TWO weeks ago Keir Starmer reorganised his top team because his “honeymoon” ended before it had even begun. But what do the new members of his team tell us about where the government wants to go? 

The newly appointed head of communications James Lyons suggests Labour might retreat further into the corporate-sponsored world of Westminster lobbying.

Starmer’s government expected to get a honeymoon period, a wave of popularity because they finally ended Tory rule. But Starmer’s mix of Labour right politics, minimal reform and obvious enthusiasm for corporate freebies mean there was no honeymoon, with polls showing a crash in public approval. 

Starmer’s solution was sacking his chief of staff, former civil servant Sue Gray, and replacing her with Morgan McSweeney, the Labour operator who helped to engineer his Labour leadership election. 

The case for replacing Gray is that a technocratic “administrator” like her couldn’t control the government “narrative,” so he has brought in a team of “political communicators” under McSweeney to keep Starmer on track.

This team comes from the very factional Labour right, making everyone outside that faction — Labour mayors and some “soft-left” Cabinet ministers — nervous.

Lyons has been brought in as a new “head of strategic communications” under McSweeney, on the theory that it isn’t Starmer’s big-business-led policies that are unpopular, merely the way they are communicated. 

Journalists generally welcomed Lyons’ appointment, because he is an ex-journalist, so “one of theirs.” The Guardian described Lyons as “hugely experienced as a former tabloid and broadsheet journalist who went on to big jobs in PR dealing with crisis situations,” someone who “boasts connections in Westminster among journalists and politicians.” 

Lyons went from the Daily Mirror to become deputy political editor of the Sunday Times from 2014-17. He made friends with the Labour right in that period by carrying many stories they cooked up to try undermine the newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. 

Helping to spread negative stories to undermine a left-wing Labour leader is exactly the kind of thing the press admires, but might not be that useful now the job is to promoting a Labour prime minister. The Labour right are experts at negative backroom briefing against the rest of the Labour Party — or even each other. It’s easy to imagine Lyons becoming part of a machine more focused on trying to, say, weaken Angela Rayner or Louise Haigh, than actually promote positive Labour policies. 

More strikingly, Lyons spent the last year as “head of corporate policy communications, Europe” for TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media giant.

Much of his job involved meeting politicians, such as President Emmanuel Macron, to persuade them against regulating his controversial social media firm. 

Trying to persuade British MPs that TikTok did not need more regulation was also part of his brief. Labour in opposition took fairly anti-TikTok positions: in 2023 the Tory government banned TikTok from government devices over fears the Chinese government might access data from the platform. 

Labour argued the Tory government wasn’t going far enough on banning TikTok. In opposition Labour also made much of TikTok’s irresponsible promotion of unsuitable messages to younger users. 

By embracing TikTok’s former lobbyist, Starmer’s government is showing that all its supposed “principles,” its worries about Chinese influence or social media undermining childhood will melt away if a big corporation is offering to employ them or their mates. Lyons’ appointment shows that sucking up to corporations is Team Starmer’s over-riding principle. 

If you look at Lyons’ own social media, you see a world where politics is just a playground for corporate-backed Westminster insiders. Because Lyons was a lobbyist, his key “social media” is business networking site LinkedIn. 

Here you find Lyons reposting another TikTok lobbyist’s reflections on this year’s party conferences. In the post, Lyons’ then-colleague, Giles Derrington (himself a former Lib Dem official) wrote about “an incredible Party Conference season with TikTok!” 

This included “our first ever sponsorship of the Liberal Democratic Disco, with an obligatory Ed Davey rendition of Sweet Caroline,” while at Labour conference “with Labour Students, we brought the incredible Will Young to a packed crowd, before he was followed by the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy with an epic DJ set” with Anas Sarwar and Emily Thornberry “having an actual dance off to Up Town Funk.” 

For the Tories TikTok offered “the iconic Peter Andre dancing on the tables at our event at Conservative Conference.” This is exactly the mix of MPs accepting trivial, embarrassing freebie entertainment from dubious corporations, having a jolly party while breaking promises of reform, that has thrown Labour into crisis. It is hard to imagine Lyons is the answer to that crisis. 

One feeling you definitely get from Lyons’ own posts is that politics is a club for insiders, where closeness to power matters more than political principles. Lyons promotes an advertisement for interns from InHouse Communications boss Katie Perrior, saying this is a “great opportunity at a great outfit with some people you can really learn from.” 

InHouse Communications is a corporate lobbying firm set up by Perrior, a former Boris Johnson aide, which represents private health firms, vape companies and low-wage “gig employers” like Uber and Getir. 

Elsewhere Lyons is full of praise for job moves by “my (super smart) colleague Theo Bertram” and “my (super smart)… lunch buddy James Kirkup.” 

Bertram was a Tony Blair adviser who became a lobbyist for TikTok before taking a job as director of centrist think tank the Social Market Foundation. Kirkup was a Telegraph political editor who became a director of the Social Market Foundation before leaving to join lobbyists Apella Advisors, who represent companies including Thames Water. 

Lyons happily lives in a world where politics means ex-Tory, Lib Dem or Labour staff all switching to new jobs as lobbyists for the bad guys in big business. His new job will draw the Labour government closer to that world.