‘A piece on advice’

On Monday, like many of you, I watched LabourList’s International Women’s Day event with the Fabian Society: an in-conversation with Baroness Margaret Curran and Baroness Diane Hayter. The eagle-eyed will have noticed that I was not the one doing the “in conversation” part. I’m currently working from home recovering from a broken arm, so huge thanks go to our excellent chair Karin Christiansen for stepping in so brilliantly.

The discussion centred on women in politics: the barriers they have faced across long careers, and the challenges that remain. Violence against women and girls featured heavily, including the government’s strategy and how the Epstein scandal has impacted public perceptions of the issue. They spoke too about childcare, family support and the reality that those who shoulder most caring responsibilities – women – still face the steepest climb into leadership — in politics and beyond.

Hayter made a point that should be obvious but too often isn’t: you need women in the room because the issues women face are not the same as those men face. Social care is a perfect example. The workforce is overwhelmingly female. Unpaid carers are overwhelmingly female. And many women find themselves juggling childcare for grandchildren while caring for elderly relatives. Without women’s voices present, those pressures are too easily overlooked.

READ MORE: A gory night for Labour

It was a wide-ranging, thoughtful conversation, and one we’ll be sharing with readers soon. But it also served as a reminder of why LabourList is keen to talk to figures like Curran and Hayter in the first place. Labour grandees carry institutional memory. They know the party, the movement and the machinery of government. Their experience matters.

Advice itself, though, has become a more contested commodity during Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Starmer has always been someone who takes advice. On politics he has relied heavily on figures such as Morgan McSweeney; on the law, on allies like Attorney General Richard Hermer. That instinct — to seek counsel — is not a weakness. Quite the opposite.

But the politics of advice has sharpened. On the current international crisis, Starmer is hearing conflicting counsel. Former prime minister Tony Blair — alongside figures such as Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage — argues Britain should remain tightly aligned with the US, whatever the circumstances. Many within Labour think the opposite: that Britain should keep its distance.

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This is the reality of leadership. Prime ministers receive advice constantly, much of it unsolicited. Deciding who to listen to — and when — is part of the job. Ultimately it must come down to the leader’s own values and mission. Advice can help with the how. It cannot determine the what.

Recent history makes the point starkly. The chaotic premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss showed the danger of leaders either ignoring advice altogether or surrounding themselves with those who simply echo their convictions. That model would serve neither Starmer nor the country.

Where voices like Curran and Hayter matter is in navigating the craft of politics itself: how to build support, how to manage institutions, how to turn ambition into delivery.

Some critics argue Starmer has brought too many veterans of past Labour governments back into the fold. I’ve written before about the tensions between his Blue Labour advisers and those steeped in the New Labour era.

But the problem isn’t listening to people who know how to get things done. The problem is when some confuse their experience of how politics works with certainty about what Labour should still be trying to achieve — unchanged, three decades on.

If Starmer is to draw properly on that experience, he must be clear about one thing. Labour’s goals in 2026 are not those of 1997, 2001 or 2005.

The advice he seeks should be about how to achieve today’s mission — not an attempt to relitigate yesterday’s. And it is here where voices of experience like Baroness Hayter and Baroness Curran are invaluable, and we thank them for sharing their experience with us.

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