Anneliese Midgley, chief whip and Labour MP for Knowsley, Merseyside, is showing me her whips. “There are three of them on the mantelpiece,” she says, pointing to the intimidating trio of leather cat-o’-nine-tails arranged above the fireplace in her wood-panelled office. Apparently, they were there when she got here. “I didn’t bring them,” she clarifies. So whose are they? “Mine! For the moment…”
Midgley, 50, – “Midge” to her pals – is formidable, respected in her party as a political operator who cuts across factional divides. After a slump in the polls just two years after Keir Starmer led Labour to its biggest general election victory since 1997, it was clear to Midgley that “the Labour Party needed to be saved,” she says.
Her role in securing our new prime minister is well recorded. When Andy Burnham, former mayor of Manchester, was blocked earlier this year from running in a by-election, Midgley is said to be the one who persuaded Makerfield MP Josh Simons to step down, paving Burnham’s way to Downing Street. Indeed, she and fellow Labour MP Louise Haigh are described as the “northern queens” behind Burnham’s succession this past July. How did it feel to be described that way? “Well, correct,” she deadpans.
Her efforts paid off. The “Burnham bounce” has seen Labour pull five points ahead of second-place competitor Reform in the polls. Gone is the pessimistic rightwards drift and glacial pace of change that defined the lawyerly Starmer and his government, replaced by Burnham’s sunny northern charisma and a focus on easing the cost of living: cutting VAT on electricity bills, proposing a National Care Service to fund the care of the elderly, slashing business rates for pubs and small music venues. The week before Midgley and I meet, the PM had just delivered a speech at Labour conference that was received with thunderous applause (and tears). The feel-good factor is officially back in government. “It is quite like paradise at the moment,” Midgley confirms, sanguinely rearranging her navy pinstripe tie. “Cabinet feels very much like a team and everyone’s pulling together.”
If the Knowsley-born politician weren’t such gracious and warm company, her no-nonsense ability to bring diverse political factions to heel might come off as mildly terrifying. As it is, she embodies a particular brand of confident Scouse grit that’s familiar to anybody with a northern mam – the phrase “iron fist in a velvet glove” comes to mind. Now Burnham has rewarded her with the ultimate job for anybody who likes to think of themselves as a behind-the-scenes mover and shaker. “I love that it’s cloaked in that mystery,” she says of being chief whip. The typical explanation of the role is that you are in charge of making sure government policy gets through a sometimes resistant Parliament. Whips warn the cabinet if MPs are planning to stage a revolt and can stave off rebellions before they happen. But how exactly one does that is up for debate: past whips have been accused of treachery, intimidation and bullyboy tactics.
Midgley opts for a different approach. “People don’t talk about kindness enough in politics,” she tells me. She sees her job as much more than ticking MPs’ names off a spreadsheet once you’ve strong-armed them into voting with the government: “You do that by having those discussions with people and bringing them with you.” She makes dealing with MPs sound almost pastoral. “Being in touch constantly, making them feel respected, not just bringing people into the office when they’re going to be told off…”
Midgley is no dweeby politico who climbed the ranks from their university Labour club. “I think you can tell by my backstory that I’m quite an unusual person,” she says, smiling wryly. “I’ll do quite wild things.” Think: running away to Paris as a teen; bouncing around London as a music journalist and doing the publicity for Pulp; putting on Britpop nights in Liverpool with a founding member of Ladytron; or marrying Bob Stanley from British indie-dance band Saint Etienne, whom she later divorced (they remain great friends). Shepherding Burnham to power might actually be the least interesting thing about her.
Midgley was raised on Cantril Farm, a housing estate in Knowsley built to house thousands of people from Liverpool’s inner-city slums. “Apparently, it was the roughest estate in western Europe,” she tells me. “It was dubbed Cannibal Farm.” Unemployment was high and Midgley remembers going hungry in childhood, but speaks warmly of the camaraderie among neighbours. “It wasn’t all roses – things went down there,” she recalls. “But we all looked after each other and made sure that people weren’t going without the essentials.”
