The House Article | Neal Lawson: “The Most Naive Person In Left-Wing Politics”

13 min read2 hr

Neal Lawson was working for Gordon Brown when he first met Andy Burnham, then a 20-something Blairite advising Tessa Jowell. It was the 90s and they were fellow members of Demon Eyes, the amateur football team set up by young Labour advisers and named after the famous Tory poster portraying a devilish Tony Blair.

The squad included future Cabinet ministers Ed Balls and David Miliband, as well as journalists and backroom staff well-known in political circles – Tim Allan, Dan Corry, Liam Halligan, Phil Collins, David Goodhart and James Purnell, today Burnham’s chief of staff.

Though Lawson and Burnham got on well, they were not especially close; it was from a distance that Lawson watched the subsequent adventures of his ex-teammate with interest, through his campaigning on Hillsborough to leaving Westminster for the Manchester mayoralty. The pair only recently reunited.

“At his last mayoral election, we started chatting about ideas for his manifesto,” Lawson recalls. “He called and we talked through some policy ideas, and it started dawning on me… ‘He’s the standout person. It’s inevitable that Starmer fails, and it’s probably inevitable that the Labour Party will turn to Andy Burnham.’ And I thought, ‘Let’s try and help him get there.’”

He helped Burnham, he says, “with platform, polling, policy, organisation”. In May 2025, the mayor spoke at a big Compass conference, alongside Miatta Fahnbulleh and Louise Haigh (both now Cabinet ministers).

The context is that Lawson had decided back in the run-up to the 2020 leadership election that Keir Starmer was not his man. Soft-left figures like the director of Compass were being collected as useful allies when he was called in by Steve Reed and Morgan McSweeney to meet their candidate. But Lawson was not impressed. “This man is completely uninterested in ideas,” he concluded. “He can’t be the leader.”

While Starmer had to do without Lawson’s vote (he spent two weeks on the Clive Lewis campaign and cast his ballot for nobody), he did, of course, nab Labour’s top job. It led to an era that deeply frustrated Lawson, who felt he had been duped by McSweeney.

“He sat in that chair an awful lot,” says Lawson, pointing to my seat in his London flat-turned-office. The party organiser who masterfully engineered Starmer’s rise had spent a couple of years courting Lawson, drawing out his political ideas over the dining table.

“It made sense to me that he said his project was Corbynism without Corbyn – let’s get rid of the antisemitism, let’s professionalise it, but the underlying facts of the 2008 crash, austerity, the composition of the electorate means that we’ve got to do something like Corbynism.

“Little did I know he was just an undercover, like the cops who join Greenpeace or CND. He was there to understand how the left thinks, in order to replicate it in a way that he could win an election.”

So, he does not believe there was any genuine intellectual curiosity there? “No, it was a complete and utter – ironically – entryist job. It was the ‘Morgan tendency’ – to infiltrate a group of people, understand how they operate and bend it to your will,” Lawson replies. “As soon as you’ve won it, you kick the ladder away, shut the door and start pouring boiling oil over the people who’ve just voted for you.”

Does he think Starmer was in on the plan, or merely a passenger? “I think he was just thinking about Keir and what was good for Keir, and this was good for Keir.”

Lawson today describes himself in no less scathing terms than a Corbynite on social media might use against him: “Neal Lawson, the most naive person in left-wing politics.”

With Burnham, a leader he did back, now in No 10, for some on his wing of the party the question arises: has the most naive person in left-wing politics been duped again?

Lawson, 63, comes from what he calls a “comfortable working-class” family: his mum worked in a shoe shop; his dad was a printer in Fleet Street; they owned their own home in south-east London, and he was the first child in his class to go on a foreign holiday.

His father was also father of the chapel, a powerful member of printing union Sogat. Lawson proudly notes that his dad negotiated a four-day week before anyone else had it, and remembers fondly his support for the miners, with Sogat sending money, resources and food.

“Our phones were definitely tapped,” Lawson says.

He struggled academically – “I’m pretty sure I’ve got dyslexia” – so was sent to a technical school despite his love of ideas and language. He left with “virtually no qualifications” and found himself working in a book-pulping factory, where he could pick out books destined for recycling from a conveyor belt.

