On Andy Burnham’s first full day as Prime Minister, the newly sacked Darren Jones made it clear he would remain a force to be reckoned with. He had lost his job as chief secretary to the PM less than 24 hours before, and woke up to see that Burnham, in his first announcement as Prime Minister, intended to cut VAT on energy bills. It was to be paid for by scrapping the Starmer administration’s digital ID scheme. Jones saw red. “It was a red line. I have no problem with cutting VAT on energy bills – crack on! But you’ve got to set out how you’re going to pay for it, and saying that you were going to take the money from a scheme that I know was not funded, that’s not OK.”
He drafted a tweet, then put his phone away, deliberating as to whether to get involved. “No, I think it’s important to send a signal,” he decided, “and so I tweeted it. I didn’t quite expect it to be as explosive as it was.” With one tweet, Jones threw a grenade into the first full day of Burnham’s premiership.
Two months later, when we meet in his office in parliament, Jones freely admits that Burnham and his team were “annoyed, obviously” by that opening gambit. “I spoke to No 10 about it, and was like, ‘Look, sorry, I know it would have caused you a massive headache in your first week. I’m not going to be doing this every day. I don’t want to be the chief critic of the government. I want to be helpful. But you should know that for me and people like me in the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party]… that is not OK.’”
Jones certainly did send a signal that morning: that after Burnham’s “coup” there is now a new cohort of experienced, opinionated former ministers on the backbenches with the potential to make Burnham’s life very difficult. Of all of them, it is Jones who has established himself as the most vocal.
He is not yet 40, but has worked at the very heart of government as Keir Starmer’s right-hand man in No 10 and, before that, Rachel Reeves’s deputy at the Treasury. Now this young, ambitious politician finds himself outside the tent, free to express himself, and he certainly seems to be enjoying it.
Jones has a fascinating way of delivering sharp criticism or warnings in a casual, matter-of-fact way, as if unaware he is doing it. He says he always knew he wasn’t getting a job in Burnham’s cabinet. When he tallied up the number of people the incoming Prime Minister owed jobs to – “people who had evidently done deals, or called for Keir to resign in public or had resigned themselves, plus people he needed to bring back who had not been in the cabinet and had supported the coup… the numbers didn’t add up”. He doesn’t shy away from the idea that some of the most prominent figures in the cabinet knifed Starmer in the back in return for a job at the top table.
He reveals, still ever-so-casually, that he was asked to make a deal himself. “I was approached indirectly and asked whether I would call for Keir to resign in return for something, but I was very clear that I wasn’t going to do that.” Something being a cabinet job? “I mean, that was my interpretation of the message. But that’s just not how I conduct myself.”
“I don’t say that in a way that denigrates other people,” he adds. “I just feel like if I look back on myself in ten years’ time, or my kids were reading about what I’d done, that’s just not really what I would want them to see… I knew it was self-defeating, but I felt like my integrity was more important.” He doesn’t name names, but one need only look at who called on Starmer to resign and ended up with a top cabinet job – John Healey, Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood, among others – to infer who he thinks took such a deal. When Healey comes up in conversation later, I ask him if he thinks one was done there. “I don’t know is the answer. One might assume that’s the case.”
Jones says he would have liked Starmer to have been replaced “in a better way”, and laments that even friends of his in the PLP “were briefing against me just because I was seen to be part of the Keir Starmer government”. “But maybe that’s just politics. In the end, if you survive and continue in a job where you can make a difference, maybe it’s worth that trade-off. But for me, that just didn’t feel right. That didn’t feel like the game that I wanted to play.”
Jones had a front-row seat for the fall of the Starmer premiership. In September 2025, after Starmer suffered the bruising welfare rebellion and his polls ratings began to seriously falter, Jones was brought into No 10 as chief secretary to the prime minister, a role created to help Starmer drive delivery at the heart of government. Jones admits now that “[I] knew I was being asked to come in and do this job because things had not been optimal. I was very conscious [of that] and made it clear that just appointing me to a job wasn’t going to fix all of these problems.” It quickly became clear “that for all of the work you might try to do on polling or perception or operational changes… it was probably a bit too late, really”.
What does he think went wrong? “You could talk about communications, engagement with the public. You could talk about the welfare vote. You could talk about reshuffles and what that resulted in. You could talk about engagement with the PLP… I mean, there’s a lot of lessons there for all of us.”
