No drama Starmer. No surprises at Thursday’s manifesto launch, no rabbits, no hats. Some in the audience are getting restless. Reporters yawn, or laugh, when the Labour leader says, for the millionth time, that his father was a toolmaker who worked in a factory. A voter at Wednesday’s Sky News debate told him to his face that he was a “political robot”. The complaint is not only about style, but substance too. Opponents on the right lambast the lack of plans and policy detail; on the left they condemn the timidity, the dearth of radical ambition.
Those complaints all miss the same point. Starmer’s boringness is not a bug: it’s a feature. Those puzzled by Labour’s giant poll lead – thinking it odd that Starmer is ahead despite being so unexciting – fail to realise that Starmer is ahead because he is unexciting. There is method to his lack of madness. To be sure, the caution, the silences on whole areas of policy, may exact a price further down the road – we’ll come to that – but for now, it’s working.
Take the lament that Labour has offered no shiny new major policy initiative. It seems a failing, until you remember Theresa May – fighting what was the worst campaign in living memory, before Rishi Sunak asked her to hold his beer – threw away a 20-point poll lead in 2017 by proposing a social care policy that instantly became the “dementia tax”. If she had said nothing, she would have done much better. Or recall Labour’s free broadband offer in 2019. Voters naturally liked the prospect of free stuff but were wary of anyone rash enough to promise it.
Indeed, Labour’s fate under its previous leader is crucial to understanding the current strategy. The party certainly made promises that ticked the boxes Labour’s left critics urge Starmer to tick now: bold, radical, exciting. But they did not reassure voters that Labour would manage the economy properly. They did not inspire trust.
Which is why Starmer offers himself as the steady, even stolid, antidote to five years that featured the radicalism of Liz Truss and the excitement of Boris Johnson – and which brought near constant chaos. This week Starmer told voters that if they were looking for someone to run a circus or a pantomime they should look elsewhere. His message is that he may not be box office but, given everything that’s happened under the Tories, a period of calm stability will itself represent a radical change.
For that to work, Labour must present nothing that might put off the many millions of voters who have absolutely had it with the Conservatives. If Labour is to be the receptacle for anti-Tory disaffection, it helps to be as blank and bland as possible. To understand why, it’s worth recalling just how hard it is for Labour to win a parliamentary majority in this country – only three Labour leaders have ever managed it, in 124 years of trying – and how deeply ingrained is the notion, nurtured over decades by a rightwing press, that Labour is risky, if not dangerous. This is what Starmer has had to overcome.
Some hint that Starmer himself has done nothing, that the current lead is a mere function of that revulsion at the Conservatives, with Labour as its passive beneficiary. But the Tories have been unpopular before and still won elections – because Labour was deemed unfit. Yet now the Conservatives are falling apart, reduced to warning of a Labour “supermajority” – misusing the term that does not, as Grant Shapps seems to think, mean “a really big majority”, but one capable of overriding a constitutional veto – as they plead with the voters for mercy. That did not happen by itself.
Even the current uptick in Lib Dem support is not down to Ed Davey’s paddleboard antics. History suggests the Lib Dems do best when disaffected Tory voters feel safe casting a ballot that will put a Labour prime minister in Downing Street. They refused to do that in 2019 but were happy to do it in 1997 – and seem ready to do it again now. Tactical voting depends, yes, on collective loathing of the Tories, but also a Labour alternative palatable to the broadest possible number: that rarely means a leader who stirs the passions of the party faithful.
For the left to slam Starmer for having got Labour to this point is not only a cheek – akin to Dagenham & Redbridge FC faulting Manchester City’s playing style – it’s also parasitical. For the left is only able to demand that an apparently imminent Labour government be bolder in office because Starmer has got the party to the brink of victory – and has done it by doing the very things they opposed.
So there should be few complaints now from those desperate to see the back of the Tories. As a strategy for winning on 4 July, Starmer’s seems hard to fault. Where the criticism bites is what happens the day after.
The pollster James Kanagasooriam warns that Labour might be building an enormous sandcastle, piling on votes from across the spectrum to make it ever taller – just as Johnson did in 2019. The trouble is, and as the Tories learned to their cost, such a sandcastle can be swept away within a single parliament. Thursday’s YouGov poll showing Reform nudging ahead of the Conservatives contains a warning for Labour too, with the party’s vote share dropping from 47% to 37% in little more than a fortnight. Some of that could be tactical voting, as those eager to see Labour win shift to the Lib Dems to dislodge a local Tory. But it also suggests some of those “red wall” leave voters who backed Johnson in 2019, and were poised to switch back to Labour, now have, in Reform, somewhere else to go – a danger that will only grow with Starmer in No 10.
To maintain the coalition currently taking shape beyond 5 July, Labour will have to offer precisely what it has withheld until now: big moves, substantive policy. Starmer says he is seeking a “mandate” for economic growth. The choice of word is telling. If he gets his mandate, he could use it as blanket permission to pursue a range of serious policy shifts about which he stayed mum during the campaign – whether on investment in infrastructure and public services or resetting the relationship with the European Union – all in the name of growing the economy.
Whatever way he does it, it will have to be done. Caution has been a wise means to win power. But, given the scale of the task that will confront the next government – a social fabric that lies in tatters, a weak economy, ailing public services and a country that feels broken – it is no guide for how that power should be used. All the daring, elan and ambition Labour has repressed in opposition, all the zeal to make things better, stronger and fairer that it has kept in check for so long, all that will have to be unleashed in office. In a reversal of the usual maxim, Labour has campaigned in prose – but it must govern in poetry.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
