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Daily Telegraph
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EDITOR'S PICK
Good morning from William Cash, the Mace Editor-in-chief
Kemi’s true blue purge
The news that former Tory cabinet minister Grant Shapps has been told he’s failed Kemi Badenoch’s new would-be candidate selection board – headed by chairman Clare Hambro – is putting fear into dozens of former Conservative MPs. Whether the party should be humiliating loyal servants of the party and making former ministers re-apply as if they are straight out of CCHQ Research Department is a Westminster talking point.
At a political soiree a few weeks ago, I met a former minister who looked less than happy about having to be subjected to the same selection process he had previously passed some 15 years ago. “It feels strange sitting the exam again,” he said. “I think I helped set it.”
Knives out
Originally, I thought Kemi’s new purge was designed to get rid of non-Tory candidates but now I wonder if it’s more political. An opportunity to knife the further career ambitions of those who were not Kemi allies and liquidate political enemies or non-loyalists.
Such discrimination against anybody Kemi doesn’t care for much does raise questions about whether the Conservative Party is striking the right note in claiming to be the party of meritocracy and equal opportunity. The Tory party has always been a fairly broad church.
Reverse discrimination
On the whole, I favour Kemi’s candidate pogrom. Labour and Conservative candidate selection has long been a rotten racket. For years, under former CCHQ Head of Candidates Gareth Fox, the Tories’ virtuous talk of “diversity” concealed a covert policy of reverse discrimination against white, upper middle-class candidates.
Thankfully the Hon Clare Hambro, Chairman of the Conservative Candidates Committee, looks to be putting an end to all this. And about time. On becoming party leader, David Cameron reportedly instructed Fox to ensure that no new Etonian candidates would be put forward for safe seats. Political journalist Harry Cole, at the time, wrote after his investigation into the 2015 batch: “If you’re a white, middle- or upper-class man, you’re unlikely to have landed a safe seat.”
Leave it to Boris
This CCHQ prejudice often worked against Brexiters. One might have expected that when Boris Johnson took over, CCHQ would have looked for articulate Leavers to stand as candidates, especially in Labour-held Northern or Midlands seats.
That proved harder than expected. The Parliamentary Assessment Board (PAB) selection procedure remained deliberately opaque with one staffer admitting to The Mace some years ago that it’s “just an excuse to say no” to various people if they don’t tick the right affirmative action boxes. At one PAB in Cambridge, where all the candidates were, according to one, “smart, successful high-achievers”, all nine – mostly white, long-term party members and avowed Leavers – were rejected.
Why was this? The answer’s simple. CCHQ was – under Fox, and PMs Cameron, Johnson (aka Dominic Cummings), May and Sunak – still a bastion of Remain. While Boris was able to ruthlessly cull Remainer rebels from his first cabinet and pack it with Brexiters, he and Cummings seemingly didn’t have time, or the effort, to exorcise the Cameron and May staffer legacy within CCHQ.
Insiders expected Boris to make a purge of the candidate list at CCHQ but he was removed from office before he had a chance. In the Gareth Fox years, there were two types of candidate pass: a “full list pass” meant you could apply for any seat, while the “team initiative pass” was awarded to “less desirable” second-tier candidates, allowing them to stand in Labour-held or urban seats.
Pale, male, fail
The procedure openly discriminated against Oxbridge or public school types, Indeed, the policy is spelt out in the opening question of the 2019 applicant guidance notes.
“What are the assessors looking for?” the document asked. The answer didn’t make promising reading for many hopefuls: “The assessors are not looking for a conventional Conservative MP. The Party is seeking diversity in its candidates.”
The message was clear, a former CCHQ staffer told The Mace: “Unless you tick the ‘diversity’ box, there’s not much point in paying the £250 PAB course fee.”
Wrong answers
The application process was not outdated but many thought it contradicted 100 years of Conservative thinking and philosophy. A copy of the 2019 guidance notes was passed to our Pepys columnist by a disillusioned candidate who said that despite all the progressive noises, it felt as if the selection exam hadn’t been changed in 20 years.
“We were told to write a press release to solve a local motorway planning issue,” the candidate said. “In the case notes, the local farming community were badly affected by foot and mouth disease. But that epidemic was back in 2001!”
