Nick Thomas-Symonds is most at home in Labour’s past. On his weekly commute to Westminster from Abersychan, a stilled cradle of heavy industry in the South Wales coalfield, the shadow home secretary drives past the childhood home of Roy Jenkins. No Welshman since Jenkins has run the Home Office in a Labour government for real. Should Keir Starmer lead Labour to victory at a general election, the next will come from the same valley.
The coincidence inevitably invites comparison, much of it too straightforward to resist. Is Thomas-Symonds a Jenkins for the 2020s? Starmer, after all, has likened himself to Harold Wilson. Both were born to sons of toil: Jenkins to a miner turned Labour MP; Thomas-Symonds to a steelworker. Both left home for Oxford as soon as they could. Each took firsts in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, as aspirant Cabinet ministers tend to do. Both wrote biographies of Clement Attlee before their election to Parliament, where both arrived young: Jenkins at 28; Thomas-Symonds at 34.
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