Good, but not quite good enough. Keir Starmer might just swallow that as a description of Labour’s performance in Thursday’s local elections. The task he faces now is ensuring those words do not become his political epitaph.
Make no mistake, there is much for Labour to celebrate in these results. The party has turned the capital city into a Labour heartland, so that London councils that were once bywords for Thatcherism – Wandsworth and Westminster – have moved from blue to red. (A notable win was Labour’s capture of Barnet, home to the largest Jewish community in the country, and evidence that Starmer’s efforts at brand decontamination on that score have not been in vain.) But this is not merely a London phenomenon, but rather an urban England one: Labour is in charge in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Norwich, too.
There were gains in the south to shout about, thanks to a win in Southampton, and in the north, with an unexpected victory in Cumberland. Labour’s overall share of the vote looks healthier. And yet no one would hail this as the kind of nationwide shift that is a clear prelude to general election victory. For that to be true, there would have had to be Labour advances everywhere, including in the red wall areas that delivered Boris Johnson his 80-seat majority in 2019. But the picture was patchier than that.
Of course, it can be a mistake to read too much into local elections. Worse than a mistake, it’s an insult to regard them as a glorified opinion poll for the Westminster parliament when they are democratic contests in their own right, ones that have a direct impact on people’s daily lives. But they can be revealing. And one thing these results show is the limits of Labour’s, and Starmer’s, current approach.
Consider just how bad things are – or should be – for the Conservative government. A cost of living crisis is pressing in on Britons, and it is set to get much worse. Energy bills are already through the roof, and now mortgage payments are going up after this week’s hike in interest rates. Inflation is the highest it’s been for years, at 7%, and forecast to reach 10% by the autumn, with the Bank of England warning of a “sharp economic slowdown” this year. If the most important question in electoral politics is usually “Are you better off now than you were before?”, most voters would answer with a loud and angry “No.”
And that’s before you get to the state of this administration. In power for 12 years, almost to the day, with a prime minister who broke a life-and-death law that he had imposed and who is thought by 78% of the country to have lied about it; a government whose state of moral decay is embodied by the MP who watched porn in the House of Commons and expected us to believe he only wanted to look at … tractors. The glum reality is that a governing party behaving like this, against this economic backdrop, should have been crushed at the polls on Thursday. It did badly, but not badly enough.
Put that together with the story told from the doorstep – that while there is plenty of disillusion with Johnson and the Tories, there is no wave of enthusiasm for Starmer and Labour. The fact that much of the current discontent found its outlet in support for the Liberal Democrats and Greens rather than Labour, even in traditionally Labour areas, adds to the same picture: voters breaking from this government but not yet embracing the alternative.
That points to a clear conclusion for Starmer to draw: that even when the prevailing conditions for an incumbent government are dire, mere opposition by the opposition is not sufficient. In Labour’s case, two things are holding it back. One is easy enough to remedy; the other much harder.
The first is that Labour is approaching the next general election much as the Conservatives approached the contest that brought them into office in 2010. David Cameron and George Osborne devoted more energy to attacking Gordon Brown and Labour than to sketching out their own plan for the country. It worked well enough to wipe out Brown’s majority without delivering an outright Tory win. The contrast is with 1995 to 1997, when Brown and Tony Blair spent more time promising a “new Britain” than they did pointing out the failings of John Major, culminating in the landslide Labour victory whose 25th anniversary passed this week.
To be sure, the circumstances were very different: Blair and Brown had the luxury of talking about Labour’s offer in the mid-1990s because by then the Tories were so obviously a busted flush. The polling was unmistakable: Labour was on course to victory. But the lesson remains, all the same. Oppositions flourish when they don’t just enrage voters about the present but encourage them about the future. (It doesn’t help that channelling public fury about Partygate just got more complicated, with reports that Durham police are to investigate Starmer over a beer he had during lockdown.)
The second is more awkward, because it’s more personal. The BBC’s political editor described Labour’s performance as far from “dazzling”. Starmer does not dazzle, and that’s not going to change. He does not have that kind of charisma. But that need not be fatal. As the i paper reports, some southern Tory MPs privately fear that Starmer’s “boring, unthreatening reputation” might even be his secret weapon, not least because it frees remainerish Tory voters to shift to the Lib Dems in a way they did not dare in 2019 for fear of letting Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street.
There might even be a constituency of voters who have grown sceptical of charismatic men and the trouble they bring. Watch WeCrashed, the story of WeWork founder Adam Neumann and his “supernova” charisma, noting how it all ended in disaster, and you can’t help but think of Johnson or Donald Trump, or the Iraq war messianism of Blair. After Johnson the steady, unflashy competence of a Keir Starmer could appeal.
Still, in the absence of charisma, you need something else. There is a moment in The 47th, the new play at London’s Old Vic that imagines Trump seeking re-election in 2024, in which the former president recalls his win in 2016. Even if you hated him, he says, you knew what he was going to do, whether it was a ban on Muslims or building a wall. What concrete thing, Trump asks, was Hillary Clinton going to do? Anyone?
Here, then, is how Labour might raise the current ceiling on its performance, demonstrated by these latest results. Talk a bit less about what the Tories are doing; talk a bit more about what Labour will do – and do it not with a rock-star personality at the top but a few sharp, memorable promises that lodge in the consciousness. It won’t be enough to win a 1997-style landslide: one of those is not coming anytime soon. But it might be enough to repeat 2010, depriving the incumbent PM of his majority and allowing for a change of government. And right now, I think we’d take that.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
