It is an occupational hazard of being leader of the Labour party to receive a lot of unsolicited advice from people who think they have a better idea how to do the job. There’s no immunity from this for Sir Keir Starmer, even though he must be doing something right. Labour starts the run-up to a general election around 20 points ahead in the opinion polls. Rishi Sunak has just dropped a heavy hint that the UK will make its choice in the second half of this year, as I suggested would be the case last week. Whenever the election is called, few Tories think they have a prayer of clinging on to power.
For all these encouraging auguries for Labour, we are just a week into the new year and a dumper truck of suggestions about how he could be doing better has been unloaded on Sir Keir. The complaint from some is that he is too opaque about what the country should expect from a Labour government. Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham and head of policy during Ed Miliband’s time as leader, has helpfully branded Sir Keir “elusive” and lacking a comprehensible sense of purpose. Grist to the mills of those on the right who clamour for the Labour leader to spell out his intentions in pointillist detail.
It is fair to say that Team Starmer still has work to do finalising the Labour prospectus to make it manifesto-ready, a process of refining and bomb-proofing that is underway, but incomplete. Yet in many significant policy areas – including education, health, housing and industrial strategy – it is already clearer what a Starmer government would hope to achieve than what we could anticipate from the Conservatives, should they somehow manage to secure a fifth consecutive term.
The most common critique from the left of the spectrum is that Sir Keir is not offering enough hope to voters. This is often a thinly disguised demand for more spending promises; other times it is a way of saying Sir Keir should be more exciting.
A Labour veteran, thinking to compare the tepid feelings towards his party in the present day with the last time it was in opposition preparing to be in government, recently lamented to me: “For all that Keir has achieved, it doesn’t feel like 1997.”
This is true enough, but mainly because how people usually remember the famous Labour victory of that election year is at odds with how it actually was. Folklore has it that Tony Blair achieved a landslide triumph in ’97 by generating a huge surge of optimistic elation about the prospect of a Labour government. Didn’t an ecstatic crowd line Downing Street flourishing union jacks to hosannah him into Number 10? So they did, but the cheering, flag-waving throng was not composed of members of the public. They were Labour party staff and their families.
Sir Tony, as he has since become, was an ace at delivering uplifting oratory when he thought the occasion demanded it, but the stats tell us that this did not excite a substantial majority of the electorate. New Labour won the 1997 election with just over 13 and a half million votes, about half a million less than dull old John Major had secured for the Tories in 1992. The most crucial factor in the Blair landslide of ’97 was not soaring expectations of what a Labour government would deliver; it was the collapse of support for the Conservatives and efficient anti-Tory tactical voting. A frequent complaint about Sir Tony was that his programme was too cautious and his campaigning too buttoned-down and tight-lipped. That’s a criticism that will sound familiar to Sir Keir. The late Roy Jenkins, generally an admirer of Sir Tony, gently mocked the then Labour leader in advance of the ’97 election by remarking that he behaved with the trepidation of “a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”.
Four previous and successive election defeats for Labour – in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 – made Sir Tony averse to taking any risks. His Labour was very constrained in what it initially promised it could deliver, even though it knew that it would come to power with the economy doing well.
The Labour high command of today is likewise scarred by quadruple consecutive losses, in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019, the last the most catastrophic defeat for the party since 1935. And whereas Sir Tony could expect to inherit decent economic growth, the bequest from the Tories to a Starmer government will be much grimmer.
So what you could call the “hope deficit” is more acute for Sir Keir than it was for Labour 27 years ago. The mood of the country is too sour, or so it is thought among the Labour leader’s team, for there to be a public appetite for the futuristic and sometimes utopian rhetoric employed by Sir Tony to try to enthuse voters. The economic traumas of recent history and the fragile state of the public finances make Labour highly wary of making any spending promises that its opponents can try to depict as inflationary and reckless, an attack the Conservatives and their megaphones in the rightwing media will make despite the Tories’ abysmal record. This is not just an inhibitor on Labour issuing a cornucopia of shiny pledges, it is also a source of continuing tension at the top of the party about policies that were supposed to be already settled. There is notably persistent wrangling about the funding and timing of the green prosperity plan.
Added to which, voter cynicism about politicians and their promises has rarely been deeper. The electorate has been taught to be highly distrusting of bombastic politicians making grandiose claims to have instant and transformative solutions for the ills of the country. If you want to identify the murderers of hope, the list is headed by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, with Rishi Sunak also wanted for questioning for making pledges that he has failed to deliver.
Successful Labour election campaigns of the past, and there have not been all that many winning ones in the party’s history, have found a formula that both reassures the electorate that choosing Labour isn’t a gamble while offering some grounds for optimism that a Labour government will be good for Britain. You could hear Sir Keir searching for that sweet spot when he delivered his first speech of 2024 at a venue in a marginal seat in Bristol. That address endeavoured to reconcile the desire to offer “a new year message of hope” with the glum atmosphere of pessimistic times. His central charge against the Conservatives was to accuse them of pursuing a “miserabilist project” to “kick the hope out of us all” in order to “undermine the possibility of change itself”. I think he overestimates the Tories when he suggests that they have deliberately schemed to squeeze the optimism out of the nation. The evidence suggests they are not clever enough to be that cunning.
What is true is that Britain is heading towards an election shrouded in a dank miasma of despair that anyone can fix our many problems. One dispiriting possible consequence of this is that we will endure a nastily negative election campaign followed by a low turnout at the polling stations as many natural Tories express their disaffection with the Conservatives by staying at home while Labour struggles to galvanise all of its potential support. That is a worry for Sir Keir, because it would put him in Number 10 with a brittle mandate.
If hope is to be revitalised, it is probably more likely to happen after we have had a change of government, rather than before. Tony Blair reached the pinnacle of his popularity not when he was campaigning to become prime minister, but only once he had crossed the threshold of Number 10. A few months after the 1997 election, pollsters were reporting that his net approval ratings were in excess of 80% and, such was the enthusiasm for Labour government, millions more people were claiming to have voted for him than actually did.
It will be helpful to Labour if Sir Keir can generate a flicker of hope before the election, but the sterner test will be whether he has it in him to lift the country out of the slough of despondency once he has the power to do more than talk about it.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
