In the middle of an election campaign that Labour looks likely to win, how many of the shadow cabinet could you name? It currently has 31 members, but few are household names – beyond their own household. If you could make it to double figures you would be doing well.
Yet the surprising fact is that this is one of the most experienced shadow cabinets in recent political history. Keir Starmer only became an MP in 2015, but Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband, alongside five other junior shadow ministers, were cabinet ministers in the last Labour government.
How does this compare with previous eras? In 2010, David Cameron’s first coalition cabinet included two former ministers, Ken Clarke and William Hague. In Tony Blair’s 1997 cabinet, there were none. Margaret Beckett, who had been a parliamentary under-secretary in the 1970s, was the most experienced politician present. That was why the Conservatives went into the 1997 campaign arguing that “Bambi” Blair and his team were too inexperienced to be trusted. Many of Blair’s first full cabinet – including Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and Harriet Harman – subsequently became well known, partly because of their sheer durability. The latter four all sat around Brown’s final cabinet table in 2010.
Remarkably, Labour’s shadow team is, in many ways, more experienced than the actual cabinet. As successive Conservative party leaders have purged their predecessors’ allies and other ministers have resigned or been sacked, inexperience has become the new normal. Only four of the cabinet Boris Johnson appointed after winning the 2019 general election are still standing (a few others, including Rishi Sunak, were attending cabinet meetings in 2019 but were not formally members). On average, current cabinet ministers have been occupying their positions for 16 months: more than the shelf life of the lettuce that outlasted Liz Truss, at least, but not by much. In the four “great offices of state” – prime minister, chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary – the present incumbents have had – between them – less than 60 months of experience in the job. Their four Labour shadows have had nearly three times that.
Does any of this matter? Yes. Read the memoirs of any former minister, and one recurring theme is that it takes at least 18 months to master a new departmental brief, to decide what needs doing and how to do it. Several of Labour’s team will have a significant head start.
Miliband, notably, will be doing essentially the same job he did from 2008 to 2010, when, as the first secretary of state in the new Department of Energy and Climate Change, he developed the country’s first renewable energy strategy. Having already managed to secure £4.7bn of annual green investment in Labour’s manifesto, he will also be able to get going without having to first plead his case to the Treasury.
Cooper, as the incoming home secretary, has the right experience to get a good funding settlement for the police and the asylum backlog in Labour’s first spending review: she used to be chief secretary to the Treasury, and in charge of it. The five years John Healey spent as a junior Treasury minister in the mid-2000s will stand him in good stead too, as an incoming defence secretary seeking to raise the defence budget. And Benn, shadow Northern Ireland secretary, will embark on his task of smoothing relationships between politicians there. He will do so after seven years developing a reputation as a good listener and persuasive advocate as secretary of state for international development under Blair and environment secretary under Brown.
There is another lesson to be learned from the past. On 2 May 1997 Blair dropped eight of his cabinet into new roles, negating the departmental knowledge they had previously acquired as shadow ministers. If he becomes the new prime minister, Starmer will have the political authority to move anyone in the parliamentary Labour party into or out of any role he wants. But given the emphasis he has rightly placed on governing competently, he would be well advised to stick, rather than twist, and keep everyone in the roles they now occupy.
Experience, said Oscar Wilde, is the name we give to our mistakes. A Labour cabinet that can draw on the experience of Blair’s and Brown’s governments has had plenty of time to learn from its mistakes as well as its achievements. The new government will be the stronger for it.
Andrew Hindmoor is co-director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the author of Haywire: A Political History of Britain Since 2000
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