Sir Keir’s not here to entertain. If the media wants politics as panto, it’s playing in Clacton
Sir Keir Starmer looks increasingly comfortable wearing the skin of prime-minister-in-waiting. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
From the off, this election has been Labour’s to lose – and boy does it know it. Every indicator signposts victory, but Labour is fighting it as if there’s a real risk of defeat. “Change”, the simple one-word slogan inscribed on the front cover of the manifesto, emblazoned on every podium and never absent from a Starmer speech, is a clinically utilitarian compression of the core theme. The messaging is rigidly repetitive. “Stop the chaos, turn the page and start to rebuild Britain.” Rinse and repeat, members of the shadow cabinet, until your mouth is cracked dry and you’ve given your audience tinnitus. One of the campaign’s architects recently purred to me: “I do love message discipline”, as if he was talking about his children. Stick to the script. Never drop the ball. Ignore the opinion polls. Take nothing for granted. Leave nothing to chance. Get over the line.
Don’t think I’m being a critic. I say all this as a compliment to the professionalism of the Labour campaign, not least because I’ve witnessed so many past contests in which the party lacked the ferocious focus and the steely will to prevail in the brutal contact sport of electoral politics.
Despite the formidable advantages Labour enjoyed going into the campaign, there were plenty of nerves jangling in camp Keir at the sound of the starting gun being fired. Understandably so, given the party’s dire record of blowing previous elections. It may have been self-evident to everyone else that a Labour victory was guaranteed. It was not so to the high command of a party that usually loses.
The media thirsts for drama and novelty, but the Labour team’s contrary belief is that most voters crave stability
As we puff past the halfway mark, journalists pronounce themselves bored with Labour. Meant as an insult, it is flattery in the ears of Sir Keir’s team. They are not in this to entertain reporters by being “interesting” or to quicken the pulse of commentators by being “bold”. Still less is it their job to start making “gaffes” that might lend a hand to the wretched Tories. Sir Keir’s may be a compassionate party, but there are limits. Its core business is winning an election for Labour for the first time in nearly two decades. It is at the point when my profession is yawning that the average voter is beginning to engage. Journalists inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) groan when they hear, for the zillionth time, Sir Keir deliver his stock line: “My father was a toolmaker, my mother was a nurse.” Asked to review his performances in focus groups, to some voters his biography comes as a revelation. The media thirsts for drama and novelty, but the Labour team’s contrary belief is that most voters currently crave stability and predictability. At the smoothly choreographed event in Manchester to launch a carefully calibrated manifesto, journalists itched to ask: “What’s new?” Sir Keir pre-empted them by declaring that they’d find nothing that wasn’t already familiar in the 135-page handbook. “There may be some people today who say: where’s the surprise? Where’s the rabbit out of the hat?” If you want politics “as pantomime”, he continued, pop down to Clacton-on-Sea, where Nigel Farage is prancing about on the Essex coast. This rare Starmer joke was one that he liked so much he repeated it a little later in a slightly different form. “I’m running as a candidate to be prime minister, not a candidate to run the circus.”
The manifesto does indeed contain nothing you would not already know if you’ve been paying reasonably close attention to the “missions” and the “first steps” previously unveiled. That doesn’t make it fair to damn it as a timid prospectus. On the likes of housebuilding, clean power and achieving sustainably higher growth, the longer-term goals are almost heroically ambitious. It is bracing for some on the left to hear a Labour leader say that “redistribution” is a lower priority than “wealth creation”. Whether a Starmer government can boost growth will likely be the most crucial test of its success or failure as a project. It is true to say that the manifesto is crimped with caution about what Labour will be able to do in the shorter term. “We don’t have a magic wand,” the Labour leader likes to say to a jaundiced country he knows to be cynical about grandiose claims. There’s no pledge that New Jerusalem can be built overnight, not least because team Starmer believes that the lived experience of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss has inoculated the electorate against politicians who promise the moon only to cost you the earth. Labour’s pitch is as the party for voters who want to be governed by people who look sensible and sound realistic.
The Tories are the party for those preferring one that frantically sprays out unfunded, slapdash, last-minute wheezes. As a strategy, that doesn’t seem to be working out all that well for Rishi Sunak.
The Labour campaign has not been flawless. There have been fumbles and stumbles that might have been more costly were the Conservatives not such duff adversaries. Days were lost and tempers ignited during the shenanigans about whether Diane Abbott would be permitted to stand as a Labour candidate, an issue that could have and should have been resolved long before the campaign began. Sir Keir was slow to counter the Tory attack on tax in the first TV debate and kicked himself afterwards for his sluggishness. He has not found a way to explain why he used to recommend Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister that does not sound very cynical. Yet these incidents don’t appear to have been anything more than briefly jolting speed bumps on the path of the Labour juggernaut.
Labour's leader is still asking for votes 'humbly', but is sounding more obviously confident that he’s going to harvest them
The driver looks increasingly comfortable wearing the skin of prime-minister-in-waiting. The hours he has put in doing performance training have had an effect. It has not transformed him into a reincarnation of JFK, but he is much more fluent and assured than he was when he first became Labour leader. He’s also become skilled at subtly slipping the dagger between his rival’s ribs. When the prime minister turned D-day into his unfinest hour, the Labour leader did not lunge in with a crude tackle. It was more artful to talk about how moved he was to meet the veterans while coolly suggesting the Tory leader would have to answer for his choices.
When the hapless Mr Sunak suggested that his childhood was deprived because his parents would not pay for a Sky subscription, Sir Keir responded by talking rather more convincingly about his upbringing in a cash-strapped household: “I know what it feels like to be embarrassed to invite your mates home because the carpet is threadbare and the windows cracked.”
He is still asking for votes “humbly”, but is sounding more obviously confident that he’s going to harvest them. Despite themselves, there’s a new note of deference in the voices of journalists representing rightwing media when they say “thank you, Sir Keir” for inviting them to ask a question. When he spoke at the manifesto launch, the shining faces of the assembled shadow cabinet turned to him as sunflowers follow the sun.
Unless the entire polling industry is perpetrating the howler of all time, he will be entering Downing Street in less than three weeks’ time. It will be a dazzling achievement to take Labour into power just five years after the party’s worst defeat since the 1930s. Those who want to cavil will say that the main propellant of Sir Keir’s success is not desire to see him in power, but loathing for the Tories. This is not such a killer point as some imagine it to be. The unpopularity of their opponents played a large part in putting Tony Blair in Number 10 in 1997 and Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
There are two worms of unease wriggling in Labour’s guts. One is that forecasts of a Starmer mega-majority may so alarm rightwing voters that they pinch their noses and rally to the Tories. Mr Sunak’s crew is already desperate enough to be implicitly conceding defeat by publicising graphics suggesting Tory parliamentary representation could be so eviscerated that there will be no meaningful opposition to a Labour government. The other concern for Labour is that there is an “enthusiasm deficit” that will mean victory is tainted by a depressed turnout. Some Labour frontbenchers think the time is coming when there needs to be more effort to lift the spirits of the electorate. One of the leader’s team agrees that “we need to make things sing” in the run-up to polling day. What more can the Labour campaign add? Food for the soul. Providing, of course, it is fully costed.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer