Will Keir Starmer keep David Lammy on as foreign secretary? That sort of question would not normally be at all relevant until about midday on the day after an election, but the result has become such a foregone conclusion that everything has sped up. The Labour leader was today asked whether Lammy would go into the Foreign Office after the election, given there have been persistent rumours that he won’t.
Starmer replied that:
I’m not going to be lured through your question into naming cabinet if we get that far. But I’m absolutely clear that we will return to stability and ensure that we have the right people in the right place and they’re getting on with the job and not being chopped and changed every few months, because that has been so bad in terms of delivery for this country and it has put investors off putting their money into this country. That has been very, very bad for our economy.
He pointed out that portfolios like housing and justice, where there are quite visible crises, have had nearly a dozen ministers holding them in 14 years.
He is undoubtedly right that too many reshuffles are bad for good government, but it is also a point that incoming prime ministers often make. David Cameron was one of them, and by the time he had finished in office, he had contributed four housing ministers to that tally. He didn’t want to have lots of reshuffles, but ended up having to do them anyway. Some of those changes were for reasons out of his control: someone elsewhere in government resigning unexpectedly, a sacking, and so on. But others were because Cameron felt ministers weren’t performing well in certain roles, and that he needed to bring on new talent in the Conservative party. The latter wasn’t just something he wanted to do because he cared about encouraging the next generation of politicians: it was also a tool of party management.
If you leave bright and ambitious people on the backbenches for too long, they tend to cause your government trouble, either by being bitter and resentful or because they end up doing incredibly inconvenient things like actually reading legislation and trying to scrutinise the government rather than sucking up to it.
Starmer will have the same considerations. Not all of the shadow ministers are the very best the Labour party will have to offer after the election. There are going to be some very talented new MPs who want to get going with contributing to a Labour government as quickly as possible – and who won’t be blind to the possibility that they’re better qualified and more able than some of the ministers who are in place largely because they were among the few people who stuck with Labour during its wilderness years. They won’t need to be promoted immediately, and neither should they be, but the pressure will grow on Starmer to make the most of his new generation of talented MPs.
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