Andrea Egan (Photography by Tom Oldham)

11 min read9 min

When The House first met Andrea Egan last year, she was standing as an underdog in the race to determine who would become the next general secretary of Britain’s biggest union.

Although she had the advantage – unprecedented in Unison – of being a single challenger against an incumbent, only the flame-haired social worker herself was confident she would win. After all, she was neither a paid union official nor a Labour member; it would be the first time a lay member of Unison had been elected to lead it.

But lead the 1.3-million-member trade union she now does, after securing 60 per cent in the internal contest that attracted a typically low turnout of just seven per cent. At the time, it was another blow for No 10, which lost an ally in the defeated Christina McAnea – widely thought to be another casualty of Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopularity.

Egan not only defied the odds to become head of Unison but also got her wish with a new Prime Minister she favoured for the job. “I am a fan of Andy. I mean, he’s the King of the North!” as the left-winger from Bolton put it to us in November.

“He’s made a real positive start,” the trade union leader tells The House today, noting that she was “really pleased” with Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign. “The way he approached that election – he wanted to listen to what people wanted to say, and he was open and honest enough to say, ‘Look, the Labour Party’s made mistakes.’ At that time, it was really important for society to hear some honest politics.”

She has already met with the new Labour Prime Minister on several occasions amid No 10’s effort to step up engagement with unions. In meetings with Tulo (as the group of party-affiliated unions is known), she reports that “he acknowledged that the trade unions had been left aside in the previous couple of years”. There is a “much better commitment” now, “absolutely”, she says, and a “better working relationship”.

“It was reassuring when he said, ‘I’m going to put the trade unions back in the front and centre,’ because why would we not be? We represent the workers who are delivering the public services. And he’s kept good with that promise. He’s met us a number of times.”

The Unison general secretary warns that Burnham is “not exempt from criticism”, though is careful not to criticise his controversial pick of chancellor, despite having endorsed Ed Miliband before the decision was made. Did the John Healey appointment come as a disappointment?

“I won’t say I was disappointed,” she replies carefully. “I felt Ed, and it was all in my own personal view, his vision for where the country needed to go was OK, was good. But I’ve made clear internally and to Andy, it’s not really our role as trade unions to tell him who to put in his Cabinet. So, if he’s picked John Healey, he’s picked John Healey, and we’ve got to respect that. Listen, the real issue is whether they deliver or not.”

Healey became Chancellor after resigning as Starmer’s defence secretary over a lack of military spending, of course. Egan, on the other hand, backs the “Wages not weapons” campaign by some unions – passed as a motion by the TUC this year for a second time – to call for investment in public services rather than defence.

“Well, that was his previous position. He’s now Chancellor, and his budget requirement and options are much wider than just defence,” she points out.

Egan does not support any increase in defence spend, let alone a three per cent of GDP or higher target. Is she not persuaded by the threat of Russian aggression, the possibility of conflict with China, perhaps even the need to defend the Falklands at some point soon?

“What are you defending, if your own infrastructure is broken and this society is not a healthy society?” she asks in response, before adding: “When you look at recent wars, we’ve been in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen. So, is that keeping our shores safe? We’ve got to be honest about what that money is actually being spent on.”

Nor does she accept the Westminster consensus that welfare spend needs to come down.

“Well, what is welfare spending? That’s the key question,” she says. “A big chunk of that is actually pensions, and that is deferred income for people who have already put into the pot.

“Then you’ve got to be really honest and realistic that a big chunk of our trade union membership is in these low-paid, insecure jobs, in these outsourced companies, and that low pay means they need to rely on benefits to exist. So, it’s all fictitious. Like Andy says, we’ve got to start having some very honest conversations.”

Although Egan holds back from criticising Healey directly, she is happy to make clear her view of the Home Secretary, who she says has “not even answered requests for a meeting”.

Unison wants to express its concerns over the government’s proposals to increase the time migrants will have to wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain status; the standard going up from five to 10 years, rising to 15 years for those who arrived on health and social care visas.

“That was one of my disappointments – that Shabana Mahmood was left in position, simply because of her position on the migrant workers. As yet, there’s just a wall of silence at the moment.

“I think that’s absolutely unacceptable because they make these big announcements, and what they’ve got is these hundreds of thousands of workers who are just being left on a thread at the minute, wondering where their futures lie and what’s going to happen to them and their families.”

Unison, a primarily public sector union that represents more social care workers than any other, is lobbying for changes not to apply retroactively: “It was a deal – come to the country for five years, do the work, and then you get leave to remain.”

