Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed David Lammy as Lord Chancellor in the mini-reshuffle
Barrister-turned-politician David Lammy has been appointed Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice in Keir Starmer’s latest mini-reshuffle.
The shake-up follows Angela Rayner’s resignation as Deputy Prime Minister on Friday, after it emerged she had underpaid around £40,000 in stamp duty on her £800,000 Hove flat — a failure to seek specialist tax advice which breached the ministerial code.
Lammy — who has also been named Deputy Prime Minister — replaces barrister Shabana Mahmood MP, who held the justice role for just over a year. Mahmood was only the second woman, and the first Muslim, to serve in the position.
The Tottenham MP, previously Foreign Secretary, becomes the tenth Lord Chancellor in a decade. A trained barrister, he was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1994 before completing an LLM at Harvard Law School.
Top of his agenda will likely be the rising prison population and the Crown Court backlog — long-standing challenges that have thwarted his predecessors.
Elsewhere in the reshuffle, Baroness Levitt (Alison Levitt KC) replaces Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede as Labour’s justice spokesperson in the Lords. Called to the bar in 1988, Levitt served as principal legal adviser to Keir Starmer during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions.
Meanwhile, barrister Ellie Reeves MP has been appointed Solicitor General, succeeding former Slaughter and May lawyer Lucy Rigby, who moves to the Treasury as Economic Secretary.