At Tuesday’s shadow cabinet meeting, less than 24 hours after Boris Johnson’s humiliating confidence vote, Keir Starmer gave his troops what one called “a bit of cold reality” about how much work remains to be done in developing Labour’s policies and message in the months ahead.
Many could not agree more. Conversations with shadow cabinet members, party aides and other senior Labour figures this week revealed deep disquiet about whether Starmer and his team are ready to capitalise on the Tories’ weakness.
Backbenchers shuffled in their seats at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions as Starmer tried to skewer Johnson over NHS waiting times, in what many complained was an oddly flat performance given the significance of the moment.
Some also raised concerns about the televised statement Starmer made on Monday evening in response to the Tory confidence vote, in which he repeatedly said the public were “fed up”. “He looked like he’d come in from the pub,” complained one usually loyal supporter.
Away from questions of presentation, senior party figures say policy development has been sluggish, and that Starmer does not appear to keep close tabs on its progress. Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband scored a political win with the windfall tax policy, which the government initially attacked before ultimately co-opting (badged by Rishi Sunak as a “temporary targeted energy profits levy”). But with a summer of campaigning ahead, there is not yet another eye-catching policy waiting in the wings to replace it.
Colleagues say Claire Ainsley, Labour’s head of policy, who is in charge of manifesto development, is detached from the political side of the operation. One senior aide said: “There’s no sense of where we can make political hay against our opponents, areas we can be exploiting to draw a clear dividing line between ourselves and the Tories.”
One shadow cabinet minister who asked for a meeting with Starmer to discuss a contentious part of their brief told colleagues they had struggled to get any face-time with the leader. They had instead been asked instead to prepare a briefing document, commenting to others in their shadow team that this was impossible to do without knowing even the basics about where the leader stood.
“Fundamentally, I don’t think Keir thinks it’s his job to come up with ideas,” one MP said. Another shadow minister said: “The way he works is, he likes to commission a paper from his staff who come to him and say ‘here are some options on policy x, what do you think?’”
That means that while Starmer may be writing a book on his political philosophy, some of his closest colleagues still struggle to understand what their leader stands for. “What is his project?” asked one shadow minister.
Andrew Fisher, who was Labour’s head of policy under Jeremy Corbyn, said: “There doesn’t seem to be much passion or detail around any policy area from Keir Starmer.” He pointed out that some of the party’s punchiest policies had not been fleshed out – including the £28bn-a-year investment in the transition to net zero announced by Reeves at last year’s conference.
“They haven’t really developed that, they haven’t really said where the £28bn is going. If you just say £28bn, all people hear is that’s a lot of money. Are you insulating people’s homes with that? If so, how many? What will that mean for a pensioner? You can humanise this stuff. It’s there like a skeleton – it’s this emaciated policy without any detail to make it come alive.”
The former business secretary Peter Mandelson – from the opposite wing of the party to Fisher – attacked the policy this week in a speech, saying: “Just announcing a massive spend and a big policy goal does not in itself deliver economic growth.”
Starmer’s allies say people should not underestimate the challenges he has faced since become leader: mending shattered party morale, fixing the antisemitism problem, and struggling to get Labour’s message across during the pandemic.
“I think he doesn’t get enough credit for segueing out of Corbynism without being pulled into a betrayal narrative,” said one senior party figure. “The membership know what he’s trying to do. He’s taken them on a journey and they’re now his members and they’re his people.”
Supporters also point to the improvement in Labour’s polling scores on a string of key metrics, including, crucially, economic competence, where the latest YouGov tracker put the party just one percentage point behind the Conservatives.
In last month’s local elections, Labour made steady progress in a string of “red wall” areas it hopes to win back.
Starmer’s aides argue that it would be a mistake to “turn the bucket upside down and dump everything out now”, revealing a string of policies, when the election could be two years away – but they promise more announcements over the summer, and point to the autumn conference as a key moment.
Starmer’s team believe the economy will be the battleground for the next general election and are hoping to draw connections from the immediate cost of living crisis to what one aide called “a bigger argument about growth, inflation and taxation – how the economy is run, and how we avoid crises in future”.
But these ideas have not yet been honed into a simple message that can be repeatedly hammered home in the run-up to 2024 (or, potentially, 2023).
With the prime minister badly politically wounded, some in the party also fret about whether Starmer would be as an good opponent to put up against, say, Jeremy Hunt, as he is against the chaotic, dishonest Johnson.
They raise the spectre of 1992, when an unpopular Tory government that had already been in power for more than a decade won the general election after ditching Margaret Thatcher.
“I think we’re at a real risk of being in 1990: Johnson goes, they replace him with Sajid Javid or Jeremy Hunt, someone who’s not in the Johnson mould, someone who people see as semi-serious and a bit dull, and all of a sudden Keir Starmer’s advantage of being semi-serious and a bit dull, goes,” said one senior party figure.
Some are openly musing about who might best replace Starmer if Durham police fine him for what the Tories have nicknamed “Beergate” and he is forced to resign as promised – an outcome his team insist is highly unlikely. Wes Streeting is widely viewed as a likely contender, as are Reeves and Lisa Nandy.
In the meantime, as one shadow minister put it, “I think we’re all a bit puzzled, really. Everyone wants to help and wants to make it succeed, but how do we do that?”
