New New Labour’s Mr Aspirational

A Job Centre machine had been installed right outside James Purnell’s office. It’s one of the Department of Work and Pensions’s new toys, matching up some of Britain’s 1.6 million unemployed with its 638,000 vacancies. But why this device should be outside the desk of the Minister for Pensions is unclear. ‘It is rather ominous,’ he says, patting it. ‘This wasn’t there last week.’

Ask anyone in Westminster to name the rising stars under Prime Minister Brown, and Mr Purnell’s name is routinely offered. He is young, articulate, laid-back and relatively unknown. The last point is especially important. Mr Brown wants to give his government a mixture of experience and novelty, so he wants to appoint some people the public have never heard of. Mr Purnell will be one of the key players in Labour’s campaign for renewal before the election.

The irony is that he was around the Blairite gang long before the days of New Labour — due to a mixture of being good at golf and bad at law. As a student at Balliol in 1990 he applied for work for shadow Cabinet members and had offers from Martin O’Neill and Tony Blair. ‘I hadn’t heard of Tony Blair at all,’ he says. ‘But I was playing golf with my friend Tim Allan, who said, “Go for Blair, he’s the coming man”.’ So Mr Purnell spent the summer squeezed in Mr Blair’s tiny office, given an upturned bin to use as his desk.

He was rejected from law school the next year, but returned as Mr Blair’s fulltime researcher and found himself put to use by Mr Brown. ‘If you worked for one of them, you worked for the other too,’ he says. ‘They were interwoven.’ He left Labour after the 1992 election, then worked in various roles with the IPPR think tank, with the BBC, with Islington Council and latterly as a special adviser in No.