For the first year of Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party, Anneliese Dodds served as a visible reassurance to the left of the party that he intended to continue the legacy of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
Having served in Corbyn’s shadow Treasury team under John McDonnell, Dodds was promoted to shadow chancellor when Starmer took over in 2020. However, her slow slide down the ministerial ranks since has encapsulated the prime minister’s steady shift to the right.
Her dramatic resignation on Friday is the latest sign of how far those on the soft left of the party – even those who have remained loyal throughout – have been pushed to one side under the prime minister’s leadership.
Dodds, a bookish intellectual who studied at Oxford, Edinburgh and the London School of Economics, was first elected to parliament in 2017. An expert in government and public policy, she was snapped up by McDonnell soon after becoming an MP to work in his team as shadow junior Treasury minister.
While working under Corbyn, she was known as a capable media performer who could promote policies such as hiking corporation tax without the belligerence shown by some of her more outspoken colleagues.
She also earned a reputation as one of Brexit’s most vocal opponents, supporting Starmer in his calls for a second referendum, promising to try to “stop the government from pursuing its extreme, chaotic version of Brexit”.
When Starmer appointed her as shadow chancellor, the decision was welcomed even by those who later become some of his staunchest opponents in the party. “Anneliese was a superb member of my Treasury team, is really talented, works incredibly hard and is conscientious in all she does,” McDonnell said.
Just a year later, however, Starmer changed his entire approach after a crushing set of local election results, which included losing the previously safe seat of Hartlepool in a byelection. The Labour leader decided he needed to pivot to the right, and reshuffled his frontbench team, moving Dodds to the job of party chair and replacing her with Rachel Reeves.
She was to take up the role of equalities secretary later that year after the resignation of Marsha de Cordova, and chaired the Labour policy review that helped inform the party’s election manifesto last year.
Having been a shadow cabinet minister from 2020 until the election, Dodds found herself demoted once more when Labour entered government, with her women and equalities portfolio downgraded to that of a minister of state.
But she was also given the job of overseeing international development within the Foreign Office, with both roles allowing her to attend cabinet without being a secretary of state.
Starmer was already signalling his declining commitment to international aid, reversing a pledge to re-establish the Department for International Development as separate to the Foreign Office.
However, the prime minister remained committed – at least rhetorically – to lifting the amount Britain spends on aid to 0.7% of gross national income.
So when he told cabinet ministers this week that, in the short term at least, he would not raise the aid budget but slash it by half instead to pay for defence spending, this was the last straw for the previously ultra-loyal Dodds.
“I know you have been clear that you are not ideologically opposed to international development,” she wrote in her understated, but devastating resignation letter. “But the reality is that this decision is already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAid.”
“I will continue to support you,” she added. “But now I will do so from the backbenches.”
