Rural affairs don’t tend to be the biggest draw for Labour governments. But Environment Secretary Steve Reed may be counting on a personal trump card to win his department a better deal.
He has an old friend, Labour’s election mastermind Morgan McSweeney, now installed not far away across Whitehall on a mission to end the dysfunction, infighting and hostile briefing that has disfigured Sir Keir Starmer’s first 100 days as PM.
Their back-story is a prime example of the close relationships — both political and personal — that proliferate in the shifting deck of cards that has produced Labour’s first winning hand in 14 years. But it’s in the brutal nature of governing that those relationships will be sorely tested in the months and years to come, starting very soon.
That’s because, given the financial “black hole” she claims to have inherited from the Tories, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is warning of tough choices coming down the track in her first budget at the end of this month.
“Even more than other political organisations, Labour’s built on friendships, shared histories, previous working relationships and family relationships,” one party insider said.
“Steve and Morgan go back a long way. But I’d like to think all the Cabinet members have strong relations with the PM and Morgan,” they said. Asked if those relations risk turning sour now that Ms Reeves’ hard choices are bearing down, the source said: “It doesn’t feel like we’re in that space — yet.”
The Reeves sisters have stayed close on their way up
The Chancellor herself is married to Nick Joicey, the second permanent secretary in Mr Reed’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Her sister is another MP, Ellie Reeves, chairwoman of the Labour Party and wife of the newly ennobled former MP John Cryer (who’s just been named a government whip in the House of Lords).
The Reeves sisters have stayed close on their way up. That’s not exactly the case for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and his elder brother David, who is still nursing the wounds of Labour’s fratricidal leadership battle in 2010.
The man who came third in that race, Ed Balls, is married to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (who reportedly once shared a house with Ed Miliband). Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was in an on-off relationship with Sam Tarry, who stood down as the Labour MP for Ilford South in the July election after he was de-selected in favour of Jas Athwal (the self-declared champion of tenants’ rights whose properties were found to be ridden with mould and ants).
Ms Rayner, the housing and communities secretary, and her then-boyfriend benefited from the hospitality of wealthy Labour donor Lord Alli when he lent them his New York apartment for the New Year.
The TV mogul’s largesse has stoked some of the early scandals for Sir Keir’s government, throwing a spotlight on the patchwork of alliances at the top — both the strength they give the new government, and the possible ways they could undermine it.
Then there are the children of Labour grandees. Northern Ireland Secretary Hillary Benn (a constituency neighbour of the Chancellor in Leeds) is the son of the Left’s old champion Tony Benn. Georgia Gould, the new MP for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale, is the daughter of the late Lord Gould, a leading architect of Sir Tony Blair’s (Islington-headquartered) New Labour project.
Every party has its cliques
Every party has its cliques. The “Notting Hill set” centred on David Cameron and George Osborne was for years the policymaking heart of Conservatism, and many Tory seats have been handed from father to son (and more recently to daughter) down the years.
Morgan McSweeney doesn’t have old party roots. He’s not even from the UK. To examine the Irishman’s place in the current Labour tribe, we have to go back nearly 20 years, to Lambeth. Mr Reed has become the leader of the capital’s worst-run borough, where the British National Party is making worrying inroads.
Enter Mr McSweeney, a driven young man who, after moving to London aged 17, has been working his way up as a Labour Party organiser and relishes the chance to now work with the future Cabinet secretary in shuffling the Far-right BNP out of existence as an electoral threat.
It could be handy, then, for the Defra boss to have his old mucker newly installed in 10 Downing Street, in place of Sue Gray.
Mr Reed, the MP for distinctly un-rural Streatham and Croydon North, could be said to form a Labour Gang of London also consisting of David Lammy, Wes Streeting and Sir Keir himself. (A younger Labour MP in London is Liam Conlon, representing Beckenham and Penge. He happens to be Ms Gray’s son.)
Mr McSweeney meanwhile faces a long weekend commute. He’s married to Imogen Walker, the new Labour MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley in Scotland who has already started on the ministerial ladder as a parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor.
Labour’s election victory was also engineered by Pat McFadden, a softly-spoken but deadly effective, and increasingly prominent, Scot representing Wolverhampton South East. From further north there’s a Manchester Mafia in the Cabinet comprising Lisa Nandy, Lucy Powell and Jonathan Reynolds.
Mr McSweeney’s brief is to sort out the misfiring politics, and the wobbly communications
But it’s the geography of No10 that has posed the more immediate test for Sir Keir. In any office setup, proximity to power matters. In the confusing warren of rooms that comprises the nerve centre of authority in Britain, your location matters extraordinarily.
And so does your standing on the pay scale. So if your biggest rival is not just shifting your desk further away from the boss (as it’s alleged Ms Gray was doing to Mr McSweeney) but also getting paid more than both you and him, you might feel aggrieved, and push back.
After a troubled Labour conference, where post-election euphoria was noticeably absent, there’s no doubt that Sir Keir has acted with ruthlessness in evicting the woman who did more than anyone to train his people in the machinery of government.
Mr McSweeney’s brief is to sort out the misfiring politics, and the wobbly communications, of No10 to ensure that the PM doesn’t turn into a busted flush so soon into what is meant to be a decade-long project of national renewal.
But it’s said that Ms Rayner had an ally in Ms Gray and there are once again mutterings about a “boys’ club” surrounding Sir Keir, even if he also promoted two highly effective backroom women as deputies to Mr McSweeney, and a third to be his go-between with the Civil Service.
And it wasn’t Sue Gray who decided it was a good idea for the incoming PM to take tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of suits and designer glasses courtesy of Lord Alli, just as Labour prepares to end universal winter fuel payments for pensioners. (The peer was given a No10 pass for a few weeks, which the freebie-loving Boris Johnson, with customary chutzpah, says looks “greedy” and “corrupt”. Labour insists Lord Alli was there solely to advise the new Government, and sought no benefits in return.)
Transport Secretary Louise Haigh says there are “bound to be missteps” in the infancy of a new administration. A former Labour official who played a key role in the election campaign conceded that the Sue Gray controversy had been allowed to become a distraction under a rookie PM.
“And it’s Morgan’s skill set to drive the agenda every day in terms of media moments, narrative, social and digital media,” the source said. “That’s where we were for two years before the election, and where we need to get back to.”
