his portfolio then things have changed.

In briefs that had been long neglected, like energy and climate change and Northern Ireland, new shadow ministers are busy pressuring the departments that had previously been virtually unaccountable.

This reinvigorated approach could just be driven by the enthusiasm of the new team. More likely though, given the scale of change, it’s down to some active management from the top.

If this is the case, Ed Miliband deserves credit.  Being able to get the most out of your team is a test of leadership. And even if this column disagrees with some of the leader’s strategic choices, properly harnessing the talents at his disposal is a positive and the party dearly needs those at the moment.

Atul Hatwal is associate editor at Uncut.

Tags: Atul Hatwal, Caroline Flint, Liam Byrne, Peter Hain, Shadow Cabinet

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