I don’t believe anyone has ever compared Sir Keir Starmer to Jean-Claude Van Damme, so I’m going to be the first here. Because in one vital way, the mild-mannered Labour leader is very like the muscle-bound Belgian star of numerous Nineties kick-em-up action flicks: he’s a very Hard Target.
Not for want of trying. Right now, significant efforts are being made by the Conservatives and their allies on a project that could determine whether Starmer gets to be PM, and for how long. That project, part of the “black ops” side of politics that voters rarely get to hear about, is all about finding ways to paint Starmer as dangerous, radical, extremely Left-wing or otherwise threatening.
Failing that — and the smart money is on failure — the next Tory objective is to depict him as the frontman for a dangerous and radical Labour team.
A big part of the Conservative election strategy is making people if not actively frightened of Starmer as PM then at least a little uncertain and nervous about that prospect.
This is their classic technique. For decades, Conservatives have been depicting Labour opponents as too dangerous to trust with the country and the economy. Ed Miliband is basically a boring policy geek but that didn’t prevent David Cameron’s team in 2015 casting him as “Red Ed”, who would bring “chaos” to Britain. We all remember how that turned out.
Of course, the effectiveness of these tactics depends a lot on the nature of the target. Jeremy Corbyn made life very easy for the Tory attack machine by positively playing up to the caricature of a bearded revolutionary. By contrast, Tony Blair was the toughest challenge the Conservative operation ever faced. Tory bullets just bounced off him. The 1997 poster showing a smiling Blair with demonic red eyes is one of the most famous failures in campaigning history.
The ‘black ops’ involve finding the material on which to base such claims. Political parties go to great lengths to amass evidence of their opponents saying and doing things that appear to support allegations of radicalism — or when Labour attack the Tories, heartlessness. That material is then handed out to friendly media outlets who run headlines that might just sow doubts in voters’ minds.
Young members of staff are sent undercover to public events where the other side’s politicians are speaking.
Once at these events, they record MPs (hopefully) saying something stupid or nasty or otherwise damaging. It’s not just in person events. Every social media utterance, too, down to the oldest Facebook comment, is hoovered up by the other side’s Opposition Research team and filed away for use closer to the election campaign. Any politician speaking at a private event should assume there’s a staff member of their rival party in the room. As for their social media — it pays to be prudent, and to prune.
But this tried and tested method, which has helped the Tories win so many recent elections, is failing. Why?
It’s not just because Starmer is too dull for such pulse-raising tales. No, he is making himself a hard target for the Tory operation. He’s painted over his former opposition to Brexit by stealing the phrase “take back control”. He’s distanced Labour from striking trade unions and hinted at modest public service reform. He’s said sensible, let’s-meet-halfway things on contentious issues like trans rights and Channel crossings.
Above all, he’s accepted the fiscal estimates behind the last Tory budget, meaning little room for extra spending promises.
It might not set Left-wing hearts fluttering but Team Starmer care more about neutralising Tory attempts to present him as a threat. It’s working. Internal Conservative messaging shows how the party is struggling with Starmer. Letters to Tory members from party HQ still try to frame him as a front for Jeremy Corbyn, a genuinely dangerous figure who Starmer has, revealingly, kicked out of Labour. Telling voters that Starmer backed Corbyn in 2019 won’t cut it for the Tories in a 2024 election.
So the black ops teams will continue their work, trooping incognito into obscure Labour meetings and diligently sifting every Labour candidate’s entire Twitter history. Can Starmer’s Labour maintain his deliberate and disciplined dullness all the way to the general election? The answer will do a lot to decide the result of that vote.