Egan also wants their visas no longer to be tied to specific employers. “It’s got to be sector-wide,” she says. “The victimisation of those workers because you’re tied to one employer – that’s where the abuse happens… There’s a fear about raising your head and reporting them because the threat is there and it is real: ‘If you speak out, we’ll report you to Home Office, we’ll sack you’.”

Her overriding argument speaks to something fundamental – and very challenging – that Burnham wants to achieve in government: the creation of a ‘national care service’. “What I have said to Andy Burnham is, ‘You’re not going to be able to deliver that without the migrant workers.’”

And was he receptive to that message? “He nodded,” she recalls. “We were in a big meeting, and he acknowledged my statement.”

Egan, who was raised by a single mum on a Bolton estate, worked in the care sector herself; in a care home at 19, then children’s residential care. A union rep, she worked her way up, becoming manager of the unit, then convenor for children’s services, and ultimately a social worker.

“I’ve been asked by a number of ministers about me joining the Labour Party. I’ve reminded them that I didn’t leave them, they left me”

She joined the Labour Party about 16 years ago, yet was expelled in 2022 after sharing posts by Marxist group Socialist Appeal, which was proscribed under Starmer.

Asked whether she would like back in, Egan says: “I’ve been asked by a number of ministers about me joining the Labour Party. I’ve reminded them that I didn’t leave them, they left me.

They expelled me. I’m now the leader of the biggest trade union in the country, and what I have said is, ‘You need to start behaving like a Labour Party.’”

Extraordinarily for the leader of the largest trade union, which is affiliated to the Labour Party and continues to be one of its biggest donors, she is “waiting for a number of things” before considering a fresh membership application.

“They’d have to do something that would inspire me and instil my trust again that the Labour Party can behave and deliver like the Labour Party,” she says. Has she been given assurances that she would be let in? “After four years, I can reapply anyway… So, it is a choice thing.”

In the meantime, she is allowed to attend Labour conference but not permitted entry to the main hall.

When Egan last spoke to The House, she said she would not move down to London, where Unison headquarters sits on Euston Road, if she became general secretary. That has not changed – and fortunately for her, splitting one’s time between North and South is in vogue right now.

“My husband and my son are still in Bolton. That’s my family home. But whether I need to be down in the London office, the West Midlands, Glasgow – I’ll be wherever. You only need to look at my diary. I’m all over the place.

“The same is said about how many days you work. Ideally, you’d want to be working a standard working week, wouldn’t you? But that doesn’t work out either. So, I’m just wherever I need to be.”

Egan also pledged to shun the £181,000 remuneration available to the general secretary, vowing to take only a social worker’s salary, without specifying what this figure would be. Has she been able to fulfil that pledge?

“For clarity, I’m taking a social worker’s salary, and that is within the scope of a social worker’s salary,” she replies, which suggests it may be the general average of around £40,000 but could also be much higher. She has not yet donated the remainder to Unison funds as promised; it is “sat in the account because I want to do it year-end”.

So, what will her final salary be?

“It’s a social worker’s salary,” she reiterates, unwilling to clarify. “What I will do is, I’ll publicise it at the end of the year to my membership. The only people I’m accountable to, if I’m really frank, is my membership, and you don’t say anything to your membership you’re not prepared to deliver on. So, I will deliver on that, and I will let my membership know.”

In our last interview, Egan also said she would not feel comfortable with the union representing someone like Sandie Peggie, the Fife nurse who complained about having to use the same hospital dressing room as a trans colleague. “We have members come to the union with all kinds of issues, and some of them are unreasonable, but you’ve got to unpick them,” she explained.

Has this situation arisen since she has become general secretary? “You can imagine: members come with all kinds of issues. They stole money, they’ve assaulted somebody, they’ve been accused of being racist. You don’t have to represent every single member through the rulebook because there’s some standard,” she says today.

The Supreme Court ruling on sex and gender in the Equality Act is “unworkable”, she adds, before stumbling over her words, trying to decide whether she “respects” the law as it stands.

She settles on: “You’ve got to adhere to the law. But at the same time, we absolutely will be looking at how we challenge that.”

While others favour reopening the Equality Act to change how it defines gender in light of the court ruling, Egan is not so sure. “I never said we were open to opening the Equality Act because where do you stop?” she asks. The implication is that it could open a Pandora’s box; she is deeply concerned by Reform UK’s plans to scrap the Equality Act, as well as the threat the party’s potential electoral success poses to unions.

