Darren Jones: ‘Labour will reform, not splurge’

This time next year, Darren Jones could very well be deciding how your tax money is spent. As shadow chief Treasury secretary, his days are spent having difficult discussions with would-be Labour ministers and explaining that it would be hard for them to spend any more than the Tories already are. If Labour wants to change Britain, the party will have to rely on reform rather than cash. This message would be a theme of Keir Starmer’s government, in which it is assumed Jones would be a key player.

In his office, Jones, who is 37, has a framed front page proclaiming Labour’s 1997 election victory. Next to it hangs a picture of the Bristol council house he grew up in. He didn’t have ‘much of a view’ about Labour’s victory at the time (he was ten) but he now says it changed his life, because it was a New Labour policy which took him from one of the worst-performing schools in England (Bristol’s Portway Community School) and put him on the fast track.

‘It was the Gifted and Talented programme which plucked people like me out of the system and gave us opportunities to go to university, which no one in my family had done before,’ he says. ‘And the national minimum wage had a huge impact on my family. So I’ve got that sense of debt to the last Labour government.’ And to Blairites in particular: Brownites resented the Gifted and Talented scheme (an initiative which identified young and gifted individuals ‘significantly ahead of their year group’, who then received enhanced educational opportunities). Ed Balls regarded it as elitist and abolished it in 2010. By that time, Jones was moving from law to politics.

Elected to Bristol North West in 2017, Jones rose to prominence as chair of the House of Commons business and trade committee, grilling his subjects for the cameras with theatrical flourish.