Sir Keir Starmer has warned cabinet colleagues to be sceptical about core principles of the New Labour era including globalisation and immigration — while also quietly filling his administration with figures who served under Tony Blair.
The prime minister wrote a memo to his cabinet saying that the public are “hungry for change and disruption”.
In the letter, seen by the Financial Times, he repudiates ideas associated with Blairism, including the concept that “globalisation held all the answers”, an alleged “complacency” about the role of the market, and the idea that immigration is “an untrammelled good”.
Yet at the same time, Starmer has turned to vastly experienced hands from the New Labour period to help him deliver what he insists must be a “disruptive” agenda.
Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, tells colleagues he wanted to create a blend of “youth and experience” to dig the government out of a hole and to create a “strong strategic centre” for the prime minister.
The remarkable New Labour comeback began in earnest after McSweeney, architect of Starmer’s election win, replaced Sue Gray as the Number 10 chief of staff last October. “He wanted to bring good people in very quickly,” said one ally of the Irish strategist.
Return of New Labour gang
Matthew Doyle
director of communications
Labour’s head of press under Blair, Doyle later went on to work for the former Labour prime minister after he left Number 10 in 2007. Hired by Starmer shortly after the low point of Labour’s Hartlepool by-election defeat in 2021, he now runs Downing Street’s comms.
Michael Ellam
EU sherpa and international economy adviser
A highly regarded Treasury official, Ellam was picked by Gordon Brown to run his Number 10 media operation. Recently chair of public sector banking at HSBC, Ellam will lead Britain’s EU “reset” negotiation and is Starmer’s principal adviser on global economic issues.
The scale of the Blair revival is striking. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, is now Starmer’s national security adviser, while Liz Lloyd, deputy chief of staff in Downing Street from 2005-07, oversees domestic policy in Number 10.
Meanwhile, Lord Peter Mandelson, architect of Blair’s election triumphs, has the top diplomatic role of UK ambassador to the US, while Claire Reynolds, Starmer’s political director, smoothed party relations for Blair.
Douglas Alexander, the trade minister who prepped Blair for prime minister’s questions, was this month given a new Cabinet Office role, where he joins the influential Pat McFadden, Blair’s former political secretary.
Matthew Doyle, Labour’s head of press under Blair, is Starmer’s director of communications, while Katie Martin, chief press officer in Gordon Brown’s Number 10, is chief of staff to chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Starmer has also turned to Brown’s former press secretary Michael Ellam, a highly rated ex-Treasury official, to act as his civil service “sherpa” in EU reset talks.
Return of New Labour gang
Liz Lloyd
Director of policy, delivery and innovation
Blair’s deputy chief of staff, she is now delivering domestic policy for Starmer. Described by a colleague as “low ego but incredibly effective”. Highly successful at avoiding the limelight, Lloyd is often portrayed in newspaper profiles as a dark silhouette.
Peter Mandelson
Ambassador to Washington
Given arguably the most demanding job in British foreign policy, was chosen by Starmer to try to keep Britain out of President Trump’s crosshairs. Along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Mandelson is seen as a key architect of the New Labour revolution.
Mandelson attributes the return of the New Labour gang to the fact that the party “lost a generation of people” — a cohort of advisers who served under the unsuccessful Labour leaders Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn during 14 years of opposition.
Powell quips to colleagues that while McSweeney wants to blend youth and experience, “we managed with youth last time”. He was 38 when he started working for Blair and is 68 now. Mandelson, newly installed in Washington, is 71 and jokes about his discounted rail travel.
Blair’s government operated in a different era. Powell likes to tell colleagues how the former prime minister was sent on a computer course in Newcastle but the computer just sat in the corner gathering dust. “We got him a mobile phone but he couldn’t answer it — he had to get his protection officers to do it,” he told friends.
But John McTernan, another Blair-era veteran, said experience counts and that the arrival of older heads around Starmer have helped to stabilise his operation after a chaotic first six months in office, providing a solid platform for a political fightback.
“Politics isn’t like football,” he said. “People don’t lose their legs. You need experience. In the initial phase of the government there were far too few political operators. That has been corrected by Morgan in all kinds of ways.”
Return of New Labour gang
Katie Martin
Chief of staff, Rachel Reeves
Head of press in Gordon Brown’s Number 10, Martin was hired by Reeves in 2021 as her chief of staff. Influential and the gateway for business to the chancellor, after No 10 Martin took a masters at Harvard.
Pat McFadden
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
A powerful player in the Starmer administration, the quietly spoken Scot pulls the strings from the Cabinet Office. Admired for his toughness by successive Labour leaders, McFadden was Blair’s political director, charged with keeping Labour MPs and unions sweet.
Labour MPs say the New Labour crew has helped to stabilise things after the chaotic start that saw the team split into rival factions, and there was no functioning “grid” of government announcements.
But the government remains deeply unpopular with approval ratings in a YouGov poll down to just 14 per cent. “Starmer has brought in good people — it’s necessary but not sufficient,” said a Blair ally.
Some Labour veterans warn that Starmer still lacks serious economic clout in Number 10. “That will become very apparent in the spending review, when ministers keep going to the PM asking him to help them out against the Treasury,” said one former Downing Street insider. “It’s going to be bloody.”
McSweeney has told friends the Downing Street overhaul was meant to rebuild confidence in the ability of government to “change people’s lives” but ultimately it is up to Starmer and his cabinet to set the political direction and pace.
Starmer’s note to the cabinet and special advisers, dated February 15, was a warning that the old world that Blair once operated in had gone, along with the “comfy elite world view” that globalisation and immigration were essentially good things.
Urging his political operation to embrace radical reform, he said: “If governments are not changing the system in favour of working people, then voters will find someone else who does.”
Return of New Labour gang
Jonathan Powell
National security adviser
Blair’s chief of staff from 1995 until 2007, Powell is described by colleagues as a diplomatic “Rolls-Royce”, who helped to broker the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. His recent efforts to negotiate a deal on the Chagos islands have been more controversial.
Claire Reynolds
Political director
The former director of Labour Women’s Network, Reynolds has the key role of managing Starmer’s relations with his party. She performed a similar role for Blair. “She is brilliant, very effective,” says a former No 10 colleague. Married to business secretary Jonathan Reynolds.
It is notable that Blair has in recent years become an advocate of artificial intelligence and its disruptive power, but Starmer recognises the government also needs an injection of youth. “People for whom TikTok is a first language, not a learned language,” as McTernan put it.
A reshuffle this summer is widely predicted, giving Starmer the chance to match his “disrupters” rhetoric with some new political faces or — as he puts it — people capable of putting “pedal to metal on wholesale reform and change of our politics and our country”.
One Labour MP said: “A few things have moved in the right direction, but things are still bad. The reshuffle needs to bring in the risk takers and rule breakers and move out the risk avoiders.”