Is it political brilliance in the rough and tumble on the road to a general election? Or a worrying sign that Labour has discovered its inner Donald Trump? A viral “attack” campaign with a vicious personal overtone has led to a row on election tactics, with it laying out a shouty argument more familiar on the Right-wing of the Tory party than the “centrist dad” milieu of Starmerite Labour.
The Prime Minister is accused of letting child sex offenders off the hook: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t”.
It is questionable logic (sentencing rules for offenders pre-date Sunak even becoming an MP, let alone the Prime Minister) focusing on an area of strong passions with a complex criminal justice background. While this has divided Labour it has also provided a warning for the Tories who are enjoying an upward blip under Sunak’s leadership after the polarising late-era of Boris Johnson.
Even more telling is that Sir Keir Starmer himself doubled down (in the Daily Mail, no less) on the personal assault on the PM: “When 4,500 abusers aren’t sent to prison, people want answers rather than excuses”. Another attack message this week focused on Sunak’s wealth and clearly referenced his wife’s former non-dom status.
The aftermath has split Labour and divided some of Starmer’s closest advisers and front-bench figures over the campaign’s ethics and effectiveness. Critics baulk at a tone which feels Trumpian, and as one US Democrat adviser puts it, “makes your opponent responsible for pretty much anything you feel angry about and tries to make you angrier”.
The punchy brain behind Starmer’s push for power is Shabana Mahmood, whose Twitter posts this week told us that the Tories “crashed the economy, caused interest rates to surge and ruined the dreams of people looking to buy their first home”. This looks like a version of the dysfunctional “American carnage” trope channelled by right wing Republicans to catch Democrats off guard — it certainly worked when Trump beat the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton.
Mahmood has brought discipline to the earlier chaos of Team Starmer. “It was like a smart but pointless debating club,” recalls one insider who witnessed the early period whenStarmerites took control with little hope of a revival. “Keir was focused on the legal difficulties of getting the Corbynites out of positions of power. Angela (Rayner) was great ‘box office’ but not organised enough to run a campaign and likely to shoot off-message. Shabana came in like a dose of salts: 8am meetings, everyone told to keep their phone cameras on so no slacking. She can be fierce”.
Even Starmer is said to be in awe of his campaigns co-ordinator, whom he trusts to liaise directly with shadow cabinet figures. Not all of them appreciate her forthright style. One says they “take a deep breath” before answering when her number pops up. Relations with veteran figures like Yvette Cooper, the brainy shadow home secretary, are said to be “edgy at best”. Cooper favours Labour pursuing forensic dissection of Tory missteps and sloppy policies, especially on areas like asylum and immigration, to show that it is the more serious and effective force.
Mahmood — flanked by enforcer Morgan McSweeney, a Scottish Labour figure experienced in the “ground war” of many campaigns, wants a harder tone. In an interview with The Times this week, she noted that “immigration comes up as an issue that my voters who are black or Asian and from other ethnic minorities want to talk about”.
Mahmood is a trained barrister with a Kashmiri background. Her itinerant childhood took her to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, where her father was an engineer. She was also a contemporary of Sunak’s around the tiny central quad of Lincoln College, Oxford, and once canvassed his vote in student elections — unsuccessfully.
The two are now locked in mortal electoral combat. John McTernan, a Blairite spin doctor, thinks Starmer’s more pugnacious and risky attempt to up the war game is inevitable, if the Opposition is to turn advances into victory. “Labour can’t afford to sit back and watch the Government fall into disarray,” he writes on the UnHerd website. “It needs to put them in the wrong and keep them there.”
The trouble with this direction of travel, however, is that it rarely results in a knock-out blow. The Tories have responded that Starmer, who was a “classic Labour lawyer” in his approach to criminal justice, himself sat on the sentencing council which watered down mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders against children and young teenagers in a bid to give judges and magistrates more say. And while Starmer’s inner circle has closed ranks to defend the attacks on Sunak as factually based, many other prominent figures have not — from Cooper who has said only that she did not know about the campaign, to Lucy Powell, the party’s culture and media spokesman and engaging prominent media voice.
