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The Deborah Mattinson Edition

29 min listen

Deborah Mattinson joined the House of Lords as a Labour peer in February. Her involvement in politics began when she worked alongside Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould to create Labour’s Shadow Communications Agency for Neil Kinnock. In 1992 she co-founded Opinion Leader Research, and she went on to advise Tony Blair ahead of the 1997 election and later became Gordon Brown’s chief pollster. In 2021 she was appointed Director of Strategy for Keir Starmer, a position she held until stepping down following last year’s landslide victory. On the podcast, Deborah tells Katy Balls about growing up as a Labour supporter with a father active in local Tory politics, the work