Meet the Curveballs in Starmer’s Cabinet

The good, the bad and the ugly.

by Simon Childs

12 July 2024

Richard Hermer. Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street
Richard Hermer. Lauren Hurley/No 10 Downing Street

Amid a sea of predictable faces, Keir Starmer’s first week in office has seen some surprising ministerial appointments, with peerages handed out as some non-MPs take over offices of state.

The freshly-minted prime minister’s allies are calling it the “government of all the talents”, a technocratic prioritising of competence over loyalty (bad luck, Emily Thornberry). Others suggested there were political calculations, a strategy to “take the air out of [the left’s] balloon”, as the Sunday Times put it, with some choice progressive appointments.

Will they deliver, or will they simply be the liberal faces of some very bad policies? Here’s your guide to some of the more surprising of Starmer’s appointments.

Richard Hermer KC – attorney general.

Labour lost five seats to pro-Palestine candidates, while Jess Phillips and Wes Streeting avoided a similar fate by a few hundred votes each.

This may explain Starmer’s choosing Richard Hermer KC as attorney general over Emily Thornberry, despite only one being an elected MP.

Hermer is a Jewish lawyer who has spoken out against Israeli war crimes. He advised the Labour frontbench last year when the Conservative government tried to ban boycotts of Israeli goods, saying that the legislation could breach international law. This led to a hit piece from the rightwing community newspaper the Jewish Chronicle, which reported on Hermer’s “pro-Palestine activist past”. 18 senior Jewish lawyers, including a former JC chairman, then slammed the JC’s “dangerous and foolish” attack on their colleague.

Columnist Danny Finkelstein has written – for the Jewish Chronicle, no less – that Hermer’s appointment means Zionists will have to engage in a “nuanced public debate” in which they accept that “the government will criticise, or even act against, Israel without being opposed to its existence.” Not everyone is so sanguine. Speaking to All Israel News, UK Lawyers for Israel chief executive Jonathan Turner KC said: “I view his appointment with great misgiving.”

Hermer’s practice as a lawyer has often involved holding corporations to account: for instance, representing claims stemming from oil spills in Nigeria. He acted for over 900 victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Whether the government changes its stance on selling weapons to Israel – worth at least £488m since 2015 – remains to be seen. This hinges in part on foreign secretary David Lammy. When in opposition, he pressured his predecessor David Cameron to release FCO guidance on the legality of continuing arms sales, citing “risks to the credibility of the UK’s export controls regime”. Cameron refused. Now that Lammy is in power, will he live up to the high minded principles he held when acting on them was someone else’s problem?

Resurrected Blairites.

Alan Milburn was a health minister under Tony Blair and is an advocate of using the private sector to deliver NHS services. He returned to the backbenches in 2003 to spend more time with his family, but he also found time to accept a £30,000 consultancy gig with Bridgepoint Capital, which finances private health companies moving into the NHS. He has also been chair of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ health industry oversight board. In 2021 he encouraged Boris Johnson to couple increased NHS spending with “reform”, widely understood as a byword for privatisation.

Now the Starmer government is trying to come up with a role for him – which is yet to be determined, according to the Telegraph – to help Wes Streeting with his own NHS “reforms”.

Jacqui Smith, who became the first ever woman to hold the office of home secretary under Gordon Brown, is back, this time as education secretary. She seems to epitomise a technocratic, managerial approach: She was shamed by the expenses scandal and had to be made a Lord so that she could enter government, but she also does have some experience for the job, having previously been an education secretary and a teacher.

Douglas Alexander, another Blairite veteran, is trade minister, while Pat Mcfadden, described by Peter Mandelson as “pure New Labour”, has been appointed chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

James Timpson – prisons minister.

The prison system is so broken that soon it will no longer be safe to accept new inmates, causing the criminal justice system to grind to a halt. The Conservatives repeatedly ignored warnings about this, according to Tom Wheatley, president of the Prison Governors Association, making it “inevitable that someone else would have to make very difficult decisions”.

Arise James Timpson, the new prisons minister.

In February he told Channel 4 News that the UK should follow the example of the Netherlands: “They have shut half their prisons not because people are less naughty in Holland. It’s because they have a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their children bedtime stories, and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again,” he said.

Timpson is the millionaire owner of Timpsons, the eponymous key-cutting chain which you may have seen in your nearest big Sainsbury’s car park. Timpson makes a point of hiring former prisoners in order to help them avoid re-offending. He believes they make excellent workers because they don’t want to disappoint their families again. Timpsons workers get access to a range of benefits, including company owned holiday homes and pet bereavement days.

The Daily Mail is going to blow a gasket watching this guy try to make criminal justice marginally more humane.

Matthew Pennycook – housing minister.

Matthew Pennycook’s appointment as housing minister is making landlords nervous.

Before the election put a stop to it, Pennycoock tabled an amendment to the Renters Reform bill that would have prevented landlords selling a property for two years after a tenancy had begun. He also shaped Labour’s policy of ending “bidding wars” between tenants.

When the bill got nixed in the wash-up before the election, Pennycook accused the Tories of protecting vested interests, and pledged to abolish section 21 or “no-fault” evictions. Given the Tories’ heel-dragging on section 21, it will be interesting to see whether Pennycook picks up the pace.

He has also said that growth of housing stock is “not a panacea” and is cool on giving developers’ carte blanche. He previously opposed a high-rise development in his constituency of Greenwich and Woolwich – and was accused of nimbyism.

It will be interesting to see what impact he has on Labour’s plans to overhaul the planning system. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said that the state will not build council housing, leaving it to the private sector. Whether or not Pennycook is as “pro-renter” in government as the hysterical landlord lobby imagines he will be is yet to be seen.

And the one that got away.

Starmer has replaced the Tories’ “Stop the Boats” with his own only marginally less dehumanising “Smash the Gangs” (previous attempts to target smuggling gangs have pushed migrants to make even more dangerous crossings). As part of this, Yvette Cooper announced a new policy gimmick, the Border Security Command.

Neil Basu – the first Asian to lead UK anti-terror policing – accused the previous government of intervening to stop him getting influential jobs because of his statements on diversity. The former cop has said he’s proud to be “woke”; accused the Met police of being institutionally racist; said BLM protesters were “right to be angry”; and compared Tory rhetoric on migrants to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech. But his views clearly attracted Starmer’s attention.

Basu was briefly tipped to be commander of the new Border Security Command, though apparently turned the job down. Awkward.

Simon Childs is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media.

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