PM vowed Lords reform, but packs chamber with his allies

Since Matthew Doyle lost his job in charge of comms at Downing Street nine months ago, there hasn’t exactly been a stampede to snap him up.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

The main offer of paid employment appears to have been a part-time role with the Malta Film Commission.

But Doyle needn’t lose much sleep about having to log on for jobseeker’s allowance. Just before Christmas, Keir Starmer announced that Doyle would henceforth be afforded a perch on the plump red seats in the upper chamber. Doyle is 50, so he’s looking at maybe 30 years of making, amending and passing laws for the rest of us with a daily attendance allowance of £371. Nice work if you can get it.

There may be some who regard the early months of Starmer’s time at No 10 as a triumph of communications. A more general view is that the messaging was a bit of a shambles, and in March last year, Doyle was shown the door. You might almost call his subsequent peerage a reward for failure. Actually, it feels rather more cynical than that.

It was a little over three years ago that Keir Starmer was promising to do away with the House of Lords altogether as part of his plans to restore trust in politics. In November 2022, he told Labour peers of his revulsion at the way Boris Johnson had been appointing “lackeys and donors” to the upper House.

You may remember the row at the time over Johnson’s decision to elevate two backroom advisers, Ross Kempsell, 30, and Charlotte Owen, 29. Well, it would all be different with Starmer, or so he promised. In his first term. he said he would strip politicians of the power to make appointments to the second chamber. And then he would move to abolish the Lords altogether, replacing it with a new elected chamber.

And here we are, tottering into 2026 with the prospect of Lord Doyle. If the name is unfamiliar, it will be because Matthew Doyle is something of a blank sheet of paper. His LinkedIn profile records a 27-year career in spin and communications. He works in the shadows. There is virtually no public record of what he himself thinks or believes about anything.