For now, her focus is primarily on a campaign pressing the government to deliver on its manifesto promise to “bring about the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation”.

Have the unions involved figured out how much the insourcing they proposed would cost upfront? “Work is being done, but our bottom line is really clear: it would pale into significance to what’s already been lost through the public purse.”

Egan is “loving” her new job. “I feel more optimistic than I did last year. I feel more excited than I did last year because I’m now – I mean, that was an historic win,” she says.

“I’m a working-class woman. A working-class woman from a town who has always felt that my position as a council employee, as a trade unionist, as a community member, are connected. It’s all for the good of.

“I did say this to Keir Starmer before he left: ‘Listen, I’m not an oppositionist for the sake of it, because if you win, we win, society wins.’ I think that’s where we’re at now. We’ve got one opportunity for really trying to get us back to a better place.” 

(Photography by Elio Zhang)

9 min read7 min

If Andy Burnham does decide to call an early election, he has just chosen the man who will be responsible for ensuring the Labour machine is up to the job.

With this hire, the Co-operative Party’s coup is complete. Not satisfied with becoming the fourth-largest party in the Commons at the last general election, both No 10 and Labour HQ have now been acquired too: we have the first Co-op Prime Minister, who in turn has chosen Joe Fortune, the head of the Co-op Party, as Labour’s new general secretary. Quite the feat for such a mild-mannered outfit.

The relationship between Labour and its sister party is not widely understood. The pair have an almost century-old electoral agreement that allows them to put up joint candidates and prevents nominees from standing against each other. Many more Labour MPs are personally Co-op members (two-thirds of the Parliamentary Labour Party, in fact) than officially represent the party in Parliament. The Co-op also has representation beyond Westminster, with mayors and councillors too.

The party’s aim is to promote co-operative values. Instead of nationalisation, it favours mutualisation and community ownership, on the basis it produces better outcomes – and, crucially, more durable ones, less easily undone by right-wing successors to Labour administrations.

“If people in 1844 could form the co-operative movement in Rochdale to lower the price of food, then why can’t we act now, with similar courage, to make life better?” Burnham declared in his first big speech after winning Makerfield. The Labour manifesto commits the party to doubling the size of the co-operative sector, but it is too early to tell whether co-ops will dominate his government’s agenda beyond that. Still, the PM name-dropping the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ has turned out to be a reliable indicator of his preferred personnel.

Hollie Ridley, Sir Keir Starmer’s second general secretary, often regarded as a protégé of Morgan McSweeney while also being a working-class woman who worked her way up to the top of Labour on merit, announced in July that she was stepping down. It was reported at the time that she was forced out via “toxic” briefings by Burnham allies, though this is strongly denied by No 10, where it is said the news of her departure came as a complete shock.

However it happened – and it is far from unusual for a new general secretary to follow soon after a new Labour leader – the vacancy has enabled Burnham to choose a successor of his liking. He decided against the two other initial frontrunners for the post: Claire Reynolds, the former No 10 political director who moved to Labour HQ last year, and is married to reinstated Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds; and John Lehal, the consultant and ex-COO of the party who helped run Burnham’s 2015 leadership campaign.

The Fortune camp insists the rival candidates each came to the decision not to put in any application for the job independently, without pressure. Burnham had made his preference clear, however, and the feeling on Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) was that a new leader should have their pick. “You have to be really ballsy to want to be general secretary against the leader’s wishes,” as one NEC member put it to The House before Reynolds and Lehal confirmed they were not applying.

In the end, it was from a shortlist of just one that the ruling body interviewed and unanimously selected Fortune. Labour conference is now expected to formally ratify the appointment before a handover takes place the following week.

Fortune, 44, is a father of two who lives in south London with his wife and watches trashy reality TV to switch off from work. At 6ft5, he has been called a “literal giant of the labour movement”. He comes across as quiet but is highly social, with a friendship group in Labour/Co-op politics that includes Alex Norris, now Justice Secretary; Emma Foody, a 2024 intake MP and whip who is married to Norris; Jonny Reynolds; Miatta Fahnbulleh; Jim McMahon; and Caitlin Prowle, who will be Co-op’s interim general secretary when Fortune leaves his post.

“You have to be really ballsy to want to be general secretary against the leader’s wishes”

Burnham and Fortune have known each other for some years, and are considered longstanding allies, but they are not close friends.  

