Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey were seated next to each other in Westminster Abbey for the coronation. For these knights of the opposition realm, it was an opportunity to exchange mutual congratulations on their successes in the local elections. For everyone else, the pairing provided a glimpse of one possible future for this country in which prime minister Starmer and deputy PM Davey have agreed to form a Lab-Lib coalition. I don’t say this will happen. No one can predict exactly how the chips will fall. I do say both men should be thinking about and preparing for hung parliament scenarios because there’s a significant level of probability that the next election will produce one.
Sir Keir has credible grounds for saying he will become prime minister, but his MPs struggle to sound genuinely confident that Labour will secure a parliamentary majority. The explanation is the national mood and the electoral maths. As one of the Labour leader’s inner circle puts it, “the maths is very difficult”. Sir Keir has sought to efface the Jeremy Corbyn years, but he can’t rewrite the party’s cataclysmically atrocious performance at the last election, which crushed the number of Labour MPs in the Commons to its lowest tally since 1935. Climbing a towering mountain from such a very low base presents a vertiginous challenge. To get to a parliamentary majority of just one, Labour must win 123 more seats than it did in 2019. Sir Keir would need a majority substantially better than one to sustain a reforming government through a full parliamentary term. Seat gains on that scale rarely happen. History suggests it is not mission impossible, but it is mission extremely bloody difficult.
