As the Labour deputy leadership contest gets away after the resignation of Angela Rayner from the post last week, it’s now down to a straight battle between Phillipson and Lucy Powell.
Starmer’s Education Secretary, Phillipson is undoubtedly the most senior of the two, but either way it seems clear that the party is on course to meet the call of former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman for the next deputy leader to be a woman.
But who is Bridget Phillipson, and what is her background?
A political background
Phillipson grew up in the former mining town of Washington in the North East to a single mother. She has described the council flat she grew up in as having “rotten windows, no heating upstairs.” Her father lived nearby, but she never met him.
She joined the Labour Party at the age of just 15, and served as co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club during her time at the university, where she studied History and Modern Languages.
After graduation she moved back to the North East and worked in local government, before working with her mother to manage the domestic violence refugee, Wearside Women in Need, that her mother set up in 1983.
A North East MP
Phillipson was selected as the Labour candidate for Houghton and Sunderland South in 2009, from an all-women shortlist. She won the seat with an over 10,000 majority in 2010, and has held it ever since.
Under Ed Miliband’s leadership, she served a number of roles in opposition, including as Opposition Whip from October 2013 to September 2015. She also sat on the Home Affairs Committee from July 2010 to November 2013, and was secretary to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic and Sexual Violence from 2010 to 2015.
During the 2016 Brexit referendum she campaigned for Remain.
A committed Starmerite
Phillipson has always been to the right of the Labour Party – in party leadership elections since 2010 she backed David Miliband, Yvette Cooper, Owen Smith and Keir Starmer.
It was after Starmer’s election in 2020 that Phillipson was first promoted to the Shadow Cabinet, as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Starmer’s November 2021 shadow cabinet reshuffle saw Phillipson promoted to the role of Shadow Secretary of State for Education. Following Labour’s landslide victory in July 2024, she took her opposition portfolio into government, where she was also appointed Minister for Women and Equalities. During Starmer’s recent dramatic reshuffle, Phillipson held on to the education portfolio.
The frontrunner (so far)
Since she announced her candidacy Tuesday morning, Phillipson has been widely regarded as the frontrunner in Labour’s deputy leadership contest.
As the only Cabinet member to announce her candidacy so far, Phillipson is generally seen as the candidate favoured by Number 10, and as a Northern working-class woman she in some ways fills the void that Rayner’s departure has left in the Labour leadership.
In a statement announcing her candidacy, she said: “I am a proud working-class woman from the north-east. I have come from a single-parent family on a tough council street, all the way to the cabinet.”
Lucy Powell on the other hand is a key ally of Manchester Metro Mayor Andy Burnham, which has led to some speculation that the deputy leadership contest is a proxy war between between Starmer and Burnham. As James Heale put it in the Spectator – “the race provides a litmus test of internal party opinion.”
And with the recent launch of ‘Mainstream’, a soft-left group backed by Burnham, it seems that Burnham is bound to have an influence over the deputy leadership contest.
But, you can never speak too soon in politics. It isn’t over ’till it’s over.
