Luke Akehurst: Starmer vs Streeting would be “fratricidal self-destruction”
In Luke Akehurst’s dreams, he’s running. Today, the 53-year-old MP for North Durham walks with a cane, the result of Poems syndrome, a neurological illness that left him wheelchair-bound for a time in his mid-thirties. But in his youth, he was a keen long-distance runner.
“I used to do mountain marathons,” he says. “I can’t do that now because I have a walking stick and neurological damage to my ankles and I wear splints. I repeatedly have a dream where I’m successfully, either with or without splints, running a half marathon again. So clearly somewhere at the back of my consciousness I regret that that’s something I can’t do anymore.”
We speak in his small but well-situated office in the Palace of Westminster. The room is sparse: a map of North Durham on the wall, a Matt cartoon, and little else. Sitting in one of Parliament’s standard-issue green armchairs, he has something of a 17th-century Dutch patrician about him. You can imagine him in a Rembrandt portrait – a seemingly jovial visage undermined by the piercing stare of a man who has made a fortune trading pepper and nutmeg. He is known as a fearsome political operator, a bane to Labour’s left and a loyal adjutant to the Starmer project. His critics call him Labour right; he prefers “moderate”. Beneath the machinations, though, is a man whose beliefs have been forged as much by the personal as they have by the political.
He reflects that his illness made him “more left-wing than I was”. He says, “I was always broadly centre-left in the Labour party, but being in a very vulnerable position – I was falling over in the street because my neurological system was shot to pieces, I was unable to even stand.”
He was bedbound for months, suddenly dependent on others and on the state. “The feeling of being wrapped up in this amazing, supportive, caring system, and dependent on the state protecting me, and the individual people working in the NHS from professors of neurology and haematology, the nurses, radiographers, porters, cleaners, ambulance drivers – this massive machinery looking after me, restoring me, saving my life, then teaching me to walk again…”
I am surprised to see Akehurst begin to fight back tears. “That was the socialist bit of the United Kingdom,” he continues. “Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan did that for me. They’d never met me, but they did that for me – [as did] the people paying taxes who never met me… It really made me a kind of born-again democratic socialist.”
It’s a story – and a political claim – that might surprise those who’ve faced Akehurst in one of Labour’s endless internal battles. He is secretary of Labour First, the organisation that represents the party’s traditional right and moderate wing, and is open about his role in what he euphemistically terms “stabilising” the party.
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“Gurinder [Josan MP] tends to lead, actually, on the parliamentary side of stuff, and I tend to lead on the stuff going on in the wider party out in the country about trying to make sure that we have – there’s an irony here, given we’ve been talking about instability inside the PLP – but trying to make sure that the wider party provides a stable, supportive platform for the government to get on with its job, that when ministers speak at Party Conference, they’re met with a friendly audience, not one that’s jeering them, that when the NEC is taking important decisions about how we campaign or how we select candidates, that it’s taking those from a perspective that is seeking to make the Labour government a success and get it back in for a second term, not from a perspective of being a group of people that are there to criticise or undermine the government.”
He’s aware of the conspiracies he inspires on the left. “It’s kind of flattering, on one level,” he says, half-smiling. “Because sometimes I’ll be like ‘I better get involved in this,’ because everyone’s going to accuse me of being at the centre of it anyway. I love every aspect of political activity. I’m sure of what I believe in. When a lot of people have doubts, I know where I stand – I’ve got a coherent, social-democratic ideological viewpoint.”
He knows that that certainty grates on people. “People don’t like the fact that someone they have profound disagreements with is usually one step ahead of them – in terms of organisation, campaigning energy, writing, saying stuff.”
It is also his staunch support for Israel that has made Akehurst a hate figure for some on the left. A recent clip of Owen Jones confronting him at Labour conference went viral. In it, Jones asks if Israel’s actions in Gaza were genocidal. Akehurst replies that he rejects the “G-word”, though he does call Israel’s behaviour “daft” and “reprehensible”. The footage – Jones pressing, Akehurst’s face reddening – ricocheted around social media, with many taking the opportunity to make fun of his appearance.
He shrugs off the online abuse. But there’s a personal element at play. He campaigned with Jones, years ago in Hackney, and while they’ve never been close politically, he had once considered Jones to have a “nuanced take” about Israel and Palestine. “Instead I was kind of being berated, and he was trying to entrap me in some kind of claim that because I’m broadly pro-Israel, I’m personally complicit in genocide. We’ve ended up in very different paradigms.”
