Lucy Powell has been elected as Labour’s deputy leader and is now the second highest-ranking figure in the party after the Prime Minister. It’s a remarkable turnaround for a politician who was only last month unceremoniously sacked from her Cabinet post as Leader of the House of Commons. The MP for Manchester Central secured 54.3 per cent of the vote to her rival Bridget Phillipson’s 45.7 per cent. Turnout was a crushingly low 16.6 per cent, compared to 58.8 per cent in the last contest for this role which was won by Angela Rayner back in 2020.
In terms of the raw numbers, Powell clinched it by around 14,000 votes – she got 87,407 to Phillipson’s 73,536. The final result was a little tighter than the polling in this race had predicted, for example the final poll of members by Survation and LabourList this week had Powell winning on a more robust 58 per cent. Powell gave an acceptance speech to a small room of observers which included the Prime Minister, Phillipson, Home Secretary and National Executive Committee chair Shabana Mahmood and Hollie Ridley, Labour’s General Secretary.
Unfortunately for Keir Starmer, she started as she means to go on – with pretty bald criticism of the job the Prime Minister is doing. “The result just this week shows us the task,” she said of Labour’s crushing defeat in the Caerphilly by-election, “We won’t win by trying to out Reform, Reform, but by building a broad, progressive consensus.” As well as criticising the political strategy of No 10 she also attacked its management style, saying “Unity and loyalty comes from collective purpose, not from command and control. Debating, listening and hearing is not dissent, it’s our strength.” She said of the dissenters and malcontents who criticise Starmer’s approach “my job will be to bring those voices into the heart of our Party”.
Starmer made some brief remarks in which he described this sometimes pretty nasty deputy leadership race as “a constructive and honest debate about our future”. He said: “I’m delighted to start working with Lucy as our new deputy leader and we’ll get going straight away”. After Powell brought it up, he addressed the Caerphilly result calling it “a bad result in Wales” and saying it was “a reminder that people need to look out of their window and see change and renewal… renewal is the only answer to decline, to grievance and to division”.
He left the stage after the brief remarks and immediately hugged Bridget Phillipson, the loser. He then embraced Powell. Mahmood closed proceedings, taking a brief break from the Epping manhunt to steward the announcement of the result in her role as chair of the NEC. She said: “The new deputy leader will be heading off straight away to start knocking on doors.” Well that doesn’t sound too grand, and Powell said during the campaign that she expected to be invited to political cabinet as deputy leader, so perhaps the fight isn’t over yet.
[Further reading: I thought Labour would fix everything. I was wrong]
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