Rebel Commander: How Keir Starmer's 'Real Deputy' Plans To Shake Up Whitehall

The joke was funny because it had more than a hint of truth.

At the recent Spectator awards, health secretary Wes Streeting told the audience: “The deputy prime minister is here.”

With perfect comic timing, Streeting waiting a moment before adding: “Good to see you, Pat.”

He was referring to Pat McFadden rather than the actual deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, who sat just a few feet away.

McFadden, whose official title is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is seen by many inside government as the PM’s real right-hand man.

From his base in the Cabinet Office, the softly-spoken Glaswegian wields enormous power which belies his slender frame.

“People say Pat is Keir’s deputy,” one government source told HuffPost UK. “That’s not true. Keir is his deputy.”

As a former political secretary to Tony Blair, McFadden knows more than most about how the machinery of government works.

Having suffered through 14 years of opposition - many of them from the backbenches when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader - he is determined that not a day of the next five years will be wasted trying to arrest what he sees as the “decline” of the United Kingdom under the Tories.

Alongside Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, McFadden spent Labour’s first few months in office developing the government’s “plan for change” setting out its six key targets between now and the next election.

They are to make people better off, build 1.5 million homes, get more children ready to start school, bring down hospital waits, recruit thousands more neighbourhood police and de-carbonise the electricity grid by 2030.

“The process has two functions,” McFadden told HuffPost UK. “One is the external communication of the government’s priorities on housing, health, education and so on.

“And the second one is internal to galvanise a government machine that felt whacked around, saw too many changes of ministers and too much chopping and changing in policies. 

“If you didn’t do this, you would be accepting running Britain the way it’s been run for the last five or 10 years. I see the plan for change as an act of rebellion against decline.

“These changes are tough to do, but they will make a real difference to people’s lives if we can make real progress on them.”

Starmer’s speech setting out the plan drew criticism from civil servants, who took issue with his claim that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

Dave Penman, head of the civil service union the FDA, described the PM’s language as “Trumpian” and fired off an angry letter to No.10.

McFadden, who made a speech of his own calling for outside experts to introduce fresh thinking into Whitehall, is untroubled that a few feathers have been ruffled.

He said: “I don’t see any of this as anti-civil servant. I see it as making their jobs better. We’ve got a duty to make sure that the government machine is as productive as possible.

“When you do this, and talk about reform, it’s quite easy for people to feel it’s directed at them. But I see it more as good people trapped in bad systems, where it’s easy to say ‘let’s have another paper or another meeting’ and it can be quite risk-averse.

“But risk is part of life and if you’re too frightened of failing you won’t innovate and you won’t do things.”

No one can accuse Labour of not doing things since entering office. The problem for the party, however, is that many of them have led to intense criticism and contributed to the PM’s plummeting poll ratings.

Taking winter fuel payments off 10 million pensioners and increasing taxes by £40 billion are not the acts of a risk-averse government.

But McFadden insists that the tough decisions were unavoidable - and will pay dividends in the long run.

“It is certainly the case that when we came in we found things were more difficult than we thought,” he said. “For example, I don’t think anyone realised quite the degree to which the prison system was about to fall over within days of the election.

“I believe, having come into government and looked at that situation, that it’s quite a big part of the reason why the Tories had an election in July. They were cutting and running. They knew the prison system was falling over and the consequences are drastic.

“If the jails are full, what happens is you arrest people and you put them in police cells, but there are only so many police cells. And then you’ve got to take the police off the streets to look after people in the cells, and when the cells are full what happens when the next crime is committed? The consequences really don’t bear thinking about.

“The whole system is based on having somewhere to put someone who’s done some terrible crime. So we had to cope with that right away.

“The budgetary situation was also more difficult. When we talk about the £22 billion black hole, people say ‘but £9bn of it was pay rises’. Were the Tories not going to give pay rises? Were they going to ignore the pay review bodies?

“They can’t just dismiss this as it being Labour’s choice to pay these pay rises. They set up the whole process. So that situation was genuinely worse than we thought.

“And there was lots of unfunded stuff around about transport projects, compensation schemes, some of the levelling up stuff, so we were faced with very difficult choices right away.”

Despite the ongoing economic gloom, McFadden is adamant that Rachel Reeves’ tax-hiking Budget has put the public finances on a “much more stable basis”.

“The other thing that should not be under-priced is political stability,” he said. “We’ve got a government with a big, stable majority that was just elected a few months ago with a five-year mandate. If you look around the world, that’s not that common right now.

“Having that stability is good for the UK. People know who they’re going to be dealing with for the next five years.

“Having sorted out the public finances, having published this plan for change and set out a set of directions for the government, people can look to 2025 with more confidence and more optimism about the future. It’s a five year parliament, it’s not just about the first few months.” 

As a Blairite to his bootstraps, it is perhaps unsurprising to hear McFadden claim that things can only get better over the next 12 months.

But with the electorate growing increasingly impatient to see the change Labour promised during the election, he will be hoping that the promised improvements start to become apparent sooner rather than later.