Labour chief whip Anneliese Midgley describes her tough approach to keeping MPs in line
Labour's chief whip, Anneliese Midgley, has said she is "not going to take any shit and I don’t fuck about" when it comes to keeping MPs in line. The remarks come from an interview with Vogue, as reported by the Guardian on 13 November 2026.
The chief whip is the government's head of party discipline, the senior figure responsible for making sure a governing party's MPs vote the way the party expects. Midgley is the MP for Knowsley. Before taking the whips' job, she worked as deputy chief of staff to Jeremy Corbyn and as senior special adviser to Keir Starmer.
In the interview, Midgley said of herself: "I’m very determined. If there’s things I want to do, I will do them. Basically, I will win." She said she believed Starmer, who is now a former prime minister, had treated MPs "as a number" to be walked through a voting lobby, the corridor where MPs register their votes in the Commons.
Midgley also spoke about the current prime minister, Andy Burnham, saying she "would run through the walls for" him.
Burnham's own view of the whips' role has been on record since the summer. In July, he wrote to MPs that the whips' office should be "our HR department, not something to be feared or where discipline is used to stifle debate."
Midgley's comments on how she manages colleagues therefore sit alongside a prime minister's stated hope that the whips' office would be seen as a support rather than a source of fear. The two positions have not been set out in a single exchange.
