Keir Starmer won’t be surprised Lucy Powell is his new deputy leader – but he should be very worried | Morgan Jones

This result was never particularly in doubt. Lucy Powell continually polled ahead of her rival Bridget Phillipson, and now she has won. What made her triumph so predictable is just how patently unhappy people, including members of the Labour party, are with Keir Starmer and his progress after more than a year in government.

Polling from the end of September has his approval rating among members at -11. As I never tire of saying, a core thing to remember about internal Labour party contests is that party members – who, along with members of affiliated unions, form the voter base for such races – are fairly bog standard left liberals who like public services and Europe, and nationalising the railways and Ed Miliband. “Tough on immigration” doesn’t do so much for them. They are also often less politically engaged than you might expect, and should be understood separately from the party’s hardened activist class.

Powell was the right person at the right time to be the vehicle for this discontent. Before entering parliament, she was an aide to Miliband during his time as leader: she is on the soft left. She entered parliament in 2012, becoming the MP for Manchester Central, and when Angela Rayner resigned there was a strong sense that her successor should be a woman from the north of England. And, while Powell has decried as sexist descriptions of her as a proxy for the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, a whole bunch of headlines linking her name to one of the most popular figures in the party doesn’t exactly hurt. She was sacked from cabinet in the post-Rayner resignation reshuffle that took the top team unambiguously to the right: that left her available to run and, presumably, not delighted with the leadership herself.

That the result was comparatively close – 54% for Powell, 46% for Phillipson – is testament to the latter’s strength as a candidate. Being the leadership’s pick, in the circumstances laid out, was always going to be a poisoned chalice. Phillipson did about as well as anyone could have. As education secretary (and also, of course, a northern woman – as the MP for Houghton and Sunderland South, technically even more northern, but out of the powerful Greater Manchester orbit), she has been doing exactly the kind of work that Labour members like, giving teachers pay rises and proposing to apply VAT to private school fees. Traditionally on the right of the party – she addressed the conference of the Blairite grouping Progressive Britain earlier this year – her plans for greater control of academies have drawn ire from some in that part of the political world, and she ranks highly in members’ polls of preferred cabinet members.

The overall campaign – compressed into the drizzly post-conference mid-October blur – was not one for the ages. There was a graveyard shift hustings at conference after most people had gone home. Reports appeared that Phillipson was putting pressure on the government to lift the two-child benefit cap, probably the single policy most hated by Labour members. Powell said Labour couldn’t “sugar-coat” how badly things were going. Party members got a lot of texts.

Despite the low-energy campaign, bad feeling within the party did grow. Some on the party’s right drew attention to the fact that the Corbynite campaign group Momentum had, after a ballot of members, “strongly recommended” a vote for Powell. This strikes me as a bad attack line, in part because it is out of date – Momentum is not the force it was and Jeremy Corbyn is long gone from the party – and in part because of Powell’s reputation as a fairly staid character. She has served in the shadow cabinet and the cabinet; unlike, say, the Socialist Campaign Group’s deputy leadership nominee, Bell Ribeiro-Addy (who didn’t get the nominations needed to make it on to the ballot paper), there is little chance that Powell will use her new position to become a wholesale anti-government outrider.

There is a reason why she was backed by Momentum and why MPs from the left and soft left are delighted with the result, however. Powell, fairly enough, objects to being seen as a proxy for Burnham, but she is certainly a proxy for anti-Starmer sentiments, and now she is possessed of both an independent mandate and a seat on Labour’s national executive committee, the party’s powerful governing body (which adjudicates on, among other things, candidate selections). In her acceptance speech, she said that Labour must “give a stronger sense of our purpose, whose side we’re on, of our Labour values and beliefs. That’s what I’ve heard loudly and clearly around the country these last few weeks. As deputy, my job will be to bring those voices to the heart of our party”. She added that she thinks “people feel that this government is not being bold enough in delivering the change we promised”.

Overall, this isn’t good news for Starmer. Despite the fact that he and his new deputy profess much the same politics, her election signals serious opposition. She was able to get around a better-resourced and better-endorsed opponent through sheer force of popular feeling. The byelection in Caerphilly last week, in which Labour came a distant third in its former safe seat behind Plaid Cymru and Reform, was only a taste of what the party can expect in next May’s local elections. At that point Starmer – already a beleaguered figure – will undoubtedly face some calls to stand down. It’s hard to picture Powell as the smiler with the knife – but equally difficult to imagine her being hugely energetic in any endeavours to keep Starmer in No 10.

• Morgan Jones is the co-editor of Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy