Muhammad Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” strategy: don’t attack until you are ready to do so and your opponent has exhausted themselves. The Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus followed a similar approach against Hannibal’s Carthaginians, preferring to tie the enemy down in a long war of attrition rather than confronting them in a pitched battle. At the time, many impatient contemporaries thought both Ali and Fabius had taken leave of their senses. Many were proved wrong.
Keir Starmer has neither Ali’s charisma nor Fabius’s military prowess. But it is not entirely an exaggeration to suggest he has a rope-a-dope strategy and an attritional mentality all of his own that carry at least some echoes of these two legends. Nor that this is all straining some impatient supporters to the limit, just as it did at ringside in Kinshasa and doubtless did in the taverns of Ancient Rome.
Talk to anyone in the shadow cabinet and they all agree on one thing. The Labour leader is absolutely focused on winning. “To build a better Britain, we have got to win,” he messaged party members this week. So he will not be tempted into trying a premature knock-out punch or be drawn into a battle before he has solidified his trust with the voters. And he is not going to change.
Thursday’s byelections have to be seen in that light. The three contests – in Selby and Ainsty, Somerton and Frome, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip: all Conservative-held seats – are the most important electoral test of the second half of this year. Along with three further potential autumn contests – in Tory-held Mid Bedfordshire and in Tamworth, as well as in the SNP-held Rutherglen and Hamilton West – they will define the terrain on which next year’s general election contest will be fought.
Rightly or wrongly, it is clear Starmer regards victory in these contests as pivotal and as the pre-eminent task, eclipsing all others. Wins would be “priceless” he said this week. All evidence shows Starmer laser-focused on winning the trust of disaffected voters, and on not scaring off those he needs to win to Labour’s side. Most of these are previous Tory voters, people who supported Boris Johnson in 2019. To vote Labour, they need to trust Starmer with the country – and, above all, to trust Labour with the still volatile and wounded economy.
You can see why this grates so much with many in Starmer’s party. But at the same time, you can see why the strategy makes sense. Labour currently has a clear lead among voters on the key metric of being seen as the best party at handling the economy – the party is on 25%, to the Tories’ 19%. But that lead is modest, only six points, and 25% is itself a small share. For Labour to be confident, it should be higher; self-evidently, there is more work to be done.
Last month’s confirmation that the general election will now be fought on new constituency boundaries underscores this need. Fully 585 of the UK’s 650 parliamentary seats will change in some way, many of them radically. The number of MPs from England will increase, while those from Scotland and (in particular) Wales will drop. Southern England and London will gain at the expense of the north.
The partisan shift involved in this is likely to be relatively small – the Tory election expert Lord Hayward thinks there will be a five- to 10-seat advantage to his party – but the momentum of Britain’s changing electoral geography is hard to deny. We are a changed and changing nation. Seats in which Labour needs to compete to win, mainly but not all in southern and Midlands England, are more than ever the norm. Labour has to work within these realities or shrivel into minority status.
It’s a genuinely difficult choice. But it helps explain why Starmer courted a party backlash with his decision not to reverse the Conservatives’ two-child limit on child benefit. The case for reversing it is obvious. Yet amid negligible economic growth, and huge existing demands on government spending, there are also risks in promising higher welfare payments that would require higher taxes or borrowing. The public is clearly in favour of the two-child limit. These choices cannot be wished away. Voters know that. So does Starmer.
The byelection results will be an interim verdict on his approach. A three-nil defeat for the Tories has been priced in, as part of government expectation management. We will soon see.
A Labour win in Selby and Ainsty would probably be the party’s most spectacular capture from the Tories since Dudley West in 1994, and would be treated by Starmer as a vindication. But his strategy is unlikely to change, even if the Conservatives hang on to Boris Johnson’s old seat in west London, where local issues are important for perhaps the first time in a byelection since Bermondsey 40 years ago.
Starmer’s message to his party at the start of the week was full of familiar urgings to win in Selby and Uxbridge. Significantly, he never once mentioned Somerton and Frome. The reality is that Labour is holding the gate open for the Lib Dems’ Sarah Dyke to win the Somerset seat, but without saying so. Tact not pact.
Those who think Labour should embrace tactical voting are entitled to feel sore about that hypocrisy. But even the hypocrisy should be understood. Much of it is fuelled by the absolute determination to prevent Jeremy Corbyn being a Labour candidate in 2024. If Corbyn runs as an independent, he can be expelled from the party. If he does not run, he will be history. It is a win-win for Starmer, but Labour tactical voting advocates such as Neal Lawson, of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass, have become collateral damage.
“To govern is to choose” is one of the oldest cliches in the political book. Like all cliches, though, it contains more than a grain of truth. Making tough choices is one of the tests that Labour has to pass. One of the many reasons it lost in 2019 is that it pretended everything on its wish list was possible. Voters knew that was untrue.
Success in politics is not a choice between trust and hope. It is a synthesis of the two. Yet it is trust that makes possible a two-term government of the kind that Starmer, surely rightly, envisages. The plain truth is that his government may have to suck up some hard economic times before it can deliver what it wants.
Fabius would have understood that. So, surely, would Ali. And so did the early Labour party. The first pamphlet published in 1884 by the Fabian society, itself named after the Roman leader, was pregnantly entitled Why are the Many Poor? On its title page it stated: “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.”
That’s just as true today as it was then. It would be remarkable – and fly in the face of all the evidence – if Starmer does not realise it.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist
