Only six weeks ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour party seemed locked into the mood of optimism and quiet delight that had started to cohere over the previous autumn. Polls continued to show leads over the Tories of about 25 percentage points. Starmer was guardedly looking ahead to two terms in office and “a decade of national renewal”. Rishi Sunak and his allies, by contrast, were synonymous with disruption, impossible living costs and the state of constant internal chaos labelled “long Johnson”. We were still heading, it seemed, for one of those moments when a tired and divided ruling party simply collapses, and change becomes inevitable.
Maybe we still are. Whenever the next election arrives, Conservative defeat is still the most likely outcome. But as MPs prepare to return after the Easter recess, the battle between the two big Westminster parties has subtly shifted. Labour’s average poll lead is now in the teens rather than 20s, Starmer and Sunak’s personal ratings are almost even, and gurus of political gambling have been heard advising against any bets on an outright Labour win. The key reasons why are not hard to work out: notwithstanding such grinding problems as the ongoing strikes in the NHS, Sunak is just about managing to look like an efficient, stable, confident kind of leader, while Starmer seems stuck – ahead, but coasting.
There is an obvious response to that – which Labour people know by heart – and that is, given the calamity of the 2019 result, everything is going better than anyone could have reasonably expected. But does Starmer seem insurgent? To what extent do his arguments and ideas cut through to voters? How far is he from that point when would-be prime ministers so dominate the political conversation that the move from opposition to government seems almost inevitable? Given the huge trail of Tory wreckage that has mounted up over 13 years and the recent anarchy at the top, these are questions that ought to make Labour people uneasy, at least.
Starmer and Labour’s senior shadow ministers still mostly speak in a deadening political argot full of abstract nouns and concepts that have little resonance in people’s everyday lives. A year ago, his pitch to the public was all about “security”, “prosperity” and “respect”; now, he and his team want to “build a better Britain” that will supposedly push ahead in the “global race”. Insurgency requires energy, pace and emotional intelligence, but he seems slow, leaden and strangely cold.
His key weakness is much the same as it has always been – the absence of a story about who he is, the condition of the country he wants to govern, and how Britain needs to change. And in that sense, there are grim historical echoes: Starmerism, if such a thing exists, is as reminiscent of New Labour as its admirers sometimes claim, but less suggestive of 1997’s glories than the murky years – from 2005 to 2010, roughly – when that project lost its way, got lost in internal battling, chased votes in the basest ways possible, and headed for defeat.
Back then, progressive intentions and big ideas were often lost in loud talk about “yobs”, making foreign nationals carry ID cards, and welfare cheats. Now, Labour promises crackdowns and “respect orders” – Tony Blair’s old adage about being tough on both crime and the causes of crime seems to have lost its second half – and says it is keeping a close eye on the cost of benefit fraud. The imperative, it seems, is to echo the supposed views of the so-called hero voters in seats Labour recently lost to the Tories, with any unease from leftwing faint-hearts cited as welcome proof that the leader is, to use his chosen word, “ruthless”. Meanwhile, tactics and strategy still seem woefully incoherent. Up until the recent spurt of crass anti-Sunak attack ads – defended over the weekend by the deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner as “no-nonsense” and “factual” – there was a drive to make Starmer’s lack of political experience an asset and portray him as a dutiful public servant uninterested in the usual Westminster games: now, he looks like the opposite.
All this matters for two very big reasons. First, as those tightening polls suggest, Labour’s underperformance still leaves room for a Conservative revival and a narrow election win. And there is another set of possibilities, fraught with different risks: Labour taking power with a small Commons majority – or as a minority administration, whose fragility would be sealed by Starmer’s explicit rejection of coalitions or agreements with other parties. As things stand, without a defining narrative or much of a relationship with the electorate, either scenario would reveal Labour as a precarious political force, at the mercy of both events and its adversaries.
No one should underestimate what a Starmer-led government would be up against, even if Labour won outright. The UK economy remains in a perilous state, not least in the context of continued fears about the stability of the global banking system. The effects of Brexit now play out in the kind of visceral scenes – queues and shortages, chiefly – that any government should fear. Thanks in part to Labour’s nervous embrace of spending restraint, our public services will still be vulnerable to crises and meltdowns.
And then there are the dangers of a reborn Tory party. A couple of weeks ago, I had a long conversation with the academic Tim Bale, who has just published an impressive book, The Conservative Party After Brexit, subtitled “turmoil and transformation”. When we talked about the prospect of Tory defeat and what might follow it, he highlighted the near-disappearance of centrist Conservative voices and the likelihood of a reversion to the kind of hard-right instincts that Sunak has managed to smooth over. The next leadership contest, he said, may well be between Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman. The former would mix her populist, Brexity aspects with the kind of free-marketry that so spectacularly imploded when Liz Truss was in charge; the latter would take her party perilously close to the kind of organised nastiness pioneered by such politicians as Nigel Farage and Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
In either scenario, the Tories would be backed by a fierce and formidable machine: the rightwing press, internet provocateurs, and the deeply anti-Labour voices now given a daily platform by TalkTV and GB News. More than ever before, every national mishap would be amplified into a crisis, and Labour failure would present a huge opportunity; even, come an election, the chance to finally see off everything deemed “woke” and to finish whatever deranged post-Brexit business the Tories had left unfinished.
Those are the stakes. And in that sense, drawing attention to Starmer’s shortcomings ought not to be a matter of factional fighting or ideological point-scoring, but something much more universal: a reminder that for all our sakes, he urgently needs to up his game.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
