Hollie Ridley, Labour’s Youngest and Most Successful General Secretary will be missed

She built the ground campaign that took Labour from 202 seats to 411 and she ran the party with care for the people in it.

By Kevin Craig, Founder and CEO of PLMR and former Labour Party Councillor and Parliamentary candidate

During the very difficult years of the Corbyn era, Hollie Ridley still managed to pull off impossibly difficult by-election wins as in Peterborough, for which she was publicly thanked by the Leader on Sky News. That’s how good a campaigner she is.

It all feels like a long time ago. Fast forward to September 2026 and I joined a very large number of Labour Party folk from all wings of the Party, including former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, to mark the imminent end of Hollie Ridley’s tenure as General Secretary of the Labour Party.  You have to conclude that she is almost certainly the most consequential General Secretary Labour has had in a generation. The case is built on one simple fact. She built and ran the ground campaign that took Labour from 202 seats in 2019 to 411 in 2024.

Featured

MDU warns Chancellor clinical negligence system ‘not fit for purpose’

Featured

Northern Ireland RE curriculum is ‘indoctrination’ – Supreme Court

Winning is the most important thing a political party does. A party that loses cannot deliver any of its plans. Labour had lost four General Elections in a row and had been out of power for 14 years. Its 2019 result was its worst in seats since 1935. Five years later it formed a government with one of the largest majorities in its history.

Of course, that victory belongs to many many people – but Hollie’s role in delivering the Party’s ground campaign made everything else that followed possible.

The vote share shows what her ground campaign achieved. Labour’s share of the vote rose from 32.1 per cent in 2019 to 33.7 per cent in 2024, an increase of 1.6 points. Its seat count more than doubled. The party put its money, staff and volunteers into the seats it needed to win. It kept them out of seats it could not win and seats it could not lose. Hollie Ridley, at that time Executive Director for Nations and Regions, designed and ran that operation. The part that turned votes into seats was her responsibility – and it was a resounding success.

A small number of General Secretaries have changed what the party could do. Morgan Phillips built a professional staff in the 1940s and oversaw the 1945 victory. Larry Whitty rebuilt the organisation for Neil Kinnock after the defeat of 1983. Tom Sawyer ran the party through the rewriting of Clause IV in 1995 and the 1997 victory. The much missed Margaret McDonagh, the first woman in the post, ran the organisation behind the 1997 campaign and then the 2001 victory as General Secretary. David Evans repaired the party’s finances and its disciplinary processes after 2019 and made it fit to fight an election.

The closest comparison is McDonagh. Both ran the organisation behind a winning campaign and then took the top job with Labour in government. The difference is the starting point. In 1997 Labour started from 271 seats. In 2024 it started from 202. The gain of 209 seats was the largest Labour has made at a single election since 1945. That is why I put Hollie at the top of the list.

As General Secretary she ran the party through two years in government, two difficult sets of May elections and a change of leader. When Keir Starmer announced in June that he would resign, she did not wait for the new leader to replace her. In July she told staff she would leave after conference so that the NEC could choose a General Secretary to work with the new leader. She told the prospective leadership candidates the same and offered her support to whoever won. Few people in her position handle a change at the top with such professionalism and dedication to the party – but that sums up how Ridley operates.

She did all of this – in my personal experience – with kindness. In my dealings with her as a Labour candidate she was kind and compassionate and politically savvy. Anna Turley, the party chair, said in July that party staff hold her in the highest regard. Keir Starmer called her “one of the most formidable campaigners the Labour Party has ever produced”. Both are right.

She grew up in Dagenham, the daughter of a family support worker and a lorry driver. She joined the party as a trainee organiser in 2011, in a post part-funded by the GMB and a private donor. She has said the party took a chance on her. She then made a point of creating the same chances for others, in particular working-class women. She delivered the first two rounds of the party’s Jo Cox Women in Leadership programme, which trains Labour women for senior roles.

The NEC will choose her successor this autumn. It seems that Joe Fortune (lovely bloke) and Claire Reynolds (formidable and brilliant) are the leading contenders.  Whoever is chosen will take over an organisation that won a General Election two years ago and has the people and systems to do it again. Hollie Ridley built that organisation and those of us associated with the Party should be eternally grateful.   As she said at her leaving do, Labour rarely gets majorities like this, and there is still plenty of time left for the New PM, and talented and resilient politicians like Lucy Powell, Jonathan Reynolds and John Healey, to ensure that majority is not wasted. And as for Hollie Ridley, she deserves the very best of luck in whatever she does next.

Kevin Craig served 17 years as a Labour Councillor, was twice a Labour Parliamentary Candidate and has built PLMR from start up into one of the UK’s leading Communications companies with offices across the UK