Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner have very different priorities for government… so who’s the boss?
WHO is going to have the first big fight of this Labour government?
Keir Starmer has promised to end the “tragic soap opera” of the Tories, but even when ministers are taking their job seriously, they can end up falling out.
And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be long before we get our first skirmish.
That big scrap could be over how “Labourish” this party wants to be, now it is in government.
Does it want to be controlling and bossy towards businesses, or does it think firms should be left to run things and grow the economy themselves?
At the moment, all the signs are that Labour is as suspicious of private enterprise as it has ever been.
In the run-up to the election, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made a big deal of how much business liked her, carrying out her own 21st-Century prawn cocktail offensive.
But the bosses queuing up to back her over brunch were more attracted by the chance of escaping the Tory turmoil than they were by the nitty-gritty of Labour’s employment policies.
Many of them parked questions about what a Labour government would actually do until they were sure that they weren’t going to be stuck in another season of a Tory drama that they didn’t want to continue any longer.
Now Labour is actually in government, it has to decide how much it really wants to keep businesses on side.
Particularly small businesses, who don’t have the time for brunch offensives but who will be the source of much of the economic growth that Reeves desperately needs.
I hope she read yesterday’s Sun on Sunday, where these fears were laid out in black and white by business owners.
They are deeply worried about some of the proposals in the package of workers’ rights Labour agreed before it won the election, including the “right to switch off” from emails and work phone calls out of hours, and a crackdown on “exploitative” zero-hours contracts.
Exploit workers
These plans don’t come from Reeves, but from Deputy PM Angela Rayner, who is still going to oversee them as the chair of a powerful (and fearfully named) “Future of Work” Cabinet committee.
The two women haven’t clashed in the way that Rayner has with Keir Starmer, but they still have very different priorities for government.
Reeves won’t want anything that gums up small businesses with bureaucracy or stops them from hiring casual staff, while Rayner leans more towards the instinctive left-wing Labour suspicion that employers left to their own devices will always seek to exploit their workers.
Mind you, any rogue businesses out there could learn a thing or two from this government, which I understand has hired a few of its new special advisers on short contracts lasting only a few months.
Presumably they won’t be able to ignore their emails in the evening, either.
The minister directly responsible for the reforms is Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds.
He is believed to be more “pragmatic” than Rayner, but is still of a soft Left persuasion when it comes to business.
Who will Starmer back?
He is a peculiar combination of a Blairite who agreed to serve under Jeremy Corbyn (and was unceremoniously kicked out of moderate Labour WhatsApp groups as a result).
He hasn’t yet said anything anti-business, so might soften the measures still further. Or he might not.
Certainly Rayner is more minded to yield to the trade unions than the Chancellor. So the question is: who will win out? And who will Starmer back?
The Labour leader is not particularly interested in business — his passion lies in the public sector and how to make it work properly.
Perhaps he won’t be the one adjudicating anyway.
His chief of staff Sue Gray arguably calls the shots as much as the PM himself.
Gray’s pursuit of power is currently just a sub-plot, but could develop into a major storyline by the autumn, with advisers and ministers already deeply irritated by the way the former “Partygate” investigator operates.
The Tories set a pretty high bar for political drama, and Labour may benefit from the comparison for a while, meaning that even quite dysfunctional governing will escape proper notice.
Forgot discipline
Some Labourites will argue that any reporting of these kinds of interpersonal tensions is just Westminster trivia.
But we know from the New Labour years that fights between ministers can stop policies in their tracks — and even stop governments. So they are important.
Speaking of those New Labour fights, one of the central figures back then was Gordon Brown, who started out as an Iron Chancellor determined to rid his party of its vices of overspending and slapping regulations on anything that might dare make money or hire people.
In government, though, he became so fixated on taking over from Tony Blair, undermining him by constantly signalling to Labour MPs he was to the left of the leader, that the discipline waned.
Perhaps Rayner is hoping Reeves will follow the same trajectory.