Britain is a country that tends to elect Conservative governments, while trending towards Labour. There is a tension in that condition, making the political weather unpredictable. Or rather, the unfamiliar climate provokes doubts in the polling forecast: a hard anti-Tory rain, followed by a spell of Keir Starmer in Downing Street. The needles have flickered but not moved much for over a year. The consistency of Labour’s lead suggests a structural shift in the public mood in favour of regime change.
But confidence doesn’t come naturally to a party with multiple scars from acute disappointment and a scarcity of models for election-winning leadership. Tony Blair is the only person alive to have secured a Labour majority. That doesn’t make his method infallible, but its repudiation has proved to be a reliable route to defeat.
The exceptional quality of Blair’s record is the straw at which Rishi Sunak clutches in hope of averting electoral catastrophe. Downing Street has a new plan for 2024. The template is April 1992, when a beleaguered John Major beat Neil Kinnock in defiance of low expectations, a polling deficit and a long Tory incumbency.
The relevance to today’s circumstances is tenuous but not entirely fabricated. Then, as now, Britain had endured a period of severe economic pain. Then, as now, the Labour leader was less popular than might be expected for a man on the brink of becoming prime minister. Starmer is generally preferred as a potential prime minister to Sunak, but by the standards of opposition leaders in the run-up to a general election his ratings are more Kinnocky than Blairish.
Sunak’s election message, rehearsed in a new year speech earlier this week, is a variation on Major’s warning that delicate green shoots of recovery were at risk of being trampled under Labour. Britain has “turned a corner” and is “pointing in the right direction” but must “stick with the plan”, the prime minister said. Putting Starmer in power would send the country “back to square one”.
Pleading for continuity in volatile times is probably the best campaign available to Sunak, which is to say the only one that isn’t preposterous given that his party has been in power for the past 14 years. (It says something about the prime minister’s faulty political antennae that he only reached the obvious pitch by way of a delusional one, casting himself at last year’s Tory conference as the guy to pick if you think it’s time for a change.)
But the Conservatives’ least bad option only comes good if Starmer fulfils his assigned role, re-enacting a Labour trauma he surely remembers a lot better than Sunak, who was only 11 in April 1992. There will be no “shadow budget” containing tax rises for the Tories to advertise as bombs or “double whammy” punches ready to land on struggling households. There will be no premature victory rally like the one that Kinnock addressed in Sheffield the week before polling, which has entered Westminster folklore as a parable of vote-snuffing hubristic grandiosity.
Wariness of retreading old errors gives Starmer’s approach to the election a ponderous gait, which critics interpret as morbid timidity and supporters identify as judicious pace. The most common demands made of the Labour leader have been directed at every candidate for No 10 at some point along their journey. What is the vision? Where is the hope? What about policy?
Every leader gives speech after lofty speech describing national renewal by way of policy and reform, which few hear and none remember. Starmer gave one last week. Then he took questions, most of which were challenges to match or rule out Tory tax cuts. It is hard not to sound risk-averse when every conversation becomes a prompt to leap into the trap laid by your opponents, and every effort to change the subject is ignored.
Partly that is what makes opposition hard. It is especially so when the pitch is skewed by a cultural habit of treating Conservative rule as Britain’s default setting – the norm from which Labour is a deviation, tending to perversion. That assumption, upheld by structural bias on Fleet Street, gets a little deeper each time Labour fails at the polls. It goes deep enough to withstand a barrage of data indicating that the Tories are disliked, out of touch with mainstream opinion and on the way out.
Thus buttressed, ministers can make terrible policy choices on the assumption that they won’t be saddled with the consequences, and insist that the opposition mimics them as a mark of governing credibility. A Labour leader seeking to be prime minister is applying for probably the only job in the world that involves so many demands to replicate the mistakes of the person whose failure created a vacancy.
Starmer is getting more confident in refusing to play that game, although there are only so many ways to reject the premise of a question – even one as stupid as “will you commit to doing what your enemies want?” – without sounding evasive. And the Labour leader is a private, reticent man by temperament. He lacks the easy fluency that more colourful characters can use to decant their personality into the gaps when policy answers are incomplete.
But incomplete answers are a function of not knowing when the election will be held. The demand to be more revealing comes most insistently from those who are impatient for targets to strike. Caution does not have to express deficient ambition. It is a symptom of politics so acclimatised to Tory rule that even the imminent collapse of a despised, moribund government is configured as reason to doubt the viability of any alternative.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
