Before he became Andy Burnham’s senior economic adviser, Neil Amin-Smith had a genuinely successful show business career as the violinist and pianist of the Grammy Award-winning band Clean Bandit, best known for their number one single “Rather Be”.
Often referred to as both the “poshest” and the “cleverest” band in Britain – three of its original members met while students in Cambridge, and Amin-Smith was privately educated at Westminster School – Clean Bandit became known for blending electronic and classical music.
This made Amin-Smith, 36, a fixture of the celebrity circuit, especially during his year-long relationship with Years and Years frontman Olly Alexander, a coupling written up and celebrated in BuzzFeed lists.
But even at the peak of Clean Bandit’s fame, there were hints that Amin-Smith may have another string to his bow. In a 2014 Guardian interview, one of his bandmates noted that “Neil took a master’s in economics and got the highest mark in his year”, prompting the interviewer to ask: “Why is he messing around in a pop band? Shouldn’t he be running the IMF or something?”
Two years later, Amin-Smith appeared to ask himself the same question, and decided to quit the world of music. Instead, he went on to become presumably the only person in British history to quit a chart-topping band to join the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), the widely respected economic policy think-tank.
As a research economist at the IFS, Amin-Smith spent three years working on projects relating to tax devolution and local government finance – hardly the most glamorous or high-profile research areas, even in the economics world, but topics conveniently close to the heart of the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.
After three years with the IFS, Amin-Smith joined the Treasury as a civil service policy advisor, before joining Rachel Reeves’s team as a Labour advisor in 2022, while the party was still in opposition – securing a role as one of her special advisors after Labour’s landslide election victory in July 2024.
Being posh, privately educated and handsome might open some doors, but in politics it can just as easily raise people’s hackles, or set them against you instead – especially given Amin-Smith’s penchant for wearing open-collar shirts accented with hipster earrings.
However, by general accounts, Amin-Smith seems to have avoided that trap, with former colleagues suggesting he was generally a nice person to work with and knew his stuff in meetings. Beyond that, it was clear he had actually done the work to qualify for his role.
“I mean he’s better qualified for the role than a lot of spads are,” said one former Labour Treasury advisor, using a common Westminster shorthand for special advisor. “It looks like he’s done the work.
“He went back to uni to qualify as an economist, and cut his teeth at the IFS, who I think we can agree is probably the leading think-tank in the UK on economics… he has a solid CV and is more than qualified for the role.”
By convention, political advisors do not talk to the media on the record and are discouraged from giving any public commentary on politics, partly because the spotlight is supposed to be on ministers and MPs, and partly to avoid confusion between advisors’ personal opinions and government policy.
Amin-Smith largely left show business in 2016, but last year, he briefly returned to Clean Bandit to play the violin on their single ‘Tell Me Where U Go’ (Photo: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage)This long-standing convention has been tightened still further by Andy Burnham, who was keen to avoid the rival media briefings from different factions of No 10 advisors that contributed to a mounting sense of division and infighting in the Starmer operation.
Under Burnham’s new rules, special advisors are forbidden from messaging with members of the media, even if off the record, unless their role specifically involves public communication.
As a result, few people have much of a sense of Amin-Smith’s personal political views and where he sits within the broad church of the Labour Party. The limited number of public pronouncements from his social media accounts – which generally predate his time in politics – included encouragement to people in Ireland to vote “yes” in the country’s referendum on same-sex marriage, and a statement in support of trans rights. He also, several years ago, went briefly viral after calling out misogyny among gay men.
People who had worked with or taken meetings with Amin-Smith suggested he gave little away about his personal political views in their experience, too – instead working to represent the positions of his boss.
This combination of being generally well-regarded and not having his own political views too squarely on the record might have worked in Amin-Smith’s favour, following Keir Starmer’s decision to stand down as prime minister, and Andy Burnham’s decision to replace Rachel Reeves as chancellor with John Healey, the former defence secretary.
Typically, when a cabinet minister leaves a department, their special advisors leave with them – but Amin-Smith was kept on, first as an advisor to Healey, and then, according to reporting by The Times, into a new role inside No 10 itself.
This might herald some trouble for Amin-Smith and Burnham alike, according to one former Labour advisor. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were the two least popular politicians in government, and the government’s economic policy was not seen as a triumph. One Labour advisor told me that promoting one of Rachel Reeves’s closest advisors to No 10 might signal that Burnham doesn’t intend to change that strategy much – which they thought to be a mistake.
After three years with the IFS, Amin-Smith joined the Treasury as a civil service policy advisor, before joining Rachel Reeves’s team as a Labour advisor in 2022 (Photo: Justin Tallis/Reuters)“I guess the question for Amin-Smith is, given that he was a Reeves advisor, how much culpability is there on him for bad policy decision-making,” he asked, “and how much of his advice for Burnham will be the status quo?”
If, as Bill Clinton’s chief strategist once famously said, politics is show business for ugly people, then Neil Amin-Smith – Andy Burnham’s new economic advisor – surely has no place in politics. If you ask around Westminster about Amin-Smith, the first thing almost anyone – even straight men – comments on is his appearance. One Labour colleague described Amin-Smith’s good looks as “genuinely distracting”. A civil servant admitted finding it difficult to make eye contact in meetings with him.
This is not generally how people talk about new senior advisors to the prime minister, especially ones who will likely become significant voices on economic policy.
It is not, though, merely the Westminster bubble that has been distracted by Amin-Smith’s good looks. Last year, The London Standard – formerly The Evening Standard – placed him in the number one spot on its list of “The 100 sexiest Londoners”.
Amin-Smith might have mostly left the music world behind in 2016, but he has not abandoned show business entirely. Last year, he briefly returned to Clean Bandit to play the violin on their single “Tell Me Where U Go”.
Elsewhere, he was still an occasional fixture on red carpets, though generally as the plus-one of his partner, the BAFTA-nominated actor Ellis Howard, best known for his role playing Paris Lee in BBC Three’s What It Feels Like for a Girl. Ellis is somewhat more openly political than his partner, posting on issues including poverty and trans rights on his Instagram feed.
Still, despite his ongoing dalliance with show business bringing a little glitz into the political world, Amin-Smith’s new No 10 role is deadly serious. When it comes to fame versus politics, Amin-Smith has very clearly decided exactly where he’d rather be.
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