The only question he was asked was to name the head of the European Commission. The ‘public-speaking exercise’ question was to speak for three minutes about which Strictly Come Dancing contestant he would like to be partnered with. Another was asked to speak on the subject of “whether drinking wine led to a longer life”.
Let’s hope the new selection board, under Hambro, brings some sanity back to becoming a Tory candidate. As the co-founder of the Italian Conservatives, I would suggest the answer, if they don’t change the question, is “Sono innamorato a di bere il vino Italiano.”
Burnham’s bromance back on
There was a slightly embarrassing moment for lobby firm Flint two days ago when it sent out its latest newsletter from James Purnell, forgetting that he is now Andy Burnham’s chief of staff at Number 10.
In an insightful op-ed piece for us, Mark Leftly, head of political affairs at Sodali & Co, argues that Purnell’s return to Downing Street is more than a nostalgic Blair-Brown-era reunion.
As Burnham builds his Downing Street operation, public affairs professionals need to understand the overlapping Labour networks – from the Roses set to the Miliband revivalists – now competing to shape the new administration.
Surprise leak
As Leftly writes, the leak of James Purnell’s return to the heart of British politics took even Burnham’s Labour leadership transition team by surprise. “I think the idea just came straight out of Andy’s head,” huffs one of his plotters.
Purnell was barely a month into his forties when he stood down at the 2010 general election. In less than nine years as MP for Stalybridge and Hyde, Purnell held two Cabinet roles – Work and Pensions; Culture, Media and Sport – and helped lead a rebellion against the prime minister of the day, Gordon Brown.
His fanbase was shocked. Burnham was the health secretary at the time and would not swap Westminster for the mayoralty of Greater Manchester for another seven years (and two failed leadership bids). He said of Purnell’s announcement: “James is a great friend of mine and a man of huge intellect and talent. He won’t be completely lost to the Labour Party, I’m sure, because he remains as committed to the party as he ever was.
“I think he’s obviously decided to pursue other options and I wish him well in whatever he chooses to do, but James is a great loss to frontline politics.”
Friends reunited
Famously, Purnell and Burnham shared an office when they were cub MPs in the early 2000s. Many political observers unimaginatively compared them to Brown and Blair, who constructed New Labour from cramped House of Commons’ quarters in the 1980s.
The bond, though, is real, notes Leftly. After a 16-year hiatus – during which time he strategised for the BBC, created a bizarre supergroup leadership team at the University of the Arts London and ran lobbying group Flint – Purnell is back. As Burnham’s chief of staff, his role involves restructuring Downing Street – including its offshoot, Number 10 North – and advising on a specialist policy area, welfare reform.
As Leftly points out: “What is really important for the lobbying industry, however, is what his appointment tells us about Burnham and the Labour networks that influence him.”
Coming up Roses
Looking at them, there don’t seem to be many similarities between the Stone Roses-loving, Everton-supporting Burnham and the classical literature-adoring, bus-model hobbyist Boris Johnson.
Most would point to their departures from Westminster to mayoral positions and then barnstorming, heroic returns to the House of Commons as a way into No 10 as obvious comparisons.
Fools gold
Yet, as Leftly notes, many of those who have worked for or are close to them point to more or less the same issue: both have plenty of political admirers, but not many genuine mates in Westminster. In other words, their support in the Houses of Parliament is and was broad, rather than deep. “Andy is not even that close to most of the northern mayors, [Liverpool’s] Steve Rotheram aside,” says a senior Yorkshire-based Labour source.
Any lobbyist who has attended a special adviser’s house party will know, however, that Labour’s connections run far deeper than those of the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. There are MPs debating the future direction of their party who would never have appeared together on the typical stakeholder mapping exercises that are so beloved by public affairs experts and their clients. Certainly, no amount of artificial intelligence would have made these connections, says Leftly.
Second coming
He observes that perhaps the strongest Labour networks might be dubbed “the Roses set”, which includes Burnham admirers based in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Many of them socialise in Leeds and York. Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh, who were both forced to depart Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet, are among their number.
Although Rayner was tipped as a possible successor to Sir Keir, both noted Burnham’s popularity and ability to connect with the public. They were geographically close enough to Burnham to have the access necessary to persuade him that they should help him become PM.