His stance, he insists, has evolved. “Broadly, my position has moved in the same way the government has.” He’s still “traumatised” by the Hamas attacks of 7 October: months earlier, he’d visited kibbutzim that were later destroyed. “I don’t know whether people I had lunch with in the cafeteria survived,” he says quietly. “That’s one of the few things that makes me wake up at night.”
He is equally clear about Israel’s response. “The way that Israel conducted the war clearly caused far too many civilian casualties and so much destruction. It wasn’t the conduct of the war that got the hostages out – it was Donald Trump, bizarrely, intervening,” he said. “I don’t support the current Israeli government’s rejection of a two-state solution or their acceptance or encouragement or of settler violence, or any of the rhetoric around annexation of either bits of the West Bank or Gaza. I want a two-state solution, and I would like people with my politics running Israel, and I’d like people with my politics running a new Palestinian state as well, certainly not Hamas.”
When the conversation turns to Westminster intrigue, Akehurst’s expression gives way to something closer to exasperation. The week’s Downing Street briefing fiasco, which plunged the government into turmoil, clearly pained him. Akehurst is politically close to Wes Streeting. “We don’t have that many top-tier political operators, and I want them all working together,” he says. “The idea of an internecine battle between Keir and Wes – or anyone in the same political place is fratricidal self-destruction.”
Pressed on what exactly had gone on, he said “it’s obvious that something made No 10 feel that something really significant was going on, because you don’t start briefing the media like that unless you’re really unhappy”.
The thought of it all depresses him. “I just think it’s a shame that we’ve somehow got ourselves into a situation where there’s an intensity of speculation about the leadership, particularly if it involves any falling out between basically people with identical politics,” he said. “I mean, if you can explain the political difference between Morgan McSweeney and Wes Streeting, then I have a PhD in political differences to award you, because I don’t understand what they would disagree on.”
These tragedies of suspicion, he said, are what happens “once you get into the zone of speculation about the leadership”. “People begin to worry that if they don’t move first, someone else will,” he said. “For anyone that thinks that they’re capable of doing the job, they’ll be thinking, well, if I don’t take an opportunity when it comes up, it could be another decade. Someone else could jump in there first and do it. So even though they might, in their heart of hearts, think it’s the wrong thing to have a change at the moment, they might think it’s the right thing for the country and the party to have stability. If you’re someone that ever has future aspirations to that top job, and you’d be worried that not being sufficiently bold at the right moment would be a permanent mistake.”
The briefing happened in the “context” of criticism coming from the soft left around the direction of the government. “The strategic challenge we’ve got as a Labour Party is we’ve got to be somehow maintain a broad enough coalition that we can win in in a city [like] Bristol or Hackney at the same time that we can win in North Durham or Bassetlaw or Bolsover. We’ve got to be a party with with national appeal. I think it’s a government that anyone that’s a social democrat or democratic socialist can be really proud of lots of the things that we’ve done, but you’ve got a narrative from from the soft left that the government has somehow sold out Labour values and needs to sound redder, that then has created leadership speculation. And then I think what is happening is that people with ambitions, who are not from the left at all, are worried that there’ll be a contest and they will be bystanders, rather than participants.”
After years on the NEC and in the trenches campaigning, Akehurst became an MP in 2024. It feels like starting again from the bottom. He gives the metaphor of transitioning from primary school to secondary school. “Year six of primary school you’ve got the little prefect’s badge, and you’re on the school council and whatever else, and you get to wear a special sweatshirt or whatever to show you’re at the top of the school. And then in year seven, you’re right down at the bottom again. And I was always conscious that that is just the way Parliament works, that I have no seniority. Whereas I have some accrued seniority on the NEC, inside Parliament I am literally starting at the bottom again. And I have a huge amount to learn, because I’ve not worked here.”
He says he would happily serve in government and that it’s no secret he’d like to be defence secretary. Although he doesn’t have a military background, he believes he could bring a more “holistic” approach to the job. Indeed, worrying about threats to Britain’s security is one of the few things that keeps him up at night. He suspects he hasn’t been promoted because the party needs him on the NEC. Not least because if you stay on the NEC for long enough, you get to be the vice chair, and then the the chair, which are important roles, and that would be a huge thing to do as well,” he says.
The interview ends with the sound of the division bell, the work of a backbench MP beckons. Akehurst seems cheery as he rises to head to the chamber to vote. He may be at the bottom of school, but his ambitions don’t seem to have dimmed. For now, however, the NEC, his constituency, and the quiet satisfaction of outmanoeuvring the party’s other factions will have to do.
[Further reading: What’s behind Labour’s income tax U-turn?]
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