When Andy Burnham walks into Downing Street on Monday, one of his first decisions will be who lives next door — and the MP for Swansea West is among the names in the conversation.
Torsten Bell, Swansea West’s MP for just two years, is named by bookmakers and Westminster reports as an outsider for Chancellor of the Exchequer as the new Prime Minister finalises his cabinet.
He is a long shot — but for an MP elected only in July 2024, being mentioned at all is remarkable.
A spokesperson for Andy Burnham says no decision has been taken, with cabinet announcements due on Monday.
The frontrunner — and the field
The name gaining most ground is Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood: the BBC has been told there are “live discussions” about her taking the role, and the Financial Times reports it as settled, citing three sources close to Burnham.
Financial markets appear to have priced her in — the pound rose around 1% against the dollar this week as the reports circulated, with one City analyst saying markets trust her “to take a sensible approach to economic policy”.
Ed Miliband was the bookmakers’ favourite in late June, but MPs close to Burnham believe his chances have faded — while Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is talked of as a compromise, with Wes Streeting and Pat McFadden also in the field.
Rachel Reeves looks increasingly unlikely to keep the job, with reports suggesting she would be offered a more junior cabinet role instead.
Why Bell’s name keeps coming up
Bell’s economic CV is longer than his parliamentary one. Before Swansea West, he spent nine years running the Resolution Foundation, the living-standards think tank — and before that was a Treasury adviser to Chancellor Alistair Darling through the 2008 financial crisis.
Within six months of arriving in Parliament he was made pensions minister, and he was brought in by Reeves to help prepare her Autumn Budget — reportedly sitting in on every key meeting with the Office for Budget Responsibility.
The Times has called him “Labour’s economic mastermind”; the New Statesman, one of Labour’s “sharpest minds”. City figures have named him as someone they would like to see keep a role under Burnham, whoever gets No 11.
Against him: his junior rank, his closeness to the Reeves era that a new Prime Minister may want distance from — and prediction markets that currently make Mahmood and Cooper the clear leaders.
Swansea’s stake
Bell has kept his focus local this month — he called a cross-party community meeting in Swansea to tackle “division” in politics just this week.
He took the seat in 2024 after the deselection of long-serving MP Geraint Davies — a row that resurfaced only this month.
Whether he gets the call or not, the man who wrote a book called Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back is now part of the conversation about who runs the country’s finances.
All will be revealed on Monday.
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