How long does it take to get over a trauma? Without therapy and compassionate intervention, perhaps you never do. It is over 30 years since the general election of April 1992, when John Major surprisingly was returned to office in spite of opinion polls (and pundits) pointing to a likely Labour victory. There followed three election wins for Labour under Tony Blair’s leadership, a kind of therapy, perhaps, if not necessarily a compassionate intervention. But the shock of April 1992 endures. Grasp this, and you grasp everything.
Look at today’s consistent 20-point poll leads. Why isn’t Labour happier, exuding more confidence, and winning more enthusiastic support from commentators with only a year or so to go to the next election? For one thing, those current poll leads may not be all that they seem. As Peter Kellner has shown, asking more specific questions about voter sentiment roughly halves those leads in an instant.
These unenthusiastic “20-point” leads, then, leave Labour supporters uneasy, and all other observers uncertain. Could we see another 1992-style surprise next time around? Or will voters mark their crosses in the way that they are currently telling pollsters they would if they were an election today?
Keir Starmer’s unflashy style has done little to close the enthusiasm gap. Labour are currently hugely risk-averse, ruling out spending commitments (including an end to the two child benefit cap) and trying to appear, well, reassuringly boring
In 1992, the threat of Labour’s supposed “tax bombshell” and the denigration of Neil Kinnock’s character helped underpin the surprise Tory win. The party pulled itself together under John Smith. And after Smith’s tragic and premature death Blair took over. Nostalgically, some recall the energy and verve of New Labour’s campaigning in the mid-1990s and wonder why there can’t be more of that now. It was a simpler and more optimistic time back then. The Cold War was over, and Europe was being reunited. Things could only get better. Perhaps the buoyancy of young Blair would find fewer fans today, when people are wearier and more cynical. Starmer cuts a more grown-up and sober figure—less fun, but maybe more in keeping with the times and tasks ahead.
The flatlining post-Covid economy cannot be compared to the postwar world of 1945. Yet today’s challenges are severe all the same. The Labour government elected after the war was led by another unflashy figure, Clement Attlee. I asked his biographer, Francis Beckett, whether he sees any parallels between the two Labour leaders.
“One of the reasons for Clem Attlee’s effectiveness was his extraordinary ability to make really radical policies sound humdrum and everyday,” Beckett told me. “He could never make stirring speeches, which seemed like a defect, but he turned it into a precious asset, and it helped make him the most revolutionary prime minister of the 20th century. He made huge changes, but presented a very small target.
“Starmer shares Attlee’s ability to make his policies sound humdrum. The problem is that, so far, most of them are humdrum. He understandably wants to present as small a target as possible, and perhaps he will prove a great change-maker once in Downing Street.”
But there is another crucial difference. Inspired by figures such as Keynes and Beveridge, and drawing on their experience of running the home front during the Second World War, the incoming 1945 Labour government dreamt big and acted big, as Beckett explains.
“Attlee started with a radical programme that came out of Labour’s 1944 conference,” he says. “Today’s Labour conference is far too disciplined and tightly managed to commit the leader to anything much. We really are dependent on the hope that the quiet passion that lurked under Attlee’s staid grey suit also lurks, well hidden, under Starmer’s.”
During the 1992 election campaign the conventional wisdom held that John Major looked like a loser. That ridiculous soapbox! The struggle to make his voice heard over the heckling. Labour was decisively ahead, according to the (flawed) polls.
Rishi Sunak is being largely written off too, albeit not yet quite as unequivocally as Major was (this could change if the three byelections this Thursday go badly for the government). Starmer’s restraint and caution are understandable, for now.
To be more confident of victory next year, however, Labour will have to start closing the enthusiasm gap pretty soon. Politics is not showbiz—not really. But at the next election some voters may ask, like Tom Hanks’s bewildered man-child at the corporate meeting in the 1988 film Big: “What’s fun about that?”
Governing will not be fun—not in these circumstances. But there ought to be some big dreams and big goals to aim for, and vote for.
