Musical chairs: Keir Starmer ushers in a new cabinet of trusted 'fixers and doers'

The prime minister's reshuffle signals a clear determination to tackle issues such as immigration and welfare by putting the ministers he considers most effective in charge, writes Rachel Sylvester

-  Rachel Sylvester

A giant electronic whiteboard dominated the No 10 study as Keir Starmer and his closest advisers planned their first major reshuffle last week. Names were moved effortlessly around between departments on the touch screen as the prime minister's new cabinet took shape in the wake of Angela Rayner's resignation.

For veterans of the Blair era, the "super-whizzy" technology was a revelation. "In the old days it was Post-it notes," one said, "and there was a time when Downing Street called up the wrong peer by mistake to offer him a ministerial job." The digital age may finally have reached Whitehall, but the fundamentals of politics have not changed.

This reshuffle, like so many before it, was all about power, ambition and survival.

The loss of Rayner was a huge blow to the government and to the prime minister personally, as the handwritten note to his former deputy showed, but Starmer acted swiftly to seize the initiative.

With 10 Whitehall departments getting a new secretary of state, Charlie Falconer, the former Labour lord chancellor, said the prime minister had delivered a form of "electric shock" therapy to his government. John Healey, the defence secretary, is the only member of Starmer's 2020 top team who is still in the same job.

That Britain is on its ninth foreign secretary and 13th justice secretary in 15 years does not create an impression of stability or encourage good government. The gilt-trimmed lord chancellor's gown, which had to be shortened by 14 inches and pinned up with safety pins for the diminutive Shabana Mahmood, will now have to be lengthened again just 14 months later for her successor David Lammy.