Is Liz Kendall now the most formidable woman in Starmer’s cabinet?

With her plans to slash the welfare bill by £5bn, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall has shown her impeccable New Labour credentials – and could yet cement her reputation as one of the great reformers of the British state, says John Rentoul

It was Liz Kendall who first made “country before party” a meme. In the wreckage of Labour’s 2015 election defeat, she was interviewed and said she would run to be leader of the party. When asked whether the party wanted to hear her hard truths about why it lost, she said she would always put the country before it.

It was the last time for many years that someone had the courage to tell Labour what was right, rather than what it wanted to hear. She was rewarded with a humiliating 4.5 per cent of the vote in the leadership election that Jeremy Corbyn won.

Her campaign manager, Morgan McSweeney, drew a lesson from that experience. If you wanted to change the country, you had to win the leadership of the Labour Party, and to do that, you had to tell Labour members what they wanted to hear. His next leadership campaign, for Keir Starmer, was more successful.

After it succeeded, his candidate could start talking about putting “country before party” again.

Kendall, meanwhile, withdrew from frontbench politics. She refused to have anything to do with the Corbyn leadership team, but maintained a public profile as a TV commentator. A frequent guest on Andrew Neil’s show, he would tease her as “Liz ‘4.5 per cent’ Kendall”, and she, with her natural cheerfulness, would pretend to celebrate her fourth-place finish as a great victory.

Not only did Kendall sit out the Corbyn years, she was a late arrival in Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. She served in a junior frontbench role, as shadow care minister, from the start of his leadership, but it wasn’t until September 2023 that she joined the shadow cabinet as shadow work and pensions secretary.

She replaced Jonathan Ashworth who, for all his combativeness as a media performer, was not someone steeped in the complexities of the benefits system. Kendall, on the other hand, had all the right qualifications for the post – and Starmer was fortunate in making that appointment, because Ashworth unexpectedly lost his seat last year.

Kendall passed her first test on Tuesday, navigating a third way between a Conservative and Reform opposition that accused her of not going far enough, and a cohort of Labour MPs who are horrified that their government is “taking money away from some of the poorest people in the country”.

This involved some tough negotiating with the Treasury, which resulted in some important details being left for later, but Kendall fundamentally agrees with the argument for reform and lower welfare spending over time.

She is New Labour by upbringing and experience. Brought up in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, her mother was a primary school teacher and her father an accountant at the Bank of England. She went to Watford Grammar School for Girls, where she was head girl, at the same time as Geri Halliwell.

She wanted to be a dancer or an actor, but – in a Labour household, although her father was later a Liberal local councillor – she also wanted to put the world to rights. She was at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where she gained a first in history, at the time of the 1992 election. Beth Kilcoyne, now a comedy writer, met her at university, and remembers Kendall revising the history of philosophy while sunbathing and listening to pop music. “We were both from state schools,” she said. “She was a girl from Watford who loved Wham!”

Kendall admired Neil Kinnock and was furious when he lost in 1992; she shouted at the TV on election night so much, her then boyfriend said that, if she felt so strongly, she should do something about it. She joined the Labour Party and did not look back.

She became a special adviser to Harriet Harman, who was work and pensions secretary for the first year of Tony Blair’s government, which may have been a useful lesson in how not to do the job. Harman was never trusted by Blair, and she clashed with Frank Field, a junior minister with a more “radical” reputation who had been put in the department to shake it up. Harman and Field were both moved after a year, and Kendall suffered the brutal experience of a special adviser whose career was dependent on her minister’s.

After a spell in the charity sector, though, she was back as a special adviser to Patricia Hewitt, first at trade and industry and then at health. There, Kendall worked on the smoking ban, a complicated and contentious piece of legislation. A colleague from the department remembers her going outside after long, exhausting discussions about the ban, saying: “I need a fag.”

Kendall entered parliament in 2010, a hardened Blairite at a time when the Blairite tide was receding. She showed huge ambition bordering on recklessness when, just five years later, she put herself forward for the leadership. Her campaign had a brilliant start, mainly because she was well-liked by so many journalists, many of whom were also Blairites – or had recently been so.

The tide in the Labour Party was, by then, racing in the other direction, and her campaign was soon in trouble. But today, she and many of those who worked on her campaign are at the heart of government. McSweeney is now the prime minister’s chief of staff. Matthew Doyle, her spokesperson, is now the prime minister’s director of communications.

Kendall’s time out of frontline politics during the Corbyn years gave her the chance not just to think about her political future, but to start a family. Her relationship with the comedian Greg Davies ended just before the 2015 election, but by 2022 she had a son, Henry, by surrogacy, with her partner James Ind, a banker.

By then, she was ready to return to the front line. She had the experience as a special adviser and the convictions of a New Labour reformer ready to take on one of the biggest challenges in government. She has long had an unsentimental view that the role of the state is to help people to help themselves, not to do everything for them.

If the Blairite “third way” that she trod on Tuesday is successful, she could be one of the great reformers of the British state. Her star is rising, as a cabinet minister who is actually delivering change while bringing the public and most of her party with her. Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Bridget Phillipson should look out: Kendall is looking good in contrast to their early stumbles.

If anything, I suspect that Kendall believes that reducing the growth in the benefits budget from £25bn a year in five years to £20bn a year is too modest.

Parts of the Labour Party may not like it, but she would say that a lower welfare bill is in the national interest – and she must put the country first.