Is this Labour’s first woman leader?

**Jon Sopel** (0:02)
This is a Global Production. Politics is a brutal old business, perfectly possible. The plot was brilliant. The plot to bring down, the get-handy-to-run-and-make-a-field, Josh Simons standing aside, it was absolutely one of the most brutally efficient and executed coups that there has been in modern British politics. And, you know, for better or worse, you were a part of it.

**Miatta Fahnbulleh** (0:23)
I, again, wouldn't characterise it in those terms. My view, that he wasn't the right guy to lead the sort of change we think we need in the country.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:30)
You were in the Energy Department. You work for Ed Miliband now. You're heading up the Energy Department. Do you disagree with him about anything on energy policy?

**Miatta Fahnbulleh** (0:36)
If you could design the energy system in the market, you wouldn't design it like the one that we have here.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:40)
No, I think that's fair.

**Miatta Fahnbulleh** (0:41)
I think the legacy of privatisation was botched, and I think successive governments would try to patch it up.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:46)
And your predecessor, Harriet Harman, suggested that the next time there's a leadership election, men just shouldn't be allowed to stand. What do you think about that idea? And, of course, you wouldn't necessarily have a vested interest in that, of course. But, you know, what would you think of that idea?

**Miatta Fahnbulleh** (0:59)
So, look, I wouldn't, you know, I do want a female leader of the Labour Party.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:02)
It's embarrassing, right?

**Miatta Fahnbulleh** (1:03)
A little bit.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:04)
That is Miatta Fahnbulleh, the MP for Peckham and the newest Cabinet minister, replacing Ed Miliband as Energy Secretary. She's had a remarkable life story. The daughter of Liberian refugees into parliament and in less than two years is sat around the Cabinet table and those in Westminster are already speculating that she might rise further still.

**Jon Sopel** (1:28)
The Conservative Party have already had three women Prime Ministers. Labour is yet to have a woman leader.
Is she about to change all of that? Welcome to The News Agents.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:46)
The News Agents.

**Jon Sopel** (1:47)
It's Jon.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:48)
It's Lewis.
As we're saying, the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is now sat around the Cabinet table. She is someone that is already exciting, quite a bit of speculation in Westminster about her future. Obviously, we've only just had a new Prime Minister, but such is the yearning, I think, for the Labour Party to have its first female leader. Admittedly, a yearning they never really act upon, but nonetheless, it is there. She has had, as we were saying, a remarkable political journey and life story, brought up in an intensely political family in West Africa. Her father was a prominent Liberian politician. Foreign minister eventually became a refugee. Indeed, she said that one of her earliest memories is being hid behind a bed while gunfire sounded outside. When she was six or seven, she fled Liberia because of the Liberian Civil War. She ended up coming to the UK, settling eventually in London, went to Oxford, studied PPE, was in and around Labour politics, but also was a civil servant working for the coalition government. And since she became an MP, replacing the former deputy leader, Harriet Harman, in Peckham in 2024 in a Labour safe seat there, she did a very unusual thing, which she was put immediately into a ministerial position by the then Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. And as of the accession of the Burnham government, she was put into the cabinet, replacing Ed Miliband, a long-standing ally.

**Jon Sopel** (3:16)
Yeah, it is absolutely remarkable to come in as backbencher and be around the cabinet table within two years. I mean, if you were a retread and you had previously been in government, maybe not so surprising, but for someone who'd never been held ministerial office, it really is remarkable the speed with which kind of she was spotted as someone of exceptional talent and then to be given the job. But of course, there are questions because she was appointed by Keir Starmer straight out of the blocks as a new backbencher which would have aroused a certain amount of jealousy I would think from some of her colleagues who were thinking, geez, I haven't even got a bloody select committee.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:53)
Not in politics.

**Jon Sopel** (3:55)
Yeah, no. I think it probably-

**Lewis Goodall** (3:56)
Everyone's always just pleased for each other in politics, aren't they?

**Jon Sopel** (3:58)
They always are. It's like journalists as well. Yeah. Always delighted when we see the success of one of our rivals.

**Lewis Goodall** (4:04)
I love my colleague's success.