Mirror political editor John Stevens is leaving the newspaper brand to work for the new Labour government.
Stevens has been in the Mirror role for two years, having previously been deputy political editor at the Daily Mail for five years.
He will become a special adviser to Pat McFadden MP, who is in Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and who has been described as “the most influential MP you’ve never heard of”.
Mirror editor-in-chief Caroline Waterston said in a note to staff, seen by Press Gazette, on Friday: “John has been a brilliant addition to the political team since he joined in September 2022.
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“During his time here, he has worked on some great exclusives, including his bombshell Partygate tape which showed footage for the first time inside one of the lockdown-busting gatherings in Westminster. This footage was featured at the top of broadcast bulletins for days and quickly became the most watched video in the history of the Mirror website.”
Stevens was shortlisted in the Politics Journalism category at the British Journalism Awards last year for the Partygate tape as well as exclusives that Suella Braverman’s team wrongly denied she had received a speeding ticket and that Rishi Sunak gave a £10 bottle of wine to a local school despite donating millions to his wife’s US college.
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Stevens was also involved in the Mirror’s Save Our Ticket Offices campaign which was shortlisted for Campaign of the Year at the same event, Waterston said.
She also shared a quote from Stevens, who said: “I have loved working at the Mirror with such a brilliant team of colleagues. There are so many talented people I am thankful to for making my time here so enjoyable.”
The New Statesman reported last year of Stevens’s new boss that Starmer “is said to regularly seek McFadden’s counsel and spend more time with him than almost any other frontbencher”. McFadden is a veteran of government, having worked with both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Numerous political editors have moved into senior jobs in government over the years.
For Labour, Alastair Campbell was political editor of the Mirror and then the now-defunct Today newspaper before becoming Blair’s press secretary in 1994.
For the Conservatives, recent converts have included ex-Talkradio political editor Ross Kempsell who joined Boris Johnson’s team as a special adviser in 2019 and long-time Spectator political editor James Forsyth who became Rishi Sunak’s political secretary.
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