Shabana Mahmood is no stranger to tough, career-ending jobs. She’s currently the Home Secretary, both one of the great offices of state and also one of the great graveyards of political ambitions.
The other graveyard is the Treasury, where she may well move in the next week or so once Andy Burnham has the keys to Downing Street. Rachel Reeves entered the Treasury in 2024 with a glittering political reputation, and we all know how long that lasted.
Mahmood is being mooted as Burnham’s chancellor after a rearguard action against Ed Miliband, who had been another favourite candidate. Miliband would not be entering the Treasury with a glittering reputation: though he is arguably one of the most effective ministers of the Starmer years, he has the potential to unsettle the markets, and is not favoured by Labour’s union backers due to the impact of his net-zero policies.
Mahmood, on the other hand, has thus far managed to survive the political equivalent of running with a live hand grenade, which is what running the Home Office always feels like. When she takes questions in the Commons, she commands respect from her own benches and those opposite for her immigration policies and her clear-headed approach to some of the most difficult questions Labour has to answer. Why not move her into the Treasury?
After all, along with immigration, the other big question Burnham’s government will need to answer is on benefits and how to cut that spiralling bill. Mahmood has a gift for standing firm against criticism of her policies, while articulating why she needs to pursue them clearly and in humane terms. Given the welfare bill is such a concern for the Treasury, the chancellor needs to be someone who can sell cuts, as well as the work and pensions secretary. They also need to be able to come up with cuts that make sense and which are coupled with genuine reform, rather than eliding the two.
Reeves’s political stock was already falling when she failed to convince MPs of her crude benefit cuts, but she never recovered their respect. Her approach to the benefits question was both all wrong and also classic Treasury, with a focus on the short-term savings rather than the overall picture. The next chancellor cannot simply be led by the Treasury mentality as they approach benefits.
The question for Burnham is what kind of chancellor he expects Mahmood to be. He is currently going through the phase that most new prime ministers enter at some point of believing that he can run the economy from No 10. It is in part a reaction to the way Keir Starmer allowed Reeves to set the direction on fiscal policy, rather than having his own detailed beliefs.
But beyond a suspicion of the bond markets and a commitment to devolution, it’s not clear whether Burnham has much more of an underpinning on the economy than Starmer did. If he really wants to set the direction from Downing Street, he’s going to have to spend the summer developing one.
Even if he does develop that underpinning, Burnham might find Mahmood isn’t that easy to run as a chancellor. She is a tough cookie, and that means she doesn’t like being pushed around. One of the reasons she has made a success so far of being in the Home Office is that she is, in the words of one admiring former colleague, “very hard to work with”. Burnham and Louise Haigh, widely tipped to take over at the Cabinet Office as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and also not the most malleable of characters, might find that she has her own agenda that prevents them from calling all the shots.
Perhaps that agenda will protect Burnham a bit: unlike Starmer, he might not end up with his political fortunes tied so closely to the performance of his chancellor. Starmer found it hard to offload all the opprobrium directed at his leadership on to Reeves because they had always come as a package. Other prime ministers manage to give the impression that they are merely appointing a chancellor for now, until it suits them to change their mind.
Burnham might be able to offload some of the blame for anything that does go wrong on to Mahmood. But then again, he was around in the last Labour government when the first and second lords of the Treasury had their own rival powerhouses, and the party has never fully recovered from the wars between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. At least those wars were over policy differences: the question Burnham still has to answer is what he actually thinks. If he does appoint a strong figure like Mahmood, he’ll need to decide what that is pretty fast.
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