Then her father, Brian, got a union job on the production line at the new Halewood Ford factory – “a good, solid working-class job that meant we could save up and buy a house”, thanks to Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, Midgley’s then MP, who heavily lobbied Ford to open in Merseyside. Another Labour accomplishment – founding the Open University – allowed Midgley’s mother, Jacqueline, to retrain as a social worker. “Under Andy, we’ve got the opportunity to do that for future generations, just like I had,” Midgley says. Today, when she knocks on doors in her old estate – now known as Stockbridge Village – she’s often dragged in by parents who want her to meet their kids. “They’re like, ‘You know this is our MP. She was from the street next door and you can be like her as well!”
Midgley is an autodidact with a ferocious reading habit. She checks out five books a time at Liverpool’s Central Library and finishes one a week. “There has been a bit of a lull [during Makerfield], but I’m back on it now,” she says. In 1988, a Tate Liverpool exhibition of 20th-century European art “fully blew my mind”, Midgley says. “I started sacking off school once a week just to get the bus and envelop myself in that world.” She saved up pocket money for books about Surrealism, Dadaism and the Bauhaus movement. “I realised all these pieces of art were connected,” she says. “A lot of these people were friends. They had manifestos and philosophies that they lived by, that drove them and intentions and reasons for doing it… And then I ended up running away to Paris when I was 17 because I wanted to be André Breton from the Surrealists. Which is,” she says, “quite a mad turn, really.”
She wasn’t “running away from Liverpool”, she hastens to add. “I was running towards [Paris].” Midgley landed at the door of the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop, where its late owner, George Whitman, offered her a job before introducing her to some bright-eyed arty types who were living in a squat. Midgley wound up in an abandoned hotel off Saint-Germain-des-Prés, working at the bookstore by day and hosting poetry readings at the squat by night. After a year of living off “cheese and wine”, Midgley fell ill and returned to Liverpool. “General malnutrition, not looking after myself,” she explains. “No vitamins, not seeing daylight and you know, never looking at a vegetable.”
Anneliese Midgley at Brian’s Diner in Liverpool, where she worked, in 1994.
Fittingly for someone whose family now lived in the more well-to-do area of Penny Lane, Midgley found her own version of the art collectives she once read about. She ran club nights in Liverpool, including one with Ladytron co-founder Daniel Hunt. At Liquidation – which still operates today – she had a floor to herself, playing northern soul, 1960s girl groups and garage punk with some psych rock sprinkled in (all on vinyl, obviously). Britpop was in its imperial phase by the time Midgley moved down to London with Stanley, whom she’d met when he DJ’d at her 21st birthday party. She walked straight into a job at the cult music shop Reckless Records (“I think it probably helped that I had Bob Stanley on my arm”), before working in music journalism and doing press for bands.
In a photo from the time, Midgley poses against a wall of vinyl records in a red Sergeant Pepper coat and a Kathleen Hanna-esque side fringe. She also collected 1960s vintage clothes: Courrèges, Pierre Cardin and Mary Quant. Now she takes her style cues from – her tie today and its matching pinstripe shirt from Whistles is a giveaway – and is a passionate defender of the arts: “There’s that old poem that we’ve taken on in the Labour Party: give them bread, but also give them roses.” People’s lives, she says, shouldn’t just be functional. “They should also have that beauty, that elegance, that access to design and culture.”
The aforementioned picture.
So how did a Courrèges-collecting indie cool girl end up in politics? You can thank the London congestion charge. In 2003, then mayor Ken Livingstone introduced the fee and Midgley, who didn’t drive, was a fan (she also thought its symbol “looked really pop art”). She designed a pro-congestion charge badge and found a deal to print 500. Stanley suggested she send some to Livingstone, who gamely offered her a job on his re-election campaign. The work was significantly less glam but she did find ways to inject Britpop glitz into mayoral politics. She organised fundraisers at working men’s clubs: Suggs from Madness would call the bingo, The Specials frontman Terry Hall would hop on the decks and Jarvis Cocker would do a turn on the mic. Her Britpop mates are both gobsmacked by and proud of their Midge’s ascent in politics. Ian Broudie, the lead singer of the Lightning Seeds, once told her: “It’s so weird – you just decided you wanted to be an MP and now you are,” Midgley says. “I was like, yeah, it didn’t really happen like that.”
