It was supposed to be a victory rally, but—bizarrely—the build-up to Labour’s 2024 conference has engendered a mood more like a wake. Less than three months since the Conservatives were reduced to an unprecedented parliamentary rump, the bad news for Keir Starmer just keeps piling up.
The first of the many “tough decisions” that he promises—means-testing pensioners’ winter fuel payments—has proved dizzyingly unpopular. Downing Street infighting is rampant. A welter of sleaze stories—some serious, some trifling—are combining to sour the mood in a way that ordinarily happens, not in the glad, confident morning of an administration, but rather as it is nearing its end. The tanking of the prime minister’s personal poll numbers is not so much bad as astonishing: one of several grim new surveys has him scoring worse than the recently crushed Rishi Sunak. Look at real votes in council byelections, and recent weeks have seen Labour shed wards to the Greens, the Tories and the Lib Dems. Even the greatest summer miracle—Labour’s restored dominance north of the border—is starting to look like a passing mirage: the SNP is back in front, according to Opinium polling based on voting intention for the next Holyrood elections.
The court of Keir can try and brush all this off: his government enjoys a very large Commons majority, and needn’t face the voters’ judgment for five years. But here’s the brutal truth: it is very, very rare in politics for a leader who has begun a serious slide in the popularity stakes to recover their standing. Racking my brain for exceptions, I can come up with George W Bush after 9/11 and Margaret Thatcher after the Falklands War. In both cases the emergency hour remade the man or woman, rather than the other way round.
The slide began even before Labour won office, in the long election campaign during which most voters first gave Starmer’s party a serious look. Its vote-share eventually sank by more than Theresa Mays’ Conservatives had fallen during her misfiring 2017 election, but this barely registered because in 2024 the Tories were also on the slide, and also because the Starmer operation was so ruthlessly efficient in targeting the small town, middle-aged voters who hold disproportionate clout under the distortionary rules of Britain’s electoral game. The party’s hubristic vanguard barked dismissively at anyone who dared to point out that the newly “electable” party of 2024 had in fact persuaded fewer electors to turn out and vote for it than its previous car-crash incarnation, under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.
Next month, however, the theory that a supportive House of Commons can insulate a government from the effects of unpopularity will be tested, perhaps to destruction, when Starmer—having vowed in the summer that he wouldn’t “reach for the tax lever”—presides over a Budget that yanks that lever hard.
At that point, those centrist and even centre-right voters who were lured by such reassurances to give Starmer a go this year, could—egged on by the perennially shrill Conservative press—begin to resent him as much as the leftists who feel betrayed by his casual jettisoning of the pledges that he first ran on to secure election as Labour leader. The very same lack of definition that enabled this year’s unloved Labour landslide would then start to make governing phenomenally difficult.
A government needs a solid base of voters it can rely on, especially in hard times, but for this government that base feels like it is becoming alarmingly small. The only way to build this foundation is through forcing a little of the definition that, until recently, felt like smart politics to evade. It may already be too late for Starmer to be a truly popular prime minister, but then few prime ministers are. The important thing to avoid is being an entirely friendless one.
Those who follow the news will be dimly aware of some of the decisions that could, when woven together, allow for at least the start of a cogent story about what this Labour government is for. Consider stronger rights for marginalised workers, the funding of half-decent pay rises for public servants, and—relatedly—negotiating the end of strikes with junior doctors and train drivers. If you’ve been paying closer attention, you might also have clocked less reductive school inspection, and even—despite Starmer’s damaging initial use of the Middle East crisis to make factional Labour party points—a modest recalibration of foreign policy against the hard-right Israeli government.
None of these changes, however, are going to persuade anyone to rally to the government’s banner unless the government itself tells its own story in a full-throated way. The same is true of the coming tax-raising Budget. It will, inevitably, make some powerful enemies; only if it is put forward as the way to avoid a fresh bout of austerity might it also win a few friends.
Making any argument about anything is, of course, going to be difficult while the first question the prime minister faces is always about why he needs on-the-house Arsenal boxes and Taylor Swift tickets. Freebie wardrobe makeovers may—if properly declared—be a third-order ethical problem compared to (say) the more dubious dealings of Boris Johnson. But they are nonetheless unedifyingly eye-catching, and in a brand-trashing way. Instead of the promised “government of service,” the public sees a “government of the entitled.”
Refusing future receipt of free clothes, as No 10 has now signalled Starmer will do, can only be the first part of the reputational repair job. The deeper challenge is grappling with the sort of plutocratic political funding embodied in the record-breaking £4m donation to Labour from a tax-haven-based hedge-fund invested in weapons and fossil fuels. A “whiter than white” administration would also, surely, get a grip on the position of Alan Milburn, a former health secretary with a long record of business interests in private healthcare, as a half-in, half-out unofficial adviser. Either he should be brought inside the tent, complete with the due diligence and public spotlight that this implies, or he should be firmly outside. Such lines should be easy enough to draw. Starmer is both a lawyer with a keen sense of process, and a citizen who has occasionally spoken, with evident personal feeling, about the peculiar importance of public provision of healthcare.
The question is whether he really wants to define himself—or continues to leave it to spin doctors and choices forced by events to reveal to the country who he is. The drift of the last few months would suggest he could hardly do worse if he takes matters into his own hands.
