by Rob Marchant
A Labour government. Let’s first just take a moment to savour those words.
Having sat in the Strangers Gallery just over a year ago and somewhat despaired as to the overall quality of the front bench, it looks to me that Starmer seems to have made a pretty good fist of delivering his first Cabinet.
The four Great Offices of State are unchanged from their Shadow incarnation: Starmer, Reeves, Lammy and Cooper. Reeves was brought in as a welcome safe pair of hands, with genuinely relevant career experience, to the Shadow Chancellor role after Anneliese Dodds’s unremarkable year in it, and has been well received since then. Cooper is a seasoned and respected politician, with Cabinet experience and five years of Home Affairs exposure chairing the Select Committee. Lammy we’ll come back to.
At the next level, Reynolds, Kendall, Healey, Phillipson, Kyle are all solid appointments. And Rayner’s appointment to Levelling Up, Housing and Communities seems to play to her strengths and interests. As expected, previous Cabinet experience has been pulled in wherever possible, to shore up a top table of many faces new to government; Hilary Benn has been brought back into the fold from committee-chairing, and a pleasant surprise has been the immediate deployment of “New Labour old lags” Douglas Alexander and Jacqui Smith as Ministers of State, alongside Ed Miliband, Pat McFadden and Yvette Cooper as full Cabinet members.
The less-good news: after a whole weekend of dithering, Anneliese Dodds has been given the Women and Equalities portfolio, despite having managed to anger numerous pro-women campaigners, including J K Rowling, with her clearly Stonewall-influenced views on gender recognition and conversion therapy, and will now be attending Cabinet, although not as a Secretary of State. One wonders whether no-one else wanted it, as a poison chalice; either way – in light of the new Prime Minister’s recently being forced into uncomfortable declarations regarding women’s toilets, contradicting Bridget Phillipson’s own the previous week – it is a tone-deaf appointment.
Meanwhile, women’s affairs being subsumed into Phillipson’s Education portfolio, breaking a manifesto promise that it would have its own department, presents less than ideal optics to women’s organisations on their importance to the new government. Monday’s Twitter has been aflame with the burns of disappointed women on Starmer and Dodds, and not without good reason.
