In brief:
- The MPs in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet represented constituencies on average only 117 miles from Westminster. That’s lower than under previous Labour leaders: Miliband, 157; Brown, 194; Blair, 193; Smith, 206; Kinnock, 179.
- Senior members of Corbyn’s cabinet – Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor and Leader – represented constituencies on average only 7 miles from Westminster
- Given the scale of Labour losses in Northern seats over the past decade, these data may be of interest to those analysing Labour’s recent electoral performances.
Various factors contributed to Labour’s most recent electoral defeat. Disentangling them requires a deep, objective analysis of data – the sort that Labour Together have said they will undertake. In this article, we put numbers on one factor that many argued contributed to Labour’s poor performance in Northern seats: that its leadership team was too ‘London-centric’.
Our analysis focuses on Labour’s Cabinets and Shadow Cabinets since 1984. The Cabinet is a team of around 20 senior MPs selected by the prime minister. It is the main decision-making body for Government. The Shadow Cabinet is an equivalent team of MPs selected by the leader of the opposition party. It scrutinises Government and develops alternative policies.
These two groups of MPs are the face of their respective parties. They set their policy agendas, and have a large influence on their party’s performance in General Elections.
The MPs in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet represented constituencies on average only 117 miles from Westminster. That’s much lower than under previous Labour leaders. The constituencies of MPs in Miliband’s cabinet were an average of 157 miles from Westminster. The averages for Brown, Blair, Smith and Kinnock were 194, 193, 206 and 179 respectively.
The disparity is even more striking when we look at just the most senior members of Corbyn’s cabinet – Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor and Leader. These senior members of Corbyn’s team represented constituencies on average only 7 miles from Westminster.
We’ve included the full R code used to calculate these charts below. For those not familiar with R, we summarise our methodology in the following.
When using these data or the charts above, cite www.datalobo.com
Methodology
- First, we constructed a list of every Labour (Shadow) Secretary of State since 1984. Since 2010, Parliament.uk has maintained a list of Shadow Cabinet members. Around 250 historic versions of that page are available through webarchive.org. So we wrote a function to scrape those historic versions – meaning we have 250 different snapshots of the Shadow Cabinet since 2010. Apart from when those snapshots coincide with reshuffles – our data doesn’t show the exact date that shadow cabinet positions changed. But it will generally be accurate to within 14 days and relies on official data as source. For cabinet ministers between 1997 and 2010, we scraped an official report penned by the Department for Information Services which tables secretaries of state under Blair and Brown. For shadow ministers between 1984 and 1997, we scraped Wikipedia. That’s not an official source, but was the best we could find. The results are saved in the first spreadsheet below: Data – Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet Members
- Second, we matched each of those (Shadow) Cabinet members to a constituency, using official electoral results data.
- Third, we used ONS data on the geographical centre of each constituency to get coordinates for their longitude and latitude. These data are only available for current constituencies. For MPs elected to constituencies whose boundaries have since changed, we used the coordinates of the current constituency which most overlaps with their old constituency.
- Fourth, we calculated the distance of each constituency from the Palace of Westminster. We then found the average distance for the entire (Shadow) Cabinet. These results are saved in the second spreadsheet below, Data – Average Distance
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