Tim Allan once acknowledged that under Tony Blair’s No 10 press operation it was a mistake that “spin doctors became the story”.

Now he is returning to Downing Street more than 25 years later at the request of Keir Starmer, and will be hoping to avoid that destiny that so many political press chiefs – from Alastair Campbell and Steve Hilton to Fiona Hill and Dominic Cummings – have faced.

A former deputy press secretary under Blair, Allan is a smooth and impeccably well-connected PR man, according to those who have worked with him. But he has a job on his hands to turn around Downing Street’s faltering communications efforts, which are struggling to cut through against Nigel Farage’s noisy populism.

He will also have to deal with criticism over his previous clients. Some No 10 insiders resisted his appointment on the grounds that his former communications company, Portland, took on work to help improve the Kremlin’s image.

There is further potential for controversy over his role as a trustee for the gender critical Sex Matters charity, which he resigned to take on the No 10 job. Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, wrote to Starmer this week objecting to Allan’s role and questioning whether Sex Matters would get undue influence in government. A friend of Allan’s said it would be ministers, not the director of communications, who decided policy.

Those who have worked with Allan, 55, believe he will have no problem riding out any criticism and getting on with what he has been hired to do: bringing some political communications heft into the room in the same way that another former Blair adviser, Jonathan Powell, has taken a lead on foreign affairs.

Allan has a long history with the party, having moved in the same New Labour circles as the former cabinet ministers David Miliband and James Purnell in the 1990s. Senior party figures said his annual Christmas party had for many years been the hot ticket of the festive season and that “everyone who is anyone is invited from the political world of Labour”.

A 1994 Observer article describes Allan, along with Alastair Campbell, as one of “Tony’s smoothers: smart media-orientated Oxbridge thirty-something helpers”. The Cambridge graduate was, however, only 24 at the time, having joined Blair’s team after a stint in the media on Channel 4’s Week in Politics. A deputy press secretary to Blair from 1994 to 1998 under Alastair Campbell, he was also the captain of the No 10 football team.

Allan was well respected in the job but left after just a year in Downing Street to take a job as an adviser to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB, prompting a debate in parliament over the so-called revolving door with the media operator.

A few years later, while still an adviser to BSkyB, Allan wrote for the Spectator arguing against the influence of the BBC in Downing Street, calling it a “world-class rip-off, robbing the poor to provide for the rich, and it should not be allowed to expand still further”.

He founded Portland, a corporate and financial PR company, in 2001 and sold it to Omnicom with revenue of about £40m nearly two decades later. Former Portland clients ranged from Heathrow to William Hill and the governments of Kazakhstan and Qatar.

Portland also had a controversial sub-contract through other PR companies to help improve the image of the Russian government and monitor its media presence from 2005 until Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.

Those who have worked for the agency said it was a different time when western governments were trying to bring Vladimir Putin onside and that the UK government had been fully aware of its work.

Allan has since chaired another consultancy firm, Strand Partners, which has lobbied for gas industry clients among others. He stepped down as a director in May.

One friend of Allan’s from the world of PR described him as “inscrutable and smart” and “very self-deprecating”. Former Portland staffers were also positive about his management style. One said he had a “no assholes” policy and was not a Malcolm Tucker-style political adviser.

Some within No 10 are still wary though, having worked through several different communications chiefs in recent years.

One senior Labour source said: “Can’t wait for the Tories to start looking at Portland’s lobbying for the Russian government.”

A minister said: “I’m not sure what Tim Allan and David Dinsmore [the former Sun editor appointed as a civil service communications chief] have to teach us about the modern media. Is this as dynamic as it gets?”

One person who has known and worked with Allan for decades, however, said Starmer had picked right this time and that Allan was an “exceptionally good operator” who would bring people together rather than cause divisions. “You don’t found and build up a big company like Portland without a lot of talent,” they said.

Another said Allan was “not an ideological” appointment. “He’s raised the level of human capital inside No 10 and Tim is a class act,” he said, and that his task would be to convey to the public what the prime minister really believes.