Time has dragged in the final stages of the election campaign. It feels like the end of a long-haul flight – the plane has already landed, and restless passengers fidget in their seats waiting for the signal to disembark.
The itinerary was fixed long ago. Mild turbulence has not affected the polling trajectory. Unless every standard instrument for reading the national mood has malfunctioned, voters will soon emerge into a Britain governed by the Labour party – a place they haven’t been for 14 years.
There is still scope for uncertainty. Forecasts of a Conservative rout could have unpredictable feedback effects. Maybe there is an audience for the party’s last-ditch plea for electoral mercy. Voters who despise the Tories and are uninspired by Labour could drift to smaller parties and independent candidates, or stay at home.
Differential turnout may mess with the models that show Keir Starmer romping to victory with record-breaking majorities. Expectations have been inflated so far that an 80-seat margin, matching the result that kept Boris Johnson in power in 2019, would be reported as an underwhelming performance by Labour.
In reality, it would be a phenomenal accomplishment. A majority of one looked like a distant fantasy from the bottom of the electoral crater where Labour lay divided and demoralised four years ago. To make the party electorally viable again has not been simple, but there was a plan – understand what voters had rejected; fix it; look ready to govern. It has worked.
It is an unprecedented turnaround, and yet Starmer is routinely cast as a passenger on the journey, not the driver. Despite all the evidence that he was winning, he has never enjoyed the aura of a natural winner.
People at different ends of the political spectrum have had incentives to deny that Labour’s recovery is real; or, if it is, that the opposition leader deserves the credit.
The left faction that had to be marginalised in pursuit of electability will not admit that its prospectus was toxic. It attributes Labour’s advantages to unprovoked Tory implosion, and laments Starmer’s squandering of a commanding lead on a cautious manifesto for incremental change. In that view, the gates to power swung open spontaneously and a proper socialist could have strolled through unimpeded.
Many Tories agree that Starmer has been given an easy ride. They share also the left’s habit of feeding electoral rejection into the conviction that what British voters have really been craving all along is more, not less, radical ideology. After years of ratcheting their leaders ever further to the right, hardline Conservatives attribute impending defeat to insufficient rightward thrust.
Sunak has made himself an easy receptacle for blame by running an inept campaign – demanding reinstatement in the public’s affections like a jilted lover shouting random pleas and threats through the letterbox of a slammed door.
A dysfunctional government defending a terrible record at the end of a long incumbency is eminently beatable. But beating it still requires discipline and strategic acumen. For Starmer that has meant neutralising all the reasons voters might have to be wary of putting Labour in charge.
The effectiveness of the method will show up not only in Labour gains but in seats that swing from Conservatives to Liberal Democrats. Voters who make that choice know they are helping install Starmer as prime minister, and are relaxed about it. When those same voters thought a ballot cast for the Lib Dems might put Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street, they didn’t risk it.
That dynamic could give Labour a big majority on a relatively small percentage share of the vote. The result will express a stronger desire to get the Tories out than appetite to get Labour in. Everyone who belittled Starmer’s achievement in getting his party to the verge of victory will then deny him ownership of the win. The mandate is thin, given on loan without enthusiasm, they will say. He will be treated as electoral jetsam deposited in office by the outgoing Tory tide.
Starmer’s personal poll ratings are poor in comparison with most election-winning leaders but they are no worse than Johnson’s were in 2019. Yet to this day many Tories nurture the myth of “Boris” as beloved national mascot and oracle of popular will. They struggle to get their heads around the idea of Britain as a country that is happy to be governed by someone like Starmer, with the charismatic range of a stern-but-fair geography teacher.
There are no rallies of exuberant Starmerites. His name was not chanted at Glastonbury last weekend. But cultish devotion is not a measure of likely effectiveness in government.
The Labour leader’s understated style courts underestimation. There is a pattern of slow-burning appreciation that I have heard described by various people who have dealt with Starmer throughout his career, whether in parliament or going back to his time as director of public prosecutions, and before that to the years he spent as a barrister taking on tough human rights cases.
The first impression is underwhelming. There is a suspicion of mediocrity, soon dispelled. It turns to admiration for the man’s fierce determination and strategic focus, his methodical calibration of principle and pragmatism in pursuit of justice. Another recurrent observation made of Starmer by those who know him is that he always does what he says he will do; it never pays to bet that he won’t.
He ran for the leadership of his party in order to become prime minister. It didn’t sound plausible. Most opposition leaders fail. None has ever flipped a landslide defeat into a majority within a single term. Now Starmer is at the threshold of No 10 and his detractors, left and right, imagine he has stumbled there as much by accident as design.
Nothing was inevitable. To make a Labour government look certain, to make so many people comfortable with the journey to Starmer’s Britain, to make it the obvious, natural destination at the end of the long-haul campaign is an achievement of rare political craft, not luck. Even the Sun newspaper has tucked into Starmer’s slipstream with an eve-of-polling endorsement – not through any sincere approval of his manifesto but because its proprietor hates flying against a prevailing cultural wind.
It is easy to come up with scenarios in which disembarking passengers are soon dissatisfied. A daunting list of intractable challenges faces the next government. But it is equally hard to imagine a great pining for return to Tory Britain anytime soon.
There are also many hypothetical ways that a prime minister can fail, and many incentives for predicting disappointment as insurance against the charge of naive optimism. But that tendency must be balanced against a rational appraisal of Starmer’s record as a man who gets things done. He intends to be a transformative Labour prime minister. The available evidence makes it worth believing he might just do it.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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