Over 100 days and one “reset” in and the commentariat agree: to recover from a poor start Labour urgently needs a story, a big or biggish overarching narrative about who the government is, what it wants to do and the sort of country it wishes to make.
For some, it’s largely a communications issue. On The Rest is Politics podcast Alastair Campbell argued that Labour governments have to exist in a permanent state of “devising, executing and narrating strategy all at the same time” to combat a mostly hostile media. Where a switched on, relentless Number 10 should have been in command of its news grid and making every announcement part of a wider argument, a vacuum has been left into which a gleeful press has cast semi-serious stories about freebies and briefing wars. Meanwhile, individual policies have been sent out, alone and uncontextualised, to be torn to pieces. In the New Yorker, Sam Knight complained of Labour’s “incoherence; a sense of governing without meaning… the most notable political achievement of the Starmer administration so far has been to dramatically cut a benefits programme that helps the elderly heat their homes.”
Others believe the problem runs deeper, to a lack of ideological underpinning. Arguing for his own vision of a “high-investment, high-productivity economy” and a “we society”, journalist Will Hutton wrote that to “be a managerial party focusing on delivery” is a “first order mistake [that] Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair did not make—and certainly not Margaret Thatcher. Ideas are the lifeblood of politics. Without a philosophy, the politician blows in the wind and has no definition.”
Mentioned far less often is, first, how these demands for a story have formed a near-constant background din to Starmer’s leadership and that, in the end, not addressing them to anyone’s satisfaction didn’t stop him winning a 1997-style majority; and, second, that Labour has in fact been trying really quite hard to do all of the above, but without much success.
Starmer’s conference speech is a case in point. It was a compendium of all the things that have failed to stick, all the non-stories so far—the government of service, “country first, party second”, the five missions, “take back control” redux, railing against the Tory politics of performance and easy answers, Starmer’s “ordinary working-class background” (albeit sans references to toolmaking). Competing narrative threads spooled onto the conference floor as he spoke, alongside a jumble of cliches (The turning of the tide… no stone left unturned…water off a duck’s back), mission statement platitudes and clunking, dead-on-impact rhetorical formulations such as “service is the responsibility and opportunity of power”, all written in a manner oblivious to rhythm, structure and, at times, irony (see “‘country first, party second’—that isn’t a slogan”… and “One-word Ofsted judgements: ended!”).
And there were more stories. The announcement of a duty of candour for public authorities and public servants, styled as a “a Hillsborough law… A law for the 97… It’s also a law for the sub-postmasters in the Horizon scandal. The victims of infected blood. Windrush. Grenfell Tower” was meant to convey what sort of government this is—one standing up for the downtrodden and disenfranchised—rather than make people wonder why a basic duty to be honest in public life wasn’t already a thing. The conference slogan “Change Begins” was supposed to tell us exactly where we are now—in change’s origin story, as if change was a bit like Batman, and only by going through a formative crisis of the Bruce Wayne’s-parents variety could it become the change we need.
Stepping in to clean up Labour’s act comes election campaign director Morgan McSweeney, whose reappointment as Starmer’s chief of staff was met by an eruption of fawning quotes in the liberal media and beyond. These variously hymned his acumen (“Morgan is a much more political person [than Sue Gray] with a vision of where the country should go,”) his understanding of the concerns of ordinary people (“What sometimes gets lost in the focus on Morgan as a compulsive winner is that he has a moral purpose: putting politics on the side of working people,”) the loyalty he inspires (“The thing that Morgan is very good at doing is building extreme loyalty, the people who have worked with him are very loyal,”) his data and tech savvy (“Morgan has a different view on how to do things. He’s nothing if not the agent of change,”) and the sheer magnitude of his “hugely political and strategic brain”, which he deploys to think about “issues on a very, very deep level”.
No doubt McSweeney (“He’s very principled and he’s very infectious to have conversations with and see him bounce ideas around”) will be wary of himself becoming a story, as the latest case study in the highly inauspicious “great men” theory of political advisers. He follows Campbell, remembered by many chiefly for his role in the greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez; Dominic Cummings, who for all his polymathic posturing and campaign successes ultimately became a Barnard Castle-shaped figure of fun; and The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker, a Machiavel so brilliantly realised that people almost forget not only that he was a fictional character, but what sort of fictional character he was: namely the main protagonist in a bleak farce inspired by the Iraq War.
Keir Starmer is a post-Iraq prime minister, and also post the 2009 MPs expenses scandal, post a Brexit campaign with a dismal standard of debate and truth-telling, and post the casual yet compulsive mendacity of Boris Johnson. His speech included an anecdote about the landlady of a holiday let in the Lake District jokingly saying she would have pushed him down the stairs if she knew he was a politician. If he understands anything that his critics don’t, maybe it’s that this isn’t the best time for grand narratives, evangelising or hazy visions.
His conference speech came far closer to playing to his strengths, and engaging in some decent storytelling to boot, when he stopped stumbling around in a fog of abstractions and hinted at making some actual arguments, or “prosecuting” them, if you will. Take “If we want home ownership to be a credible aspiration for our children, then every community has a duty to contribute to that purpose” or “If we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons overground otherwise the burden on taxpayers is too much.” These sentences have structure—a beginning, middle and end, and a connecting logical or causal thread—and, as per William Goldman, “writing is structure”.
Many people would settle for more of this: a clear, bullshit-free explanation of three or four complementary ways in which the new government proposes to make their lives marginally less difficult and an administration that could go a month or six without looking overtly corrupt; many might even accept a few of the advertised “tough decisions” as a fair price for the same. And if that’s not sufficient for everyone in and around Westminster then maybe, if just to scratch the itch, McSweeney (“Morgan is a driven individual who ruffles feathers and isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he gets the job done”) and co can try to sell the virtues of a tale that people might believe: that the prime minister isn’t really the sort of person who goes in much for stories.