Powell has commented uneasily that the attacks were “not to everyone’s taste”. Prominent supporters are also rattled. The Left-wing satirical novelist Jonathan Coe simply tweeted: “Please don’t go down this road, Labour”.
In the war councils though, Labour is aware that it is fighting a formidable opponent in Isaac Levido, a quiet but deadly campaigns director who originally worked for the “Lizard of Oz” Lynton Crosby, the man deemed responsible for successive elections victories for John Howard in Australia and now runs Fleetwood Strategy, his own consultancy in London.
Levido inherited the Crosby mantle and refined the techniques for campaigns, running Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 push. Now he is masterminding Sunak’s bid to retain power against the odds. A droll, quietly-spoken figure with a hipster beard, he whittles down the weak points in arguments and data to drill home repeated messages that are likely to be remembered by wavering or barely engaged voters.
Starmer and Levido found themselves in the same room late last year at a party hosted by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and nodded politely to one another — a moment of courtesy unlikely to be repeated in the coming fray, as the battle between the two parties for the keys to No10 gets dirtier.
Also on the Tory side, Cass Horowitz has given Sunak a social media overhaul. The son of Anthony Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider series, transformed Sunak’s social media appeal when he was Chancellor, with a series of fast-moving images, clips and videos which used film and digital advertising techniques to make his client look less like a physically-slight geek, and more like an inexhaustible source of pace and energy. “He is a genius,” says one insider. “Probably the most important figure on Rishi’s whole communications team.”
However manufactured the images are (documentary-style shots of Sunak apparently unaware that he is being filmed, when the shot clearly shows he has a camera operator just steps behind him) they have worked. Sunak’s personal ratings outstrip his party and even detractors at Westminster praise him as go-getting, hard-working and sensible.
The imminent arrival of Sue Gray as Starmer’s chief of staff, the senior civil servant who investigated Johnson’s lockdown breaches and who has worked closely with Michael Gove on the Government’s levelling up agenda, will bring extra firepower to the his operation. Based in its new Southwark HQ, the Labour operational nest feels like a buzzy, hopeful place. But it is short on senior figures with experience of how to manage the machinery of government. However controversial Gray’s appointment is in civil service ranks, it is a coup for Starmerites — not least because she has deep internal knowledge of Conservative plans and timelines in policy delivery in the run-up to the election.
Starmer’s other weak flank is business — a world pretty much terra incognito to him when he took office. These days he’s more often seen in business and finance settings — including missions to pick the brains of top private equity firms such as KKR on how to attract investment to the UK.
That focus is thanks to his partnership with Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor, but also to the appointment of Vidhya Alakeson, his director of external relations, an outgoing multi-lingual who spent time in the No10 strategy unit and in US health policy. It’s hardly a secret that Starmer is not the name on European (or American) lips, his name recognition in capitals remains low — “Keir Starter” was the fumbled version one commentator came up with when I spoke about Labour’s election chances on prime-time German TV.
Some former Blairite staffers still think the Labour’s in-house team needs to flex beyond its comfort zone to understand better how non-aligned or Tory-leaning voters think. A former gatekeeper thinks “they’re doing pretty well in that you can imagine any of the shadow cabinet now in the same role in government”.
Others caution that the London centrist “bubble” has a diehard habit of misreading the doubts and caution of much of the rest of the country in returning to Labour. The full-frontal style is a signal, in the run-up to May’s local elections, that Starmer — whose poll lead has dropped from 20 to 14 points — feels the need for more tiger in the tank to nail on a Labour victory and a message that he, not Sunak, is the “change candidate”.
But something else can get lost on the way: the authenticity of which personality, as leader, is more settled and trustworthy. Watch out for that firefight — the next round in a hot and long election war.
