For aspiring advisors at Westminster, the call inviting them to join the Prime Minister’s inner team is a dream come true. With the Number 10 top-level pass comes all the perks of personal contact with the PM and unparalleled insight into the heart of political power.
Yet after a rocky first year and a kamikaze political slide into an unsettled summer, a role at the centre of power feels like it should come with danger money. Starmer is now expected to shuffle his third senior aide from the heart of his operation in less than 12 months as Nin Pandit, his principal private secretary since last October, departs for a role honing some of the policy areas Starmer chose as his focus a year ago.
This is a sideways move - and Number 10 sources are keen to say not a demotion, just a “refocussing” of the best skillsets for the best positions. In reality, it is another sign of an unsettled and often fractious Number 10 team.
Pandit’s policy role adds to a number of other “premium tier” people including Liz Lloyd, the former Blair staffer, whose job it is to connect policy reform to the rough trade of the political fray as Westminster returns next week. That raises questions about Lloyd’s future - and much else. And Pandit’s successor Dan York-Smith is a “Treasury appointee” as one insider puts it - a sign that Starmer is angsty about the failure to grip a compelling economic message.
Pandit is a former NHS digital executive, initially appointed on the recommendation of Wes Streeting, the ambitious health secretary, to join up Starmer’s broader political message (which can be vague at the best of times) with his policy objectives (which can be even vaguer). That was a curious skillset for the job however - previous holders have been Whitehall insiders at a high level including the executive heft of prior Private Secretaries like the late Chris Martin under David Cameron or Olly Robbins and the late Sir Jeremy Heywood under Gordon Brown, who were closely networked and interconnected with permanent secretaries from civil service careers. Pandit knows the AI and healthcare scene, but is less eclectic in her contacts and far less political in her instincts.
One of the odd things about the Starmer operation (having covered Number 10 ins and outs for a good two decades) is how few of the senior inner team feel accessible to the outside world - or much interested in convening it.
Starmer’s senior inner team feel inaccessible to the outside world
As one recent former holder of the role puts it: ”Your job is to graft onto the principal (the PM) and anticipate what they need to get their priorities actioned and cajole the right people to being supportive - but that means knowing where he or she wants to head and clearing the road”.
Pandit will now move to a role on policy work on Starmer’s “five missions”, not least because most voters have no idea what they are (growth, health, clean energy, crime and social mobility). But that highlights another area which could prove fatal to the government’s recovery chances, by missing out the burning topic of asylum and immigration.
All of this needs a clearer line between rhetoric and outcome. But the latest move does the opposite: it brings Pandit into the orbit of Liz Lloyd, the tough former senior Blair aide who runs “delivery and innovation”, but who has also vied for influence with Stuart Ingram, who heads the policy unit. Many cooks are in a crowded No 10 kitchen - with no appetising meal in prospect.
A domino effect of departures began with the exit of “Sue Gray of a hundred days”. Gray barely began her tenure as chief of staff before falling out with the powerful strategy boss, Morgan McSweeney and then headed to brood in the Lords after a long tussle over her salary arrangements and poor treatment, as she saw it, by the PM .
A rough year has also seen turf tussles leading to the departure in March of Matthew Doyle, the head of communications in opposition and the rise in his place of the former journalist and TikTok communications expert, James Lyons, with a briskly efficient Steph Driver in charge of say to day media dealings.
Even this new-ish apple cart is about to be upset by the appointment of a top News UK executive, David “Dins” Dinsmore on the explicit desire of the PM as overall head of government communications to slim down a vast PR workforce and advance the use of AI. The media operation in Number 10, however, is keen to keep personal control of Starmer’s communications - an issue which arose in honing the job description.
The damage of U-turns and winter fuel allowances, failure to fight off opposition to its welfare and disability reforms and a weakened chancellor mean that a staffing re-boot is inevitable and the Number 10 “org chart” is always prone to occasional judders, ousters and power plays. At the heart of it is the status of the “principal” - and whether the PM really knows what he or she wants. After the doors have revolved, that will remain the question to answer.
Anne McElvoy is co host of Politics at Sam And Anne’s
