By Stefan Boscia
David Milliband once said only politically “brilliant” leaders can win elections from the centre-left in Western countries. He was referring to the type of once in a generation progressive politicians – like Sir Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Harold Wilson – who have swept to electoral victories on the back of their stunning personal popularity.
Not even Sir Keir Starmer’s most fervent cheerleaders in the Labour party would suggest he has the kind of charisma or campaigning skills of Blair or Obama. However, strategists in Labour HQ are now pointing to a wave of recent international election results to show Starmer doesn’t need to.
Several party sources told City A.M. that Labour is planning on using the blueprint for election victories by centre-left parties in Australia and Germany as a guide for how to win power in 2024. Australian Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, an un-flashy and unashamed political nerd, beat Scott Morrison in May’s General Election to overturn nine years of conservative government.
Meanwhile, Olaf Scholz was widely considered to be a safe change candidate and a natural heir to Angela Merkel, despite coming from Germany’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP).
John McTernan, a former aide to Blair and ex-Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, said Starmer’s team should copy the example of how Australian Labor marketed Albanese as an honest and relatable bloke from a working class background.
“We know Keir loves the NHS, he loved his mum so much he bought her a donkey sanctuary, he loves Arsenal and he loves a beer. With these facts, you’ve suddenly got a sketch of Keir to which everybody in the country can relate to,” he said.
“The party needs to also say that Keir’s a confident man with a plan and that this is not time for a crash or crash through government, which is what Liz Truss’ government will be.”
Australian Labor’s plan was to offer a so-called small target to the electorate that was devoid of big spending pledges and to depict Albanese as a steady change from the increasingly unpopular Morrison. While the results showed the Australian public were not excited by Albanese, Labor’s primary vote dropped to one of its lowest ever ebbs, they still voted to oust the populist Morrison after an endless stream of sleaze scandals involving his party (sound familiar?).
One senior Labour source told City A.M. that Starmer’s team wanted to copy this model and effectively “win by default” in 2024 ahead of a now very unpopular Conservative party.
“The plan is to basically contrast Keir to the psychodrama of the Tory party and to show that he is a safe pair of hands at a time of economic calamity,” the source said.
Another Labour source said a key parallel to the Albanese example was that Starmer had also made serious efforts in showing “fiscal responsibility really matters to us and that we can be trusted with people’s money”. This was particularly evident in a recent speech, where he promised to jettison the “magic money tree economics” of the Jeremy Corbyn-era and to deliver “sound finances”.
One Labour aide said party staff had been receiving training from the Australian Labor Party and the SDP on their election tactics, but emphasised that “we still want to really excite people”.
“We can’t just expect the government to collapse and we’ll be the benefactors,” they said.
Many in Westminster on both sides of the political aisle are still unconvinced Labour will win the next election, despite the party’s increasingly large polling leads. They are facing a large mountain to climb thanks to the party’s disastrous 2019 election result and polling has shown Starmer as only marginally more popular than Truss or her Tory leadership rival Rishi Sunak.
He has also been dogged by persistent suggestions, even from members of his own shadow cabinet, that he is too boring. One moderate Tory backbencher said “the only reason we are still in the game is because of how useless Starmer is” – a view that is held widely in Tory circles.
Will Tanner, director of centre-right think tank Onward and ex-Number 10 aide, said Starmer is “an eminently beatable Labour leader”.
“In focus groups that we run he gets a poor reception from the public, including from existing Labour voters,” he said.
“I think Starmer does need to seriously ignite interest in him or ultimately the Labour party could fall as a result of his relatively bland personality.”
Tanner also warned that Starmer’s previous support of a second Brexit referendum, which he has now all but renounced, and his broken pledges to stick with Corbyn’s key policies during the 2020 Labour leadership election could come back to haunt him.
“The charge of being untrustworthy could start to stick to him quite quickly in an election campaign. The idea he’s quite slipperry would be damaging,” he said.
However, the current economic and political realities are clearly on Starmer’s side as both major parties gear up for the next election. Millions of people are being squeezed into destitution by 40-year-high inflation and our economic prospects are among the worst of all developed countries.
The NHS is lurching from crisis to crisis, crippling strikes are becoming commonplace and dozens of the nation’s beaches are unfit to swim in thanks to water companies pumping them full of raw sewage. All this is happening as the Conservative party is in the midst of an internecine leadership contest that is short on ideas and inspiration.
Labour grandee Lord Peter Mandelson said he was confident about his party’s electoral chances, but implored them to not be complacent and “to be clear about its policy priorities”.
He said “every Labour policy should be subordinated” to the objective of increasing economic growth.
“It might be tempting for Labour to sit back, camp on this ground and watch the Tory government unravel over the next couple years given the mess they’re in … but Labour has to do more than that to restore itself,” Mandelson said.
“It has to continue to earn its success and retain the trust of the electorate.
He added: “I do think people want to see a contrast with the clowning, makeshift hand-to-mouth government we’ve seen over the last three years. Starmer in contrast is honest and down to earth. I think, in that sense, he is the man for the times.”
McTernan also warns against the party being complacent and says that Starmer must be more expansive than Albanese on policy.
“I think the biggest vulnerability for an opposition party, the biggest risk at the moment, is being a small target party,” he said.
“The country is waiting for a government that is willing to spend more money and isn’t prudent with money. That space is there to be taken and if Labour plays it too safe, that space will go to the incumbent government who will go – ‘look if you want change, we’re the change’.”
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