There are striking similarities: both Liverpudlian men with Catholic backgrounds, who have worked for the Labour Party, put a strong sense of place at the core of their politics and assert a rejection of factionalism. Yet they have trodden different paths through the labour movement. Plus, aside from a 12-year age difference, there is another impediment: Fortune is a Liverpool fan; Burnham is an Evertonian.

So, why was he the favourite for general secretary? After all, Fortune’s detractors say the organisation he has run for the last nine years is incomparable in scale to the Labour Party.

Highly influential fixers Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, both understood to be close to Fortune, had significant sway. That the unions were all supportive mattered too. And, despite being the PM’s pick, Fortune is said to have put the work in, making calls to every member of the NEC – further proof he understands the power of relational politics in Labour.

“He’s got his own very good networks. He is also somebody who just gets on and does the job – it’s not about him. I suspect he won’t want to be a big public figure. People who’ve worked with him talk about how he’s a very good leader, manager and strategist. And there’s not any drama around him,” explains a No 10 source.

“The importance the Prime Minister sees in driving through culture change in the party – Joe is seen as the person to do that.”

Both the Prime Minister and the incoming general secretary like to talk of there being “one Labour”. In seeking the job, Fortune also proposed that the party should work more with civil society groups and engage with people outside the membership to sustain Labour deep into the 21st century.

The men use similar rhetoric that leans heavily on the distribution of power. They share the idea that politics has become too centralised. 

When Fortune enters HQ to take up the role, he is expected to apply that to party structures by strengthening Labour’s regions. To map out what needs to be done, he will get the regional directors together early on, in the belief that lessons in creativity and innovation come from them.

Elections will take place across the UK next year, including all local authorities in Scotland and Wales. Labour figures would be forgiven for dreading these somewhat, considering the mauling the party suffered in the devolved nations in May, when – most notably – it lost control of the Senedd for the first time. In 2028, a big set of mayoral elections will see large areas require massive field operations.

And then there is the possibility of a snap general election sooner rather than later. Sir John Curtice may not believe it is in Labour’s interests, as Reform could well secure the most seats, but nonetheless suspicion is rife throughout Burnham’s party that he will want to win his own mandate after setting out a 10-year plan for the country this winter.

“He’s got his own very good networks… And there’s not any drama around him”

For all the lofty talk of empowering communities and so on, the biggest challenge facing Fortune is more mundane: money. Labour has run a deficit for the last three years: £850,000 in 2023; £3.76m in 2024; £2.55m in 2025. (The Conservatives and Reform UK both recorded a surplus last year.) After entering government, Starmer’s party saw members and high-value donors fall away, as the frustrations of governing became acute. The party also lost its director of fundraising, Rachael McCaffrey, at the end of 2024 and has not been able to replace her.

There may have been a bump in membership since Burnham took over – we don’t yet know – but nobody is claiming a Corbyn-era-style boost. Since the start of the year, Unite has cut its affiliation fee by 40 per cent, reducing its funding from £1.45m to £870,000, and there was a perceived reluctance on Labour’s part to be asking members for money, resulting in fewer fundraising emails to them. The cost of numerous by-elections – at which Labour “threw the kitchen sink”, in the words of one insider – will have hit particularly hard.

Fortune’s focus at Co-op is said to have been increasing membership – leading to a 30 per cent rise – and upskilling himself in methods aimed at retention in particular. He is determined to improve the party’s relationship with its members.

Fortune also reckons the best anti-Reform work is currently being undertaken by trade union reps and wants the party to connect with those efforts. That suggests a renewed focus on Labour seeking face to face engagements in workplaces and communities.

Staffing will need to be another key focus for Fortune, after sources say more attention in HQ was paid to politics and management of late than who to bring in for the next short campaign.

The House understands that Fortune is interested in returning Labour to its more traditional structure, with deputy general secretaries rather than executive directors.

The accusation of a “boys’ club” has been revived by critics, who point to Burnham’s choices of Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and general secretary. These are naturally dismissed by No 10 as “nonsense”, and allies point to the influence of Haigh and Midgley. A source close to Fortune stresses that, for his part, he is “not someone who hoards power” but is instead a “trusting leader, especially of young women”, such as Foody and Prowle, who’ve both been assistant general secretaries at Co-op.

Fortune will be taking the job at a “difficult time in the cycle”, a No 10 source admits. Reform’s recent mega-donations have only made Labour’s situation look more challenging.

The Co-op may have taken over Labour with impressive speed, but Fortune’s next task is much harder: to restore the country’s governing party into a well-oiled machine, ready for the next election. 

(© David Levene/Guardian/eyevine)

13 min read4 min

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.”