KEIR Starmer has entered 10 Downing Street with a landslide victory not seen since the last Labour leader to become prime minister following a General Election – Tony Blair in 1997.
The similarities don't end there.
The new PM did so with the help of director of communications Matthew Doyle, adviser Peter Hyman and director of strategy Deborah Mattinson – all of whom worked for the party when Blair was prime minister.
They – alongside Starmer’s right-hand man Morgan McSweeney – will likely remain key cogs in the machine.
Pat McFadden – Blair’s former political secretary – was rewarded for his success as campaign coordinator by getting Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, running the powerful Cabinet Office – often described as the engine room of government.
Yvette Cooper (above), Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband were cabinet ministers in the last Labour government and will be again under Starmer – taking up the roles of Home Secretary, Northern Ireland Secretary and Energy Secretary respectively.
John Healey, now Defence Secretary, also served in the Blair-Brown governments. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle was a Blair-era special adviser.
Darren Jones once hailed Blair as his political hero – he is now chief secretary to the Treasury.
And in Scotland, it has seen the likes of Douglas Alexander (below) and Blair McDougall as Labour MPs.
But, of course, 2024 is not 1997. The mood and political reality are very different.
For one, it looks as though Starmer is no way near as popular as Blair was back then. And there isn’t as much optimism.
New Labourites danced to Things Can Only Get Better outside the Festival Hall when Tony Blair made his victory speech.
Starmer made his at the Tate Modern art gallery on Friday, with much drearier weather outside. The party and his supporters no doubt jubilant but the public - other than joy at finally kicking out the Tories – arguably less so.
The new PM won with a parliamentary majority of about 170, slightly less than Blair's 179. But this was done with a much smaller share of the vote, 34% to Blair's 43%.
Without the advances in Scotland, Labour overall would have gone backwards in terms of vote share compared with the 2019 rout.
And according to YouGov, nearly half of all Labour voters declared that getting rid of the Tories was their main objective, with 5% opting for their policies, and 1% offering up Starmer’s leadership.
Mood and political reality aside, what about policy-wise?
"Real significant differences"
The Sunday National spoke with Steven Fielding, a professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert in British politics and modern political history, especially regarding the Labour Party.
“You can define Blairism from a number of respects,” he said.
“Some people saw in economics that it was a continuation of neoliberalism – Margaret Thatcher's idea that the market should prevail and that the government shouldn't really get involved directly in the economy.
“On that basis, there isn’t a return to Blairism. Rachel Reeves has made it very clear that kind of economic arrangement is no longer to be considered viable so far as the British economy is concerned, because it needs government to not just get out of the way but to actually be involved in the process of shaping markets.”
Fielding said that the way in which Labour has tried to maximise its vote by appealing to former Tory voters, for example, is seen by many as Blairite.
“There are real significant differences between what Starmer wants to do and what Labour wanted to do in the 1990s, although it's clearly not Corbynism either,” he said.
Fielding added: “We're on the other side of the financial crash. We're on the other side of austerity. We're on the other side of a British economy which is tanking, lacking investment, low productivity. People’s real standard of living has been suppressed for nearly 20 years.
“This is a very different moment.”
