Useful Darren Jones

In a government short of calm authority, Jones is proving the value of a minister who can see the mission and the machinery.

Darren Jones is becoming one of the Government’s most useful ministers. This is not quite the same as becoming one of its best-known ministers. But it is surely better. In Westminster fame is often the consolation prize for people who are out of proper work.

Jones is good on the media. He is good at the despatch box. He is also good at something rarer: remembering that policy consists not only of a soundbite on Radio 4 but of decisions, money, people, timetables, milestones and consequences.

Useful

He always sounds as though he has read the file, not skimmed it. His manner is calm and forensic. He does not arrive at the despatch box looking for his Martin Luther King moment. He takes the issue apart, identifies the working parts and tells the House which bit has failed.

This was useful today this week because the issue was Peter Mandelson.

There are names in politics which do not just describe a person but summon a whole fantastical world. Peter Mandelson is one of them. To my generation he was not just a colleague, strategist, fixer, enemy or saviour. He was the one of the biggest planets in the solar system.

Tony and Gordon may put it differently now, but New Labour had three red giants: Tony, Gordon and Peter.

To mix metaphors wildly, Tony had the sunlit uplands; Gordon had the engine room; Peter had the wiring and the fuse box and secret buttons only he could press to illuminate or darken the stage.

Darren Jones has the advantage of temporal distance. He was born in 1986, a year after I first met Peter. When Labour won in 1997 Darren was ten. While some of us were living through the New Labour psychodramas, he was engaged in matters such as maths homework, football stickers and what his mum was making for tea.

For Jones, Mandelson is history rather than intoxicated memory and scar tissue. No fascination. No buried grudge. These conditions made him the right minister for the big day.

In a previous media round Jones had already said the crucial point out loud: Peter Mandelson should never have been appointed. Yesterday he was dealing with the consequences of this flawed decision.

There was a cold clarity in that. He did not try to make the appointment look less indefensible by placing it under the dim yellow light of process. Nor did he turn it into one of those solemn Westminster sermons in which everyone agrees that lessons must be learned. He jettisoned Peter with the brutal calm of a man cutting loose spoiled cargo before the ship hits the rocks.

He did not try to dazzle the House with indignation. Nor did he sink into the blancmange of officialese. He plainly explained the documents, the redactions, the police requests, the missing messages and the process still to come.

There is another clip I will put below because it shows the same quality under more enjoyable conditions. Jones was answering an urgent question with the Prime Minister behind the eight ball and Kemi Badenoch leading the charge. The Opposition sensed danger to the Government and became overexcited. Jones began in a difficult chamber. The Labour benches wanted reassurance. The Conservatives wanted a scalp. The Prime Minister wanted it all to end. Then Jones changed the weather.

He did not do it by bellowing, Prescott style. He did it by finding the weak point in the Opposition’s case and pressing on it. He exposed the overreach. He made the attack look less like scrutiny and more like shallow opportunism.

The Labour benches came alive behind him. It was a bravura performance precisely because it did not advertise itself as one. The best Commons performers are not always those who produce the finest phrases. They are those who understand the mood of the House and move it half a yard in the right direction. Jones did that.

His biography helps explain the steadiness. He was born at Southmead Hospital and grew up in Lawrence Weston, in the Bristol North West seat he now represents. His mum was a hospital administrator. His dad was a security guard. Money was tight. New Labour investment reached his community, including a ‘gifted and talented’ scheme that helped point him towards university. He became the first in his family to go. For the flat in the area he lives in, this was unusual.

Jones read human bioscience at Plymouth, worked for the NHS, trained as a solicitor and specialised in technology law, including energy and telecoms. He chaired the Business, Energy and Industrial Select Committee. He became Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, then Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This is a steep and fast climb. It does not feel accidental.

Like Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, he comes from humble origins and talks about them without turning the violin up to eleven. He does not ask to be admired for where he started but to me, where you start matters in politics because it gives an indication of your tenacity.

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he entered the department where Cabinet ministers’ dreams go to die and his first job was to administer the poison. Yet this Guardian interview on the spending review shows the wider Jones project. He was not just counting out the money or trapping ministers fingers in the till as he slammed it shut. He was trying to connect fiscal discipline to Labour purpose, with child poverty close to the centre of the argument.

This is the right sort of Labour politics. Not sentiment but method. The child who needs a better start in life is the moral end. The route is less stirring: spending envelopes, negotiations, reviews, departmental settlements, performance measures and the small dull gears by which government either works or does not. Jones sees the mission and uses the machinery.

He’s quietly achieved something that several ministers over the decades have completely failed on: civil service pay reform, pushing through one of the biggest changes to senior civil service pay in decades, introducing performance-related pay for top officials. The easy version would have been a large speech attacking Whitehall and a private retreat before the unions arrived. Jones chose the harder route. He worked with the unions and the system to get the reform done.

This is his method. Reform without media drama. The Mandelson statement was not the of day any ambitious politician dreams of. No one enters public life hoping to explain redactions, missing messages and a former ambassador’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. But politics has a way of testing ministers not on centre stage but at the mop cupboard.

Jones did not make the Mandelson story disappear. No minister could. The documents are too awkward and the history too heavy. But he stopped the Government from digging a deeper hole than the one they have already dug.

There is a brutal symmetry here too. A child whose life chances were widened by the social ambition of the New Labour years stood in the Commons and helped draw a line under one of New Labour’s great architects.

One generation built the ship. Another is trying to keep it off the reef.

Westminster produces too many people who become famous before they become useful. Jones appears to be attempting the rarer route. He is becoming useful first.

I like the cut of his jib.