Instead her political career took off with a stint in City Hall under Livingstone, followed by jobs as the political director of Unite and advisor to TUC general secretary Paul Nowak. For someone who had, in her words, “fallen into things throughout life”, trade unions instantly felt like home. Their emphasis on working-class solidarity reminded her of community life back on Cantril Farm; she credits unions as one of the reasons her father and his factory colleagues were protected from the economic turmoil of the 1980s. “That is what my Englishness is built on,” she says. “An Englishness that is about solidarity, dignity and equality – one that built the trade union movement.” She could have quite happily lived out the rest of her career among those comrades – until Knowsley came up for election in 2024. “There was just a drumbeat in the back of my head that if I didn’t have a go, I would regret it.”
She was elected with 67.3 per cent of the vote and has been a ferocious defender of her hometown since, lobbying hard for reforms to workers’ rights and working with constituents to introduce Olivia’s Law, which gives judges more power to force offenders to attend their sentencing hearings and face their victims’ families in court. Still she maintains she is no policy wonk: “I know what my skill set is and it’s not like delving deep into what various policies should be, but how they are delivered.” Labour has pledged to halve violence against women in a decade – Midgley’s own constituency has the highest level of femicide in the country. “I think that that is an extremely bold mission,” she says. “I want every woman and girl in Knowsley to be safe, and so I will wake up every day and think about what I can do to deliver that.”
But bleak questions about Labour’s success rate loomed large on her constituency doorsteps. “We’d stood on a manifesto of change and then got in saying there couldn’t be that change, the constraints were too tough. After a couple of years, people came away thinking, ‘Well, what is happening for us? We’re just more skint.’”
By this point, Midgley had worked with leaders on the right and left of the party – she’d been Jeremy Corbyn’s deputy chief of staff and served as Starmer’s senior special adviser. “One of the many reasons Anneliese has risen steadily through the ranks under multiple labour leaders is her profound empathy both for those she works with and whom she now represents,” says Louise Haigh. Midgley first met Burnham when he was an MP under Corbyn, and remains a die-hard true believer: “I would run through walls for him.” Part of what drew her to him was a more collegiate approach to working with others, which will come in handy when dealing with Labour’s fractious backbenchers. “These are grown-ups who should be treated with absolute respect, who’ve got a wealth of ideas and advice – not just treated as a number to go through a voting lobby,” she explains. Was the latter Starmer’s approach, I ask. “Yeah, I do think that.” For the first time, the naturally chatty Midgley deigns not to elaborate.
Speaking in Parliament.
House of CommonsAh, there’s the glimpse of that steely core. As chief whip, Midgley’s primary job is to make sure the government can count on the support of their parliamentary colleagues to pass legislation. “I’m not going to go into any of the dark arts or tactics for readers, unfortunately,” she says with a glint of mischief in her eye. But if her tenure as a backbencher is any indication, Midgley is the type who simply doesn’t quit – she will “hassle” until things get done. I am reminded of how one of her friends told (anonymously) that Midgley was like “a terrier” in this regard. Her aide cracks up at the reference and immediately stops once Midgley fixes him with an inquisitive stare. “What do you think?” she asks. He offers diplomatically: “You don’t walk past a problem without trying to find a solution.”
“I’m very determined,” she says. “If there’s things I want to do, I will do them. Basically, I will win,” she says, laughing. “Obviously I said all of that stuff before about team-building, and that’s absolutely right. But like, I’m not going to take any shit and I don’t fuck about. Do you know what I mean?”
Main look: Twill coat, Mackintosh.