Jones is strikingly loyal to Starmer, even though the two are different ideologically. He is often written up as Starmer’s right-hand-man – the role he performed on paper, but which elides the fact the pair didn’t know each other well beforehand. (Ironically, Jones knew Burnham better, having worked on his previous leadership campaigns.)
Even some close to Starmer privately reached the conclusion in the dying days of his administration that he was ill-equipped to be prime minister. Some came to the opinion that Starmer was fundamentally not as nice a man as they had hoped. But if Jones holds either view, he gives no hint. “As I got to know Keir better, I became much more loyal to him,” he says. “He’s a good man with good values who would always put the country first, and I felt like he’s not been treated well enough for the sacrifices that he made.”
Starmer’s contribution to resolving international challenges has been undervalued, in Jones’s view. “The irony of the welfare rebellion – that was organised by people who are now in government – was that Keir wasn’t here because he was saving Nato.” This was after Donald Trump threatened to invade Greenland, threatening the future of the North Atlantic alliance. “It was because of [Starmer’s] leadership that that has not happened. I don’t think he’s being given sufficient credit for it.”
Jones knows that, given Starmer’s poll ratings, it was looking “difficult” for him to lead the Labour Party into the next general election. But he “think[s] it would have been better to have allowed the Starmer administration to keep doing the hard work we were doing to build the foundations to win a second term. Then if nearer the next election conversations had to be had, I think they could have been had in a more respectful… way.” He is worried by “this modern approach of getting queasy and then just changing [leader] too rapidly”. “In the past it was normal for governments to be unpopular midterm because you’ve got to take difficult structural long-term decisions.”
He warns Labour has another pattern it needs to break out of, “Where we do what we need to do in order to get elected… We then get queasy about difficult decisions and say, ‘We’ve got to be more Labour, we’ve got to be nicer, we’ve got to be truer to our values,’ which often then means losing. And then we have an internal argument about whether it’s because we weren’t left-wing enough, or didn’t shout at the public enough, or they weren’t listening, or we blame the right-wing media… And then we’re out of power for a long time, and then we figure ourselves out”, and the cycle begins again. “I don’t want my party to do the same thing,” Jones says. But he seems to be implying that cycle might already have begun again.
In between answers, Jones sips on a Huel, the food-substitute drink beloved of tech bros. “Have you ever had one of these? They’re very strange,” he says. The Huel is just one of many changes Jones has made in his life since Burnham dispensed with his services: he is seeing a personal trainer, who has made him use a calorie-tracking app that revealed Jones doesn’t eat enough in a day. Hence the Huel. This is all part of the liberation of life on the back benches: he is sleeping more, taking care of his health, seeing his children, enjoying life as a constituency MP for his home seat of Bristol North West, and generally “having a very nice time”.
As Labour gathers for conference, its first since Burnham took power, Jones is just as aware as anyone that people will be asking what the Starmerites will do next, and whether they intend to cause trouble for the PM. He objects to the moniker “Starmerites”: “Keir was the first to say there’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there isn’t. It’s old news.” But he doesn’t object to the idea that there is a significant grouping on Labour’s backbenches who intend to make themselves heard.
“Those of us that care about the future are not going to be defining ourselves based on the past. But how would we describe ourselves? We would describe ourselves as the people that want to win power and to modernise the country, and know from our experience… what we need to do in order to make that happen.” Implied in all of this is that Jones and his ilk will challenge Burnham from the centre, or the Labour right, with a focus on electability, modernisation and economic credibility – the last is no surprise after Jones’s “warning shot” in Burnham’s first week.
He is keen to stress why he and colleagues care about fiscal responsibility. “It’s not because we go about our days admiring fiscal rules for the sake of it. It’s because economic credibility is a precondition for Labour to be in government, which is a precondition for us to do Labour things.” He, Starmer, Reeves and others “worked so hard for so long in opposition to rebuild the trust that we had from the public on those issues, and then made sure that we were living that in government”.
Jones describes himself and his style of politics as “future-facing”, focused on the challenges that lie ahead. He recently argued in the Times that the country faces an “urgent inflection point on three fronts”: AI, climate change and defence capability. These three areas, along with the economy, are where he intends to focus his attention while on the back benches. He is particularly clear about the need for the government to get ahead of the curve on AI – not only its risks, but how it will fundamentally change the labour market.
Jones seems to be quietly, politely, establishing a dividing line between the Burnham regime – which, he implies, lacks answers for the future and is at risk of reverting to Labour’s election-losing comfort zone – and himself, a modern, future-facing centrist. “We shouldn’t rely on public spending as a route to some romantic version of making Britain great again,” he wrote in the Times, “look[ing] in the rearview mirror for a great history that’s no longer available to us.” Few could have missed the dig at our Oasis-loving PM, who has declared the country has lost its way and that he wants to turn back the clock on four decades of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism.
“You can’t go backwards,” Jones says. “You can only go forwards. Quite frankly, I don’t want a Britain based on whatever was happening in the 1970s, that’s meaningless to me. I was born in 1986. I want to know what’s happening in the decades ahead, and what that means for me and for my children.”
Asked directly if he believes Burnham has the answers to the challenges Jones laid out in the Times, he says “we don’t know the answer yet”, but that the PM’s ten-year plan, expected in November, is a “great opportunity to face the future”. “The Labour Party wins when we’re able to explain to the public what we think is going on in the country.” He argues that “every successful political project is a project that has a proper analysis of the country”. It doesn’t sound like he thinks Burnham has one – or, at least, not yet.
Having aired a long list of thinly veiled warnings on economic credibility, the need for a plan on AI, and a lament on how the coup could have been better handled, Jones concludes our interview by emphasising that he and like-minded colleagues are just as focused on winning a second term as Burnham and the cabinet. “I wouldn’t say that the PLP is splintered or gearing up for war.
“Irrespective of what’s happened and how, we want it to be successful, and we have a collective responsibility to help make that the case. We, as backbenchers in the PLP, are looking to… Andy and his team to get that right. We want them to get it right.” It is classic Jones: warm, casual, innocent-sounding, but with a slight tone of warning. If Burnham doesn’t get it right, I have no doubt we will hear about it from Jones. He wants the government to succeed, but he plainly has different ideas to the Prime Minister about how to do that. Whether or not Darren Jones embraces the term, Burnham has a new “chief critic” on the back benches. I suspect he is going to continue having a very nice time.
Darren Jones will be in conversation with Ailbhe Rea at Labour Party Conference on 27 September
[Further reading: Can Andy Burnham charm Donald Trump?]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 24 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Sense of Power
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentThe ghost of Neo-Liberalism rightly still haunts all Labour thinking…and it is so very fundemental to any sense of ideological direction they wish to go…..”centrist” just screams Tony Blair to me
You cannot just ignore the lessons of Thatcherism creating what is now a fractured society in Britain purely bexause you were born in 1986. A sensible non doctrinaire approach would be to calculate the trade offs between supporting the welfare state and seeking growth.Despite having initially supported Starmer in the leadership bid it was evident to me and many others that Starmer (and therefore Jones) were fixated upon economic orthodoxies at the expense of public opinion and uktimately electoral success. Burnham is certainly rowing back on some of his earlier positions but has a core of conviction that being in government means offering hope via practical incremental changes that help the poorest in society.
I can’t see him as any great loss. That comment that in order to fund a VAT reduction you need to say where the money is coming from is just plain wrong. Obviously for big sums the question might arise, but for a sum within the rounding, which this is, it’s perfectly reasonable to say we can fund this as a priority. People like Jones are the reason politics reduces to this hopeless and sterile ongoing set of questions about where are you getting this £2bm from.
He’s never likely to be forgiven by those in Wales who remember him as First Sec telling us to be more grateful for £43m rail funding over 10 years, about what it will cost to refurbish Leeds Station, despite Labour agreeing that rail in Wales has been grossly underfunded for decades. That was the point at which I concluded that either they were determined to lose the Senedd election as spectacularly as possible or they simply felt it not worth their attention.
I wonder if he noticed when they did lose; I wonder if he sees any connection if he did.
Labour, nor any other political party, will not flourish whilst there is so much infighting. This is the politics of spite and has become so much the norm of Westminster. Unless MPs overcome their myopia and work together for the benefit of the UK as a whole, Labour will not succeed.