As the election campaign entered its final week, staff at Labour headquarters were treated to a surprise guest. “It is going really well,” Tony Blair told them. “I’m not betting on it but …” His audience burst into laughter, the Tory betting scandal still fresh in their minds.
Yet the former prime minister also wanted to reassure the exhausted but excited crowd of about 100 party officials that the role they were playing to bring Labour “back from the brink of extinction” and within touching distance of power was crucial.
“When you get in, there’s so much more you are able to do. A whole set of possibilities open up,” he told them.
Labour’s campaign was a huge success, with the party’s laser-like focus on winning votes where they mattered, taking dozens of swing seats, rather than piling up support in its safest constituencies, and securing what one aide described as “Starmergeddon”.
“It has been by far the most disciplined and impressive campaign I’ve worked on by some distance,” says a veteran of several Labour election contests. “The campaign we’ve talked about from the start is exactly the one we’ve run.”
They added: “Even in the trickier moments we’ve had real clarity of purpose. Keeping that discipline, even if not the sexiest thing in the world, has been absolutely central to that.”
The drivers of that approach have been the party’s two campaign chiefs – Morgan McSweeney and the veteran Labour MP Pat McFadden – who have been spending more than 14 hours a day in what they jokingly refer to as “the cell”.
“They have that ability to think clearly about where we are, rather than getting caught up in the moment,” one campaign insider said. “Pat’s temperament suits that perfectly.” McFadden has been described – ironically – by another colleague as a “ray of sunshine”.
The pair would call the first meeting of the day at 6.30am, already having spoken to Starmer on the phone, and all major decisions were made by 8am. Every one of those was framed by three key messages – time for change, economic stability coming first and their “first steps” on policy.
Labour has faced criticism over its cautious approach to the campaign. But one senior party strategist defended the decision not to leap on every potential row that sailed by.
“We just weren’t giving the Tory party the type of Labour party they can beat. When school kids play football, everybody chases the ball. We didn’t want to do it like that. We wanted to decide which turf we would be on,” they said.
From the off, the Labour campaign was heavy on attacks on the Tories. “We wanted to make sure they were on the back foot, and to be fair they aided and abetted us with that massively,” says one campaign insider.
From the moment he announced the surprise election in the pouring rain, Sunak’s campaign was overshadowed by missteps: the accident-prone photo opportunities, the controversial national service announcement, his early return from D-day and the betting scandal.
But not everything went Labour’s way. The early days were overshadowed by selection rows, including that of the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott. Starmer also managed to anger Britain’s Bangladeshi community when he singled out the community during a debate on immigration.
Labour was constantly pummelled by the Tories on tax, with Sunak dominating the first television head-to-head with a – since discredited – attack line that Starmer would put up tax by £2,000 every year. “We left open the tax stuff,” says one adviser. “So we went all in to close it down”.
So successful was their shut-down operation, which included a letter from the Treasury’s top civil servant criticising the costings, that when the line was deployed by Penny Mordaunt against Angela Rayner in a subsequent debate, the moderator intervened.
But it did not silence the media, who then listed a series of possible taxes that could go up every time they interviewed Starmer, or the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. They only ruled out raising capital gains on primary residences “because it was just absurd”.
“We had to take a call on how you deal with it,” an aide said. “Tax is one of the things most worry people about Labour. But we didn’t want to spend time talking about every single nonsense suggestion”.
Likewise, the campaign shrugged off Tory attempts to characterise Starmer, 61, as “Sleepy Keir” as a result of his age, mirroring Donald Trump’s attacks on Joe Biden, 81.
“But attacks have to ring true, and this didn’t,” the aide added. “The average person doesn’t look at Keir and say he’s lazy or doesn’t work hard. That 2015 poster of Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket was damaging because it played into an idea that spoke to a general truth.”
Starmer spent most of the campaign out on the road, with a small handful of his closest advisers, sticking rigidly to his lines and making the most of set piece moments like the manifesto launch. A deliberate decision was taken not to announce radical new policy in the document, both because of public scepticism and also to avoid Tory attacks.
When Starmer did pop in, he would spend his time talking to staff in the modern, open-plan space, rather than tucked away in his own tiny office, with the desk of his chief-of-staff, Sue Gray, placed outside.
The day after Sunak’s D-day gaffe, he addressed the room, telling them the prime minister’s actions had summed up for the nation how low he had sunk. At the end, he turned round and hugged Gray and McSweeney.
Starmer’s office had a view of Westminster in the distance and overlooked a local primary school. “Those kids in the playground, their lives are going to be changed by what that man is going to do,” said one emotional staffer as the scale of the victory became clear.
But most of the shadow cabinet were there at some point, including the key player Jonathan Ashworth, who later lost his seat in an election night shock. His press conference stunts, while no match for Lib Dem leader Ed Davey’s daredevil exploits, provided a bit of fun.
At one, he shredded the Tory manifesto in front of reporters. There was a huge cheer across the office when he did because there had been real concern the shredder wouldn’t work. “It was a stunt, and if it had gone wrong, he would have looked like a prat,” an official said.
Hundreds of staff – many of them volunteers – were in the office every day. They stayed on for the television debates in the evenings, fuelled by Domino’s pizza and lasagne, while the Pret a Manger round the corner did a roaring trade. When the manifesto was launched in Manchester, hundreds of choc ices were distributed back at HQ, a Labour tradition.
On busy days, there were two people to a desk, and the party resorted to overspill office space near Waterloo. Staff deployed there were slightly taken aback to find it had an Alice in Wonderland theme, decorated with a giant pair of Alice’s legs against one wall and huge books with reclining white rabbits on them.
As the days passed, the anticipated narrowing of the polls did not happen. “There was no hubris, everybody kept saying ‘not a vote has been cast’,” one adviser said. “But we felt like we were winning. We knew.”
The final week of the campaign, the office emptied out as staff spread across the country to help knock on doors and deliver leaflets. But they gathered for a final time, exhilarated but exhausted, for a victory rally at Tate Modern in the early hours of election night.
“I could either cry or lie down and sleep for a week,” one attender said in the cavernous Turbine Hall, clutching a bottle of wine. “I’ve worked myself to the absolute bone. I can’t believe we did it.’
Back at headquarters, the dot matrix countdown clock that dominated the entrance, with the days, hours, minutes and seconds ticking down until polling day, finally reached zero.