At 18, he returned to education, starting with A-Levels at a college, followed by Trent Polytechnic. It had taken some convincing. “I was a class-warrior kid: ‘I’m not going to university – they all wear duffle coats, and they’re all Tories.’” His parents, who left school at 15, sent for a neighbour who’d been to university to talk to him about why he might like it.

There, Lawson encountered an outpost of Frankfurt School lecturers who introduced him to Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci and Zygmunt Bauman (who became his “intellectual guru”). His Marxist education was compounded by his surroundings: “I was in Nottingham during the miners’ strike. If you wanted a lesson in hard-class politics and the brutality of the British state, that was it.” And when he was not on those picket lines, he was at home, on those in Wapping.

Fittingly, his first job was as a regional political organiser for a union – the Transport and General (T&G, today’s Unite) in Bristol. But Militant’s role in left politics meant, while finding Tony Benn himself “mesmerising”, Lawson ended up organising against the Bennites.

“If you were a young socialist, you were grabbed by Militant,” he explains. Recounting his very brief flirtation with the Trotskyist group, he recalls being invited to a Marxism weekend conference: “I’m thinking, fucking hell, this is the answer to everything!” Yet he quickly decided he was against Militant’s “lying cheating entryism – I don’t like that in any form”.

His job at T&G was to ensure “the right candidates” were selected for the 1992 election. One of the MPs sponsored by the union was Gordon Brown, whom Lawson was then invited to work for during the campaign and full-time once he became shadow chancellor.

“I love Gordon dearly, and we still talk,” Lawson says, but goes on: “There is a big cultural difference between the way Gordon does politics and the way I do politics. Gordon is brilliantly tactical, focused laser beam… I’m much more, ‘What’s the big picture here? What’s the big vision of where we’re trying to go?’”

By then, Lawson had a family and needed money. Looking to spread his wings, he settled on lobbying. “I didn’t even know what public affairs or lobbying was, but it seemed to be the thing that people did.” He came across the outfit of Tim Bell – best-known as Margaret Thatcher’s spin doctor, and later a Tory peer – and it was, bizarrely, here that Lawson went next.

“Andy has taken a particular path since Makerfield, with people who were anti-him not that long ago, who are now supposedly very pro-him”

“I’m in Mayfair, having coffee with someone, and there’s literally a butler who walks in with white gloves and pictures of Mrs Thatcher on the walls. I’m just thinking, again naively but in a curious way, ‘This is fantastic.’ I don’t mean ‘I aspire to this’. This is like, ‘I didn’t know this world existed’,” Lawson says.

“I’m a working-class boy from south London who is then being paid quite amazing amounts of money, and your feet leave the ground. All of a sudden, you’re dining in very plush restaurants, talking to all of these different people, and you’re wearing cufflinks.”

His chain-smoking boss would “preach a politics of Thatcherism and practise a politics of socialism”: “He took care of everyone. He was lovely to anyone. I did some terrible things to him.” Lawson refuses to say which things.

This path led him to ‘lobbygate’. Alongside Ben Lucas and Jonathan Mendelsohn, Lawson had left Bell to set up his own lobbying firm, LLM Communications, but quickly found himself embroiled in scandal when an undercover journalist caught them making inadvisable promises of government access to clients.

While he used his knowledge to advise clients, Lawson says, “I never used my connections, so I was a pretty awful – in that respect – lobbyist. I just thought it was too awkward and difficult.”

The journalist posing as a client was repeatedly asking for a meeting, he claims, and ultimately he remembers “getting so worn down, and going, ‘I can probably get you a fucking meeting’. And that’s the story. That’s my fault and I was naïve”. It was exposed by the Observer in an “embarrassing” and “awful” episode.

The company survived and eventually thrived, but Lawson describes lobbygate as an “eye-opener”: “That’s the moment I stopped wearing a tie and cufflinks.”

Lawson was an early enthusiast for New Labour – “I thought the Labour Party needed to be modernised and changed” – and even did a stint with Peter Mandelson, working on strategy in the 97 Millbank operation.

“Jesus, God, what a brilliant organiser!” he says of the ‘Prince of Darkness’ who recently became darker still. “I was never that particularly close to him, but I could see why people were impressed.” (Asked later whether he feels sorry for Mandelson, Lawson says yes, explaining: “I’m on the soft left – I’m quite soft emotionally as well as politically.”)

But soon after their seismic win, Lawson started questioning it all: “Is this taking us in the right direction? Is this a left project or is it a cover for not? I get disappointed really quickly.”

He and other critical friends came together to start Compass in 2003. “We started off as New Labour’s best friends but then they tried to do commercialisation of schools, the Iraq War, privatise the Post Office, all of that.”

Lawson had successfully stopped the privatisation of the Post Office while working under Bell, co-ordinating Alan Johnson and the CWU and undermining the proposal from within the Conservatives. “It’s the only time privatisation under the Tories was ever stopped.” When New Labour attempted to part-privatise the Royal Mail, “I worked with the CWU again and stopped it again. Instead of being New Labour’s critical friend, we were just critics.”

Ahead of the 2005 election, Lawson considered securing a parliamentary seat. He was on a train, on the way to a selection meeting, when he read an essay in Soundings by Marxist intellectual Stuart Hall – New Labour’s Double-shuffle. The party had taken to speaking with a “forked tongue”, Hall argued, and was “fundamentally neoliberal in character”.

“I just thought, fuck me, I don’t believe in this project. I got off the train, walked over the bridge, and got the next train back to London,” Lawson says.

Although he is clear about New Labour’s failures, the soft-left chief does characterise the era as one of vibrant discourse and undeniable talent. Finding himself in the middle of exciting debates between Jack Straw, Mo Mowlam and Philip Gould as well as Blair, Brown and Mandelson was invigorating.

Does he believe the level of talent we saw then is unmatched today? “Completely.” Why is that? “Because why would you go into politics now? You don’t get paid that much, you haven’t got that much influence, you’ve got complete exposure about who you are and what you’ve done. If you wanted to change the world, you’d start your tech company or your venture capital,” Lawson replies.

“The talent pool is really drying up, and that is a problem. Our analysis was the Blairites didn’t think a better world was desirable, and the Brownites didn’t think a better world was feasible. In the end, you ended up in the same place. But, my God, they were giants in terms of thinking, strategy and tactics.”

In 2011, Compass opened up its membership to other parties. The organisation’s Labour-only rule did not make sense, Lawson figured, when his political outlook was so similar to that of Caroline Lucas. “I believe everything she believes in and how you make politics happen,” he thought, and yet, “She can’t join Compass, but Peter Mandelson can. This is madness.”

The reaction was strong: “I hadn’t quite anticipated the tribal backlash of people in Labour. ‘You bastard! You’ve given up. You’re no longer one of us!’” But amid the rise of the internet and the multiplication of TV channels, he had long felt that the same fragmentation would come to politics too and Labour would not be able to remain “the only player”.

“I hate the coercive power of first past the post. I hate forcing people to do what they would not otherwise do. That’s a horrible politics,” says Lawson. “It can win big majorities on 34 per cent of the vote, but then it finds it can’t govern because you don’t have any real support in the country.”

Unless there is real change, he warns his comrades on the left, “The causes of Reform are going to keep growing, and they won’t be Reform. It will be Restore, or worse.”

Under the new Prime Minister, supporters of electoral reform are hopeful a major constitutional change is coming. But on other issues, there has been talk of the left of Burnham’s camp being jettisoned.

Asked for his thoughts, Lawson says: “Andy has taken a particular path since Makerfield, with people who were anti-him not that long ago, who are now supposedly very pro-him. We’ll see how that plays out…

“I think he’s gone for, I’d call it, a parliamentary Labourism route. We’re back to the same question of Labourism and the Labour Party, and is it the sole vehicle, and can you build a good society just through parliamentarism? Or do you need bigger ideas and bigger vision and bigger alliances and bigger movements? People will take shortcuts, and shortcuts never work.”

Lawson reasons: “There are never complete wins in politics.” But he is delighted that a prime minister has declared they want to roll back 40 years of neoliberalism.

“In many respects, job done. The bar has now been set at that level,” he says, noting that someone close to Corbyn once told him “they could never get him to say that” about neoliberalism. “We’ve got a prime minister who’s saying that. This is game on.”

So, he continues on “the long march”, believing that society “will go fascist right or it will go Neal Lawson/Compass”. “I’m joking,” he adds, although he isn’t really. “That will end up being the choice.”