If the opinion polls are correct, Britain will have a new government next week with Labour entering power for the first time since 2010.

One of Sir Keir Starmer’s first jobs, if he becomes prime minister, will be to appoint a Cabinet to take over the running of the country.

It is likely the Labour leader will bestow power on those that are already serving him as shadow ministers across various briefs.

But what do we know about the views of senior Labour figures who could soon be forming Britain’s next government?

And here’s how many have previously been caught up in controversy… 

Angela Rayner

The 44-year-old is set to become deputy prime minister if Labour win power and also take the lead on the party’s plans to build 1.5million new homes.

She was recently cleared by police following a months-long row over claims she may have avoided tax on the sale of her former council house.

In 2021, Ms Rayner was caught up in another fierce dispute after she called Conservatives ‘scum’ at a Labour conference event.

She later apologised ‘unreservedly’ for the comments and said she had ‘reflected on what I said’.

In 2016, when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, Ms Rayner was among 48 Labour MPs to vote against replacing Britain’s four Trident nuclear missile submarines.

David Lammy

The 51-year-old is likely to become Britain’s next foreign secretary in a Labour government.

He was also among those MPs who voted against the renewal of Trident in 2016, but has since said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed his mind on the issue.

In 2019, Mr Lammy caused fury after he compared Tory Brexiteers to Nazis.

He said: ‘I’m just looking over there at Winston Churchill. On the 30th of September 1938, he stood up in Parliament and he said we would not appease Hitler.

‘I’m looking across to Nelson Mandela who would not give in to apartheid. We say we will not give in to the ERG. We will not appease. We will not appease.’

Mr Lammy later defended his comments and said they weren’t ‘strong enough’.

He was among 35 Labour MPs who nominated Mr Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015.

Emily Thornberry

The 63-year-old was also among those to nominate Mr Corbyn when he stood to become Labour leader in 2015.

She is currently the shadow attorney general and is set to become the government’s chief legal adviser if Labour win power.

Ms Thornberry was previously shadow attorney general under former Labour leader Ed Miliband.

But she resigned from the role in 2014 after being accused of snobbery when she tweeted a picture of a house decked out in St George’s flags while out campaigning. 

Wes Streeting

The 41-year-old is set to take charge of the NHS as Britain’s new health secretary should his party win the general election.

Earlier this year, Mr Streeting admitted he had been wrong to previously say that ‘trans women are women’.

He said the LGBT rights group Stonewall – where he used to work – had got it wrong with its slogan.

Mr Streeting spoke out following the publication of the Cass Review of NHS gender identity services for young people.

He told The Sun: ‘To the extent that – and I say this with some self-criticism and reflection – if you’d asked me a few years ago, on this topic, I would have said trans men are men, trans women are women.

‘Some people are trans, get over it. Let’s move on. This is all blown out of proportion.

‘And now I sort of sit and reflect and think actually, there are lots of complexities.’ 

Asked if he stood by Stonewall’s stance that ‘trans women are women, get over it’, he replied: ‘No’.

Thangam Debbonaire 

The 57-year-old is currently Labour’s shadow culture secretary.

She sparked anger earlier this year when she claimed Rule! Britannia ‘alienates’ a lot of people.

Ms Debbonaire commented on the view of cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason that playing the song at the Last Night of the Proms would make Brits feel uncomfortable.

‘It’s not my favourite bit of music,’ she said. ‘And the Proms is a fantastic institution and it’s the world’s greatest music festival.

‘It’s a decision for the people who run the Proms and it shouldn’t be politicians who tell people how to run cultural events.

‘I think for a lot of people that feels like a very sort of British moment, which I think has to be respected as well

‘But for a lot of people, as Sheku Kanneh-Mason said, it will feel alienating.

‘As I want the Proms – I want culture – to be accessible to everyone, I think it’s a good debate for us to be having.’

In 2018, Ms Debbonaire voiced her support for supervised drug-taking rooms to be opened in her Bristol constituency.

She gave a speech in Parliament calling for “drug consumption rooms” – places run by clinicians which have clean needles and facilities available – to be made legal because of the heavy burden drug-taking is placing on the city.

In 2017, she spent a month trying to live free from buying single-use plastics. 

Rachel Reeves

The 45-year-old is set to become Britain’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer if Labour wins the general election.

Ms Reeves, who spent six years working for the Bank of England between 2000 and 2006, published a book last year titled ‘The Women Who Made Modern Economics’.

But this plunged her into a plagiarism row after it emerged some of her book’s passages were lifted from other sources – including Wikipedia – without acknowledgment.

Ms Reeves admitted she ‘should have done better’ and some sentences ‘were not properly referenced’, saying this would be corrected in future reprints.

She told the BBC: ‘I’m the author of that book, I hold my hands up and said, I should have done better.

‘Obviously, I had research assistants on the book, but I take responsibility for everything that is in that book.’

The Tories have since taken to calling Ms Reeves the ‘copy and paste shadow chancellor’.

Ed Miliband

The 54-year-old is a former party leader and the key driver of Labour’s green agenda. 

He denied that he ‘bounced’ Ms Reeves into announcing a £28billion a year splurge on green investment at Labour’s party conference in 2021.

Labour have since U-turned on that pledge and dramatically scaled back their Green Prosperity Plan.

Mr Miliband was said to have pushed back against diluting the plan, although his aides denied he could have resigned over the issue.

At the 2021 Labour conference, Mr Miliband blasted the Conservatives over their climate policies.

He said: ‘The Tories are not climate deniers, they are something even more dangerous.

‘They talk green but fail to act. They refuse to rise to the scale of the emergency and they will not make the investments we need.

‘They are climate ditherers. They are climate pretenders. They are climate delayers.’

When he was Labour leader in 2014, Mr Miliband warned Britain was ‘sleepwalking into a national security crisis on climate change’.

One Labour veteran has complained to the ConservativeHome website that the party’s environmental policy – overseen by Mr Miliband, who lives near to Sir Keir in north London – was ‘being made by the Primrose Hill Mothers WhatsApp Group’.

Louise Haigh

The 36-year-old served as a shadow minister throughout Mr Corbyn’s spell as Labour leader, after she nominated him for the leadership.

She is now shadow transport secretary under Sir Keir.

In 2021, when she was shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Ms Haigh sparked fury by suggesting Labour would not fight to keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom.

She said that if her party was in Government it should remain ‘neutral’ in any referendum on Irish reunification instead of campaigning on behalf of unionists. 

The comments put her at odds with Sir Keir, who previously said he would campaign against reunification, saying: ‘I believe in the United Kingdom’.