We are told the focus groups are clear as a bell. No, Labour’s Keir Starmer is not exhilarating. No, the economy is not screaming for new management. Yes, the world is a mess. But one message for sure was splashed across Starmer’s lectern on Wednesday: give us “change”.
Rishi Sunak has not been a signally worse prime minister than his recent predecessors. Eighteen months ago he was handed a tougher job than that of possibly any postwar holder of his office. The closest parallel was Douglas-Home’s year-long inheritance of the wreck of Macmillan’s government in 1963. Sunak confronted a second-rate cabinet, a crippled economy and a destitute public sector. It would have taken a political titan to have succeeded. He has struggled at least to be responsible, sincere and well-meaning.
The definition of a democracy is not that it votes its leaders into office. Russia and China pretend to do that. Democracy requires that they also be voted out. Most constitutions impose term limits on rulers to ensure regime refreshment. The issue is not the quality of government but its openness to renewal. It is Tennyson’s plea to “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”
No one could accuse the political clubland that is Westminster of failing change. After 10 years, two of Britain’s longest-serving recent prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, simply lost the public’s patience without a vote. The trauma of Brexit later supplied the country with five leaders in just eight years. Unlike the US, Britain’s constitution at least allows mistakes to be swiftly corrected. Boris Johnson was toppled by a few opinion polls. Truss lasted 49 days. Trump enjoyed four years.
Sunak is gambling against change. In announcing the election he pleads that state security requires continuity. He professes to be “the strongest possible protection” against a world “more dangerous than it has been since the end of the cold war”. He also hopes that the electorate will see him as a restorer of “economic stability”. To this, Starmer could hit back not with different policies but only with a change of leader, a promise to end “political chaos feeding decline”.
This illustrates just how lost the days are when Labour and Conservative fought elections from divergent ideological platforms. There is now little talk of public sector versus private, of privatisation versus nationalisation, or free markets versus price controls. Ministers and shadow ministers speak the same language, as if they had both just stepped out of the same PPE course. The only criticism they can level at each other is an exchange of tame abuse.
Politics thus offers the electorate an empty intellectual discourse. Public services and institutions are governed by a consensus that appears to be failing on all sides. Competence matters more than ideology, which means that politics is less about policy than about the people to whom we entrust it. Since voters cannot tell how competent a minister is likely to be, they can only fall back on trial and error, wait and see.
When Gordon Brown entered No 10 as prime minister in June 2007, he muttered to the cameras: “Let’s get on with change.” Yet he had been chancellor of the exchequer for 10 years. What was the change he had in mind? The answer could not be policy, only that of prime minister.
Boris Johnson took office in 2019 and swiftly won an election on a tide of personal popularity. He brought to British politics something it had long lacked: charm and even a sense of humour. It turned out he could not run a whelk stall. Having been given no choice of policy between him and Labour, the electorate had to judge their new leader on his performance in office. The result was lethal. Johnson’s popularity plummeted from nearly 70% to under 30%. Populist politics is the politics of whimsy. It cried out for another change.
Change is both Starmer’s opportunity and his burden. His slogan is starkly negative. It is to be not Sunak, not Tory, not the past 14 years. It is to be a relief from years of Tory backbiting, splitting and disloyalty. Like Blair in 1997, Starmer is likely to inherit an improving economy and the possibility of better times ahead. But his chief handicap, as after a long period in opposition, is a lack of ministerial experience. Blair’s cabinet disastrously backed Thatcher’s privatisation of water, trains and care homes for lack of cabinet colleagues who knew any better. Starmer may find that chaos in public services is the result not of Tory incompetence, but of structural failure that he needs to put right, and fast. Or his criticism of Sunak will return to haunt him: that the country needs change.
Initially Starmer will expect a honeymoon and a sense of a new dawn. We saw it in the “first hundred days” of Blair’s administration, and even Cameron’s coalition. There was a brief respite from political vituperation and blame. It was a period of new faces on the television screen and a new political discourse. Every government announcement no longer required the BBC to add an abusive opposition put-down. Politics was eerily happy.
Of course the challenges will remain the same, but the personalities will be different. A new club will be in power. We have only to gaze at the world as it is today to realise that this is democracy’s most precious gift.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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