I am the resurrection
Haigh, for example, now First Secretary of State, recently admitted such discussions went back a year and has become a key ally, overseeing Burnham’s Makerfield by-election victory in June. The pair’s closest political advisers acted in what insiders have suggested was “in effect, a secretariat for Andy’s campaign” since Labour’s disastrous local election results in May.
In effect, Burnham’s leadership ambitions but lack of organisational apparatus meant that the Roses set could easily impose themselves and their governmental objectives on him as a potential prime ministerial candidate.
Read Mark Leftly’s full article here.
Tech it or leave it
Ten years. Seven prime ministers. Multiple agendas. That’s too many, if you ask Popsa CEO Liam Houghton. Running a business is already hard in itself, he argues, but having to navigate continuous policy change on top of it isn’t helping.
Successive governments have made it difficult for founders to take risks, scale companies and even stay in the country. A 2025 survey showed that nearly half of fintech founders have considered relocating their business outside the UK. If Britain wants to retain its position as a competitive tech ecosystem, that needs to change.
New prime minister Andy Burnham has an opportunity to fix this by making Britain the best place to start and scale a business. In his insightful op-ed, Houghton outlines the areas he says Burnham should focus on.
Rewarding job creation
Every politician talks about growth. Far fewer make it cheaper to create it. For Andy Burnham to deliver on the government’s mission of bringing “good growth in every postcode”, he needs to make it genuinely worthwhile for businesses to hire. That means reducing the cost of employment through payroll tax credits and targeted National Insurance relief for scaling companies, so that expanding a team becomes an easier decision rather than a financial risk.
France offers a useful model here: its tax credit on research expenditure lets startups that spend at least 15% of their total fiscal costs on R&D claim an exemption from employer social security contributions for R&D staff, alongside corporate tax and local economic tax benefits during their early profitable years. For a country notorious for high taxes, France is doing remarkably well by its founders. Britain should learn from what works elsewhere and build support programmes that operate on business timescales, rather than political ones.
Investing in British innovation
The UK’s IPO market has struggled for several years. Despite reforms to listing rules, we see delayed IPOs and companies bypassing London altogether. Last month, fintech scale-ups Revolut and Thought Machine both announced they were delaying their IPOs.
The UK has every ingredient it needs to become a genuine champion of innovation and to achieve AI sovereignty, says Loughton. If Andy Burnham wants to leave a lasting economic legacy, he needs to “build an environment where founders and talent choose Britain simply because it’s the easiest place in the world to build, hire, invest and list a company”.
Read the full article here.
The Advocate: Joe Chapman
Joe Chapman, Head of Public Affairs, Manchester Airports Group, “I love being an advocate”. Read more >
The Strategist: Sonia Khan
Senior partner, H/Advisors. “Those of us who’ve spent a good amount of time in government understand how government operates”. Read more >
Leader in UK Public Affairs
Steph Kenyon; Director of External Affairs, UK Chamber of Shipping. “I came to public affairs via a more unconventional route”. Read more >
Industry Watch
Dan Mulloy has left his role as chief press officer at Downing Street, where he led on AI, technology, industry and the economy, to join public affairs and communications consultancy Blakeney. Read more >
The Mace Questionnaire: Rt Hon Darren Jones MP
With Andy Burnham purging Starmer loyalists, his politically savvy fixer-in-chief Darren Jones is now on the backbenches. In his Mace Q & A, the former Chief Secretary to the PM reveals that when the political going gets tough, he plays the D:Ream anthem “Things Can Only Get Better”. Read more >
From the Archive: Andy Burnham
Number 20 in Ian Dale’s “Top 100 in UK Politics”, 2022. Four years ago, our political list guru Ian Dale named Andy Burnham as his number 20 in his “Top 100 in UK Politics”. In the last line of Burnham’s profile, Dale wrote: “Burnham is the bookies’ favourite to succeed Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party, despite the fact that he has stood and failed to be elected twice before.” Read more >
Op-ed of the Week
Lucy Carrier-Pilkington argues that Burnham’s surprise appointment of John Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer proves that Westminster politics is an unpredictable game of thrones. Read more >
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