What sort of Labour deputy leader would Lucy Powell be?

Powell doesn’t want to run the party and is unlikely to be a regular helper in 10 Downing Street, as Sean O’Grady explains

Is there no end to the sufferings of Keir Starmer? To borrow the line from the Labour campaign song, it may well be that things can only get worse before they can only get better, and straight after the humiliating loss in the Caerphilly by-election comes the widely expected arrival of Lucy Powell as his deputy. She is on course to beat his preferred candidate, education secretary Bridget Phillipson.

Unlike lost elections, difficult Budgets and policy U-turns that are at least one-off events a leader can move on from, Powell will be a permanent irritation. Or worse.

What sort of a deputy would Powell be?

Awkward. That’s not so unusual in Labour history – indeed Starmer had some clashes with Angela Rayner during their time in opposition – but it’s obviously better if the pair at least get along. Powell was sacked by Starmer in the last reshuffle, so there’s obviously no love lost. Politically, she is close to Ed Miliband (she ran his successful leadership campaign in 2010), and an ally of Andy Burnham, so much so that she’s often seen as the latter’s stalking horse.

An archetypal “soft left” personality, she has said she will be “a shop steward; their voice in the room” for party members and MPs.

What’s the best that can happen?

She wants to be a “strong independent voice ... to help bridge the divide, reconnecting our membership and leadership.” Starmer and his team haven’t gone out of their way to be collegiate with the parliamentary Labour Party, and he suffered the consequences of that neglect when his social security reforms were vetoed and a U-turn on the winter fuel allowance was forced upon him after a disappointing set of elections in May.

If Powell can help Starmer craft policies that can carry Labour MPs, she would be doing the government a service. But it feels highly unlikely that such a happy state of affairs will ensue.

What’s the worst that can happen?

Powell will foment trouble and act as a kind of leader of the internal opposition to Starmer in the Commons and on Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) – a focus for dissent. The dynamic will be conflict and division will be the result.

As Phillipson has tried to remind her comrades, voters don’t like divided parties and won’t re-elect a government that can’t even run its own affairs. Powell’s election itself damages Starmer’s authority: arguably, never before has a deputy been elected so openly at odds with the leader.

Will Powell have much power?

She will hold ex-officio positions on the NEC and can use her position there and on any subcommittees, including for party conference arrangements and election candidates, to influence decisions. The leadership has a reasonable hold on the NEC, but that was very much with Rayner’s help. If the NEC membership tilts leftwards it would be another cause of division and challenge to the prime minister.

Some deputy leaders, notably George Brown in the 1960s and Rayner in the less successful early part of her time in the job, are given campaigning or organisational responsibilities to compensate for the duller aspects of playing second fiddle to someone they might not rate highly. But such is Powell’s disaffection, her self-defined role as “shop steward”, and her perceived lack of talent, that it’s unthinkable Starmer would put her anywhere near such activities.

By contrast with most previous partnerships, Powell won’t be able to pop in to have a chat with her leader from time to time and expect her advice to be listened to with gravity and respect. However, she can at least say that she has a kind of “right of audience” under the Labour Party rulebook, which states: “The Leader shall consult the Deputy Leader on a regular basis and the Deputy Leader shall provide the Leader with advice and support in achieving the goals of the Party and deputise as requested.”

How much “support” Powell will provide to her leader in return for him “consulting” her very much remains to be seen.

Will she enjoy the job?

Most Labour deputy leaders don’t speak well of the role. Margaret Beckett, who worked with John Smith and was his preferred choice in 1992, called it “really ghastly”, hard work and thankless. Roy Hattersley spent a decade in the role under Neil Kinnock (1983 to 1992), and wrote afterwards that: “I had known five deputy leaders. Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins – the two whom I had known best and admired most – had hated the job and George Brown, who had been the first deputy leader in my life, had regarded it as a constant trauma.”

When Labour is in power, the deputy leader often gets to be deputy prime minister, enjoys a senior ministerial office, and (as also happens in opposition) can deputise at Prime Minister’s Questions. Powell won’t be doing any of that.

Unlike most of her predecessors, who accepted the job because they’d been deprived of the post of leader, Powell has no such ambitions. She is no John Prescott, Roy Jenkins, or Herbert Morrison, but merely a proxy for the soft left candidate of the moment, currently either Burnham or Miliband. Thus liberated, she is free to make whatever she wants to make of the deputy leadership, which is unlikely to be what Starmer wants.