Given any poll you look at points towards a Labour victory at the next election, what I am about to say may seem counter-intuitive. Namely, that Keir Starmer is by no means certain of victory, for the simple reason that it will take the kind of swing which UK politics rarely sees.
Looking back at the past 13 years, it is hard to think of pretty much anything that has improved and the Tories should be toast. With the carnival of post-truth populism which gave us Brexit, then Johnson, then Kamikwazi Trussonomics, and now Rishi Sunak struggling to control his divided party, you can be forgiven for thinking the only question is how big the Labour majority will be.
But to get a majority of just one, Labour must win seats it didn’t even win in the landslide of 1997.
Starmer, who lacks the experience of Neil Kinnock and John Smith, or the charisma of Tony Blair, is trying to achieve in one term what it took them three terms to do: steer Labour from a crushing defeat into power.
Labour were on their backs after the 2019 election. To lose badly to Margaret Thatcher, as Michael Foot did in 1983, is one thing; to lose by a sizeable majority to Boris Johnson, as Jeremy Corbyn did in 2019, is another. A liar and a charlatan, as is commonly accepted, with no real agenda for the country other than a few slogans without strategy, he won in part because of the weird popularity I have never understood (perhaps because I have known him for a long time), but largely because Labour were seen as unelectable.
It takes time to erase that impression, and to his credit, Starmer has done so. The fact that the expectation problem Labour faces now is not whether they can win, but by what margin, underlines the significance of that shift.
It speaks to success in the first two of the three parts of an overall strategy: first, detoxify the Labour brand by dealing with the issues Corbyn failed to address, notably anti-Semitism; second, show that the Tories were unfit for office, and had no real agenda. The Tories have helped, with the kind of prime ministerial churn we used to laugh at when it was happening in Italy, and scandal upon scandal, with precious little real advance in the lives and livelihoods of the British people.
It is the third part of the strategy that needs to move centre stage now — setting out why a Labour government would be better and, specifically, how. In virtually every public meeting I do these days, I detect from my show-of-hands surveys a problem Labour need to address … most people think Labour will win. But when I ask people to explain what they think that will mean by way of change for them, even well-informed audiences struggle.
Voters need to know what kind of country Labour wants to shape
People can imagine Starmer in No 10, and feel okay about that. But given the scale of challenges a new government will inherit, it won’t be enough to sustain them. For that to happen, the country needs to vote positively for change, knowing what kind of country Labour wants to shape, what kind of economy, what kind of public services, what kind of relations with the world. Call it the vision thing.
To be effective, it has to be clear, and relentlessly communicated between now and polling day, so that when people vote, they know not just what they are voting against, but what they are voting for. Starmer has achieved Parts 1 and 2 with more skill and ruthlessness than he gets credit for. But Part 3 is the Big One, and the next few months is the time for that clarity to show.
Alastair Campbell was Labour’s director of communications under Tony Blair
