Starmer’s magic lamp

Imagine it is 2022 and you are a Labour Party strategist with three wishes. First, you might ask for the incumbent, landslide-winning Conservative prime minister to implode in a series of scandals so repugnant that they seems likely to stain his party’s image for years to come. Next, you might wish for the Tories to trash their reputation for sound economic management. Perhaps a radical successor could overdo it in her first fiscal statement, triggering a market panic and soaring mortgage rates. Then it might occur to you that Labour has never won a majority without carrying Scotland. And so, just to be safe, you wish for the Scottish first minister to be caught up in something unfortunate to do with party finances. There should be resignations, even arrests. That ought to do it. If you had a fourth wish, you might ask for Nigel Farage to announce that he is decisively entering the election campaign, threatening to split the Tory vote. But that would be greedy.

Ahead of last summer’s general election, commentators joked that Keir Starmer appeared to have discovered a magic lamp. And its powers were impressive. Starmer emerged from election night with a historic majority of 174, having gained more seats than any of his predecessors since Clement Attlee; he is only the fourth party leader, out of nineteen, to win the keys to Number 10. The Conservative Party has been reduced to a rump of 121 and is likely to go through several identity crises before seriously regrouping as a political force. But lamps can dim and luck can run out. Starmer’s majority is far more precarious than it looks and his momentum already seems to be ebbing away. Excitable commentators have begun to ask whether he could wind up as a one-term prime minister.

Certainly there was more than dumb luck involved in Starmer’s triumph on July 4, and two pacey new books – Taken As Red by Anushka Asthana, ITV’s deputy political editor, and Landslide by Rachel Wearmouth and Tim Ross – piece together the story of how Labour pulled it off. Both are at the better end of the genre of rapid election retrospectives. Taken as Red looks back at Labour’s organizational and ideological reinvention under Starmer: how a new strategy was laid out and what drove the people who delivered it. Landslide is more of a campaign tracker: it takes us through the immediate build-up to the election and the key moments between the vote being called in late May and the country heading to the polls six weeks later.

Both books show what a monumental task it was to rescue the party from Corbynism. Labour had stared into the abyss on December 12, 2019, when the party recorded its lowest seat tally since the 1930s. To drag it back required a ruthlessness that many will not have realized Starmer possessed. His decision to remove the whip from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020 – having already sacked Corbyn’s ally, Rebecca Long-Bailey, from the shadow cabinet – showed an iron determination to move on from the antisemitism crisis that had plagued the party. (Corbyn had dismissed the Labour antisemitism crisis as “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.) Starmer made a decisive break with the left and sought to return Labour to the values – moderation, pragmatism and a progressive brand of patriotism – that had secured it victory in the past.

The intellectual inspiration behind all this was the think tank Labour Together, which continues to wield immense influence in Starmer’s Labour. (It receives its own chapter in Asthana’s book.) Its erstwhile leader Morgan McSweeney ranks among the most important backroom figures in this story. McSweeney would go on to become the mastermind of Labour’s election campaign, and is now Downing Street’s chief of staff. Crucial work was also done by Deborah Mattinson, Labour’s director of strategy, who drove the party’s focus on the “hero voters” it had to win back in the Red Wall of post-industrial northern seats.

The impression that emerges is of an operation that was ready to take power and that probably deserved it. The party ran a formidably professional campaign, and both books describe its ruthlessly efficient targeting: every safe Labour constituency was twinned with a target seat, and activists would be redeployed from the former category to the latter. Sometimes they were virtually banned from campaigning in safe seats and would have their canvassing data switched off if they tried. And it wasn’t just a question of the ground game: the Tories had twenty digital campaign staff; Labour had 110, forty-five of them based in key marginal seats. In the first week of the campaign, Labour accounted for 63 per cent of all parties’ spending on digital adverts on Meta. This was made possible partly because Labour had so much more money: it received more in campaign donations than all the other parties combined.

So it wasn’t really luck that propelled Starmer to Number 10. Still, it didn’t hurt that there were such great windfalls of the stuff – windfalls that continued as the campaign wore on. Rishi Sunak’s D-day debacle, in which the Tory leader unwisely chose to leave the Normandy commemorations early in order to take part in a political interview with ITV, thus dealing a devastating blow to the Conservatives’ reputation for patriotism, followed the ludicrous scandal in which numerous Tories – including an aide close to the prime minister – were revealed to have placed bets on the date of the election. The gambling commission is currently investigating anyone who may have sought to profit from inside information.

On the night itself, it was a bloodbath. Sunak kept his seat but those of his four predecessors turned red. Liz Truss provided the Portillo moment. More than 180 constituencies switched from Tory to Labour, including much of the Red Wall, and Labour now holds thirty-seven of fifty-seven constituencies in Scotland. Yet, while making his way to an election night celebration, Starmer complained that his majority wasn’t as big as that of Tony Blair in 1997. This had a ring of ingratitude to it – but it got at a deeper truth. For, despite the headline numbers, this was clearly not 1997.

In the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, if a party wants to win, it has to target seats, not votes. Even so, it must be alarming for Starmer that his vote share was barely higher than Corbyn’s in 2019: 33.7 per cent compared with Corbyn’s 32.1 per cent. Indeed, Labour won the lowest share of the vote of any majority government formed in British electoral history. It was able to achieve this questionable distinction due to the immense efficiency of its vote. Labour prioritized gaining support in winnable Tory constituencies over piling up votes in safe seats. It succeeded. Tactical voting by Liberal Democrat and Labour voters worked to devastating effect: in the 411 seats won by Labour, the Lib Dems came second in just six of them. Meanwhile, Reform hurt the Tories where it mattered most, in Leave-voting seats where Boris Johnson’s party had romped home in 2019. In more than 170 of the seats the Conservatives lost, the Reform vote was greater than the margin of their defeat.

These forces all conspired against the Tory Party. But while the country voted against the Conservatives it is not clear that it voted for Labour. Despite its impressive overall seat tally, Starmer’s party was only really able to achieve its landslide thanks to what the academic Rob Ford has called “a masterpiece of electoral jenga”. A swing of under 6 per cent to the Conservatives next time would wipe out Labour’s majority.

The rise of other challenger parties compounds the precariousness of Labour’s position. All but one of the Green Party’s second places came in Labour seats. Starmer’s party could end up caught in a pincer movement, squeezed by social conservatives on its right flank and by progressives on its left. Its loss of several constituencies with large Muslim populations, in protest at its position on the Gaza war, is another warning sign. Farage will attempt to use this phenomenon for his own ends: he has predicted that there will be a radical Islamic presence in parliament by 2029 and will surely continue to stoke racial tensions where his party stands to gain.

Whether Labour can hang on to its majority depends on whether it can finally begin to tell a compelling story. Its luck should hold for a while. The Tories, under the stewardship of Kemi Badenoch, do not look like serious challengers for power. But public discontent is already showing in the polls. Starmer’s own popularity has plummeted in the wake of scandals over free suits and the constant distracting headlines about his now former chief of staff Sue Gray. A recent attempt to reboot his government, with the launch of six new “milestones”, has failed to change the public mood. Electorates are ever more hostile to incumbents and volatility is an established fact of modern politics.

Wearmouth and Ross remind us that “landslide” has several connotations. It calls to mind unstoppable momentum, the burying of one’s opponents; it also implies an ongoing instability, as old certainties are swept away. Starmer’s victory was a landslide in that latter sense, too. The ground is still shifting beneath our feet.

Alex Dean is an editor at the Economist Group. He specializes in law, politics and the constitution

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