The question I hear most from Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs is: who will be Labour’s next leader? Yet the question that Labour’s activists ask me more than any other is: who will be picked as shadow chancellor? They think, rightly, that the appointment will shape the next leadership’s political positioning in a far more profound way than whoever emerges from the deputy leadership contest.
The next Labour leader – rather like the Prime Minister – faces two constraints in picking the role. The first is political – your ability to pick your preferred shadow chancellor rests on your own internal power and the scale of your mandate – and the second, equally importantly, is about personnel: your chancellor-designate actually needs to be able to do the job, one of the most difficult roles in both government and opposition.
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