Labour’s factional drift
Briefing wars have exposed a culture that treats policy delivery as irrelevant
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Back in September 2025, Keir Starmer insisted his cabinet reshuffle was about “delivery”. He used the word repeatedly. He moved half his cabinet, scattered ministerial teams and disrupted departments mid-programme, all in the name of a “phase two” focused on getting things done. Eight months on, as briefing wars over a potential second reshuffle erupt, delivery feels perilously low down the agenda.
Consider the cabinet ministers cited as vulnerable. Peter Kyle, the Business and Trade Secretary, whose cardinal sin appears to be his association with Wes Streeting. Liz Kendall, the Science and Technology Secretary, who was left to take the blame for the welfare reforms botched by the Treasury. And, if some allies of Angela Rayner have their way, Shabana Mahmood, whose planned changes to indefinite leave to remain have prompted a backbench revolt.
A government with a coherent philosophy would be able to say why ministers should rise or fall beyond their “faction”. It would ask what they are trying to do, whether it is working, and whether each minister is the right person to do it. Yet this government struggles to answer such questions.
The solution to Labour’s malaise is not another reshuffle – all too reminiscent of the Conservative churn that Starmer promised to end – but articulating what, precisely, this government is for, and then backing those ministers whose work advances it. Without that first step, “doubling down on delivery” is just another slogan, but with it, the case for ministerial stability becomes self-evident.
Consider what a reshuffle could erode, not in factional terms, but in governing capacity. Kendall’s speech earlier this week offered the beginnings of a thesis on how to achieve AI sovereignty for the UK, promising to champion Britain’s domestic talent pool and to collaborate with “middle powers”, such as France, Canada, and South Korea, to shape global standards. Her department has launched Sovereign AI to make strategic investments in early-stage AI companies, open up critical datasets and provide advance market commitments to promising start-ups. The decision this week to back Ineffable Intelligence, which builds algorithms that can learn for themselves, is one example of this approach in practice.
DSIT has assembled talent including venture investor James Wise, who chairs Sovereign AI, and Henry de Zoete, previously Rishi Sunak’s AI adviser, who has returned in the civil service role of AI and investment adviser. This is a department where the government’s rhetoric about attracting outside expertise has actually been matched by practice. The goodwill that Kendall and AI minister Kanishka Narayan enjoy should not be taken for granted by Downing Street.
The same logic applies at the business department; ministerial stability is paramount here because success depends on building trusted relationships with the organisations and individuals that want to create jobs in the UK. Kyle brings continuity on AI – having led the government’s investment push while at DSIT – and has carried key relationships with founders and investors into DBT, where AI sits within digital technologies as one of the eight Industrial Strategy growth sectors. These are negotiations and programmes that require familiarity; a new business secretary would mean rebuilding relationships at exactly the moment they need to deliver.
Replacing Kyle to settle factional scores would burn credibility that no successor could quickly rebuild. Mahmood, meanwhile, has challenged Home Office inertia and cut small-boat crossings by 36 per cent this year, reduced the asylum decision backlog by 46 per cent and closed another 11 asylum hotels this month – beginning to deliver what voters of all parties have long demanded.
The point is not that these three cabinet ministers are beyond criticism; it is that their records risk proving incidental to whether they survive. There are other ministers who have achieved remarkably little in government but will endure because inaction allows them to fly under the radar and leave a jittery parliamentary party untroubled. We should fear for a Labour Party that creates a perverse incentive structure in which the rational move for any ambitious minister is to keep their head down, signal the right sympathies and wait for another minister to be briefed against first.
Punishing loyal performance while rewarding political positioning would be the clearest signal to date that this government has no theory of why or who it governs for – that there are no benchmarks, no criteria and no connection between what a minister does and whether they keep their job. No 10 should remember this: the way out of the current crisis is delivering for voters, not pleasing Labour activists through ideological signalling. That means letting Kendall fight for procurement reform and serious AI adoption policy, letting Mahmood grip immigration and letting Kyle build the relationships that attract investment – not sacrificing all three in a futile attempt to buy internal peace.