People who want to be MPs really want to be MPs. They are willing to try and try again: in the footnotes of the careers of many now-prominent politicians, one finds unsuccessful first tilts at parliament. Often, they spend years in pursuit of elected office; Liz Truss was at it for a decade before securing in 2010 the South West Norfolk seat she just lost. Years after defeat, many candidates can’t stop themselves from returning to the fray.
As this new parliament has been gradually sworn in, there’s been plenty of attention paid to the former MPs (Douglas Alexander, Emma Reynolds and Heidi Alexander, to name a few) returning to the Commons. But what about the almost-MPs of the past who have now made it too? In 2015 a whole raft of people with big profiles in the Labour Party, who were going to be the future, failed to make it to parliament. Losing in 2015 wasn’t like losing a snap election; it was months, in most cases years, of candidates’ lives. Some stood again in 2017 and won, but many of them sat out the Corbyn years, only returning to seek selection under Starmer. These people are now entering parliament for the first time. How will this class of 2015 come to influence the Starmer government?
There are some prominent names among this MPs-who-weren’t set. The new East Thanet MP Polly Billington, a former BBC journalist and aide to Ed Miliband, contested Thurrock in 2015 – then number two on the party’s target list – and lost by 536 votes. In Scotland, we have Melanie Ward, who just stood down as CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians and was previously David Miliband’s chief of staff at the International Rescue Committee. She lost the notionally safe seat of Glenrothes in the party’s 2015 Scottish wipeout, but has now won Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy. Jess Asato won in Lowestoft. She is a former adviser to Tessa Jowell who, as director of Progress in 2009, was listed as one of the Telegraph’s most influential left-wingers and was a great hope of the Labour right. Andrew Pakes, a former president of the National Union of Students, fought Milton Keynes South in 2015 and won Peterborough in 2024. Lucy Rigby and Uma Kumaran also fit into the cohort.
These representatives aren’t politically homogeneous, but as a group they tell a story about the recent life of the party – on its relationship with the charity sector, and on what it means to be a rising star in Labour politics. But they also demonstrate, collectively, how the party mainstream regarded Corbynism as an aberration, and Starmerism as a return to normality.
How this cohort, which was not politically formed by Starmerism (as they were already running for parliament before it existed), will adapt to the new regime remains to be seen. There were just 203 Labour MPs at the start of the last parliament, and there are 411 in this one; competition for front-bench jobs will be incredibly stiff. One of this group – the Solicitor General, Sarah Sackman – has made it into the ministerial ranks. The others will hope to join her. Asato (an Evening Standard rising star in 2013) would have been a bigger name upon election in 2015 than she is likely to be now; but for Ward, one of Time’s most influential people in health in 2024, the reverse is true.
Managing the thwarted ambitions of people who think they should be ministers but, because of the limited number of positions, can’t all be, will be one of the many challenges for Keir Starmer in keeping his Parliamentary Labour Party in line. And those who think they should have been MPs a decade ago may be more enthusiastic than most to see their ambitions fulfilled. They have catching up to do.
But whether it’s better or worse for your career, there remains something striking, on a human level, about getting what you aim for at a decade’s remove. How do people who were going to be the future ten years ago adjust to being part of the future now? Is being good at politics just about good timing? Do these MPs think of their peers as the new intake (many of whom are ten years or more their junior), or the intake they didn’t quite join in 2015?
Starmerism often tries to portray itself as a clean break. But you can’t build a party without strong foundations, and even the “changed Labour Party” now in power contains figures that remember past defeats. For the lost-and-found generation of 2015, this feeling is unusually vivid. Whether those formative experiences produce an ideological or factional cohort to be reckoned with in this parliament, however, is another question.
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