Back in July 2023, Keir Starmer and Tony Blair appeared on stage together for the first time. “You’ve done an amazing job,” said Blair, who had sometimes been critical of the Labour leader. But he warned: “What you’re going to inherit next year is grim.”
As Starmer contends with a fraught political landscape, he has increasingly turned to figures from the Blair administration. Jonathan Powell, who was Downing Street chief of staff from 1997-2007 (making him the longest-serving Blair aide), has been appointed national security adviser – a recommendation first made to No 10 by Peter Mandelson. It was Powell, an expert on conflict resolution, who negotiated the recent deal for the UK to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.
“If the next presidential election throws up Trump, the relationship is likely to become much more challenging – but so it will be for everyone,” he wrote in an essay for the New Statesman last year. “A new government will have a chance to reinforce the relationship with the US institutionally before that happens and build up alternatives in Europe.”
Powell’s appointment was announced alongside that of Liz Lloyd, Blair’s former deputy chief of staff (from 2005-07), as director of policy delivery and innovation. In his memoir, Blair writes that she brought “order and discipline” and “had an excellent temperament too: lovely to work with, honest and, underneath all the English feminine charm, quite steely. Above all, capable.”
Then there is Blair’s former health secretary Alan Milburn, who has been named lead non-executive director of the Department of Health, and Mandelson, No 10’s preferred candidate to become US ambassador. The latter is close to Starmer’s team – when we spoke last month following Morgan McSweeney’s appointment as chief of staff, he praised his “brainpower, political depth, strategic thinking and courage”.
Could Mandelson yet become ambassador and Oxford University chancellor? Yes, some insist (the latter is a largely ceremonial role with fundraising a key duty – something aided by US connections).
Other key government figures from the Blair era include Pat McFadden, Starmer’s chief political fixer as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Matthew Doyle, No 10’s director of communications. Some on left and right will draw inevitable political conclusions from all of the above – but Starmer rejects such thinking. He has said privately: “I don’t know whether someone is a Blairite or Brownite. I wasn’t around at that time. I don’t think like that. I’m interested in whether they have experience and talent.”
Starmer, who only became an MP in 2015, sees no contradiction in hiring Blair-era figures while pursuing a policy agenda to the left of New Labour on workers’ rights, public ownership and infrastructure investment (and to its right on welfare spending). As Blair himself has observed, the world is a different place to 1997.
It’s also worth recalling the warning that Blair gave Starmer after he became Prime Minister. “The populist usually doesn’t invent a grievance, they exploit the grievance,” he told the Guardian. “If you want to close off their avenues for increasing support, you’ve got to deal with the grievance. That’s why Keir is absolutely right in saying you’ve got to have controls on immigration.”
This is something Labour is taking more seriously than ever following Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump. “Immigration can nuke a record, however good,” one government aide observed to me. Expect to hear much more on this subject in the months ahead.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: England’s revolt against change]
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