Co-conspirators may remember Wes Streeting’s boyfriend Joe Dancey landing a plum gig (£104,985) as Labour’s new Executive Director of Policy and Communications – a combo of two previously separate roles. His job: “provide strategic leadership across the organisation to ensure that Policy and Communications functions are at the cutting edge.” Co-conspirators can probably make up their own minds on how that’s going…
Ministers are beginning to more angrily chirp at the lack of direction and poor communications – Reeves is, for now, the natural venting target ahead of the multi-year spending review next month. Within the government there is concern that the party political end of the effort is being let down by “never present” Dancey, who seems to have failed to get over being the only Labour candidate not to win in the Teesside area after Tory incumbent Matt Vickers successfully defended his Stockton West seat. He is frequently in the constituency and staffers have observed him ‘constantly’ having coffee meetings in Portcullis House – as though he were an MP…
The consensus is that party communications have lost their edge since Dancey started work. Labour has quietly briefed that Tom Hamilton, longtime ex-Labour adviser and Tom Watson’s former head of policy and research, will take up a role as the party’s “executive director of policy and research.” That means the Dancey combined role experiment is over…
Dancey will still head up the umbrella communications operation in Labour. Guido hears Hamilton is meant to start the week after next. A government source tells Guido: “The party needs its teeth back.” Ultimately it’s a contest to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic…
Green Deputy Leader Rachel Millward said:
“The reality is that it’s Zack Polanski who brought the nation, Andy Burnham. And if we hadn’t had the success of the Green Party in this last year since Zack’s been leading, which has been unprecedented, phenomenal success and a growth from about 60,000 members to 230,000, if we hadn’t had that much pressure on Labour, then we’d probably still be in the Starmer regime, which was pretty much ushering in a Reform government with its lurch to the right. So actually, what we’re seeing now is that we’ve set the political agenda and the government is picking that up.”