Shortly after her appointment as Shadow Chancellor, Anneliese Dodds was doing a live interview for Sky TV from her Oxford home. Just as she started to discuss the economic implications of the coronavirus pandemic, the door behind her swung open and her three-year-old daughter burst into the room. Unperturbed, the 42-year-old MP smiled broadly and carried on debating the importance of balancing the risks before admitting that she had hoped Isabella would stay asleep, but “she’s thankfully under the chair now.”
It’s hard to imagine such a human interaction from her predecessor John McDonnell, the hard man of the left who once listed his interests in Who’s Who as “fermenting [sic] the overthrow of capitalism.” Margaret Hodge, the veteran Labour MP, recalls the first time she met Dodds, at a tax justice event in the House of Commons a few years ago. “She arrived with this baby, just three weeks old, and was feeding her but she also managed the event without any fuss. She was incredibly articulate and clear, with terrific analysis. I think she’s absolutely brilliant. I can’t see her falling out with people but she’s also got that bit of steel.
Labour’s first female shadow chancellor appears to have achieved the virtually impossible task in politics of being almost universally popular. Even in the factional, sectarian world of the Labour Party the former MEP, who was only elected to the House of Commons in 2017, seems to have emerged from the in-fighting remarkably unscathed. One Labour frontbencher says: “Everybody likes her, she has never caused me any reason to be offended or even mildly irritated, that’s her key strength. It’s very hard to be angry with her even when the Treasury team is saying ‘don’t commit to spending any money’.”
Seb Dance, who became an MEP at the same time as Dodds, describes her as “massively intelligent” and “very collegiate.” “When we were elected to the European Parliament there was quite a broad range of political backgrounds in the party, people from the left and the right, I don’t think there’s a single one of my colleagues who ever had a cross word with her or found her impossible to work with,” he says. “She’s incredibly empathetic, she listens to everybody and she combines attention to detail with an ability to communicate.”
But the shadow chancellor has a mountain to climb in turning around her party’s reputation. At the last election less than a fifth of voters believed Labour could be trusted to run the economy and to restore an impression of competence she will have to be willing to pick some fights. With the country heading into recession as a result of the pandemic, she arguably has the hardest, and most important job in the shadow cabinet apart from the leader.
Born in Aberdeen, Dodds was educated privately at Robert Gordon College before graduating with a first in PPE from St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she served as the president of the Student Union. She got a master’s degree in social policy from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in government from the London School of Economics, then worked as a lecturer in public policy at King’s College London and Aston University. Elected as an MEP in 2014, she sat on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in the European Parliament, before becoming MP for Oxford East at the snap general election in 2017. Although she supported Yvette Cooper in the 2015 leadership election, she was swiftly appointed to the frontbench by Jeremy Corbyn, then backed Keir Starmer this year.
A strong pro-European, Dodds is on the soft left of the party and worked as shadow financial secretary in McDonnell’s Treasury team. But she does not share his enthusiasm for Karl Marx. In her first outing on Radio 4’s Today programme, she chose Gordon Brown rather than her former boss as her role model, and insisted: “It’s necessary to make sure that taxpayers' money is spent wisely.” One former cabinet minister from the Tony Blair years describes her as: “highly intelligent, two degrees, evidence based, not a show boater, works hard, not anti-business.” He adds: “Ed Miliband is parking tanks on her economic policy lawn but I would put money on her standing her ground.”
In the City, the appointment of the two moderates Pat McFadden and Wes Streeting to her team has reassured many and there is a sense of relief that Labour’s most revolutionary elements are in retreat. One senior banking figure says Dodds is “a great improvement—very open to engagement and in particular has a strong and credible frontbench team. They acknowledge the work they have to do and have made clear they want to listen, which is a compelling starting point.” Yet the shadow chancellor was also praised by McDonnell, who described her on her appointment as shadow chancellor as “a superb member” of his Treasury team who “is really talented, works incredibly hard and is conscientious in all she does.”
The truth is that if she wants to succeed, Dodds will not be able to keep everyone happy. One Labour MP argues that a degree of tension between the leader and the shadow chancellor is a necessary part of the political ecosystem. “I can’t see a situation where Anneliese would be a Pushme-Pullyou with Keir but there’s something healthy about a certain level of conflict, a bit of grit and challenge.”
More importantly, to transform Labour’s fortunes Dodds will have to take on the hard left and abandon some of the more radical economic policies she helped promote when she was part of McDonnell’s team. She must for example decide whether to keep her predecessor’s extraordinarily expensive programme of nationalisations or his plan to seize 10 per cent of companies’ assets. These proposals were part of a manifesto that was categorically rejected by the voters as unrealistic at the last election.
As the country reels from the economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis, she will also have to reconsider whether scrapping university tuition fees—a policy that disproportionately benefits relatively wealthy graduates—is still the priority it was under Corbyn.“She’s extremely well-liked and she does seem a really nice person,” says one MP. “But being nice is not enough, you can’t escape the question of political direction.
One shadow cabinet minister says the Labour leadership has the chance to reset the agenda. “All the policies have gone up in smoke because of Covid-19, it’s about having an identity that makes people believe not just that you could do it—and Keir is capable of being a competent PM—but that Labour’s instincts are in tune with the instincts of the general public.” The shadow chancellor will be central to that mission to detoxify her party but to do so she will have to be willing to make some enemies.
