Tony Blair’s article of faith was always that governing is better than opposition because in government you do, whereas the opposition “just talk”. Sir Keir Starmer is struggling even to get his voice heard, largely thanks to the pandemic.
Stripped of the countless hustings in which Labour usually luxuriates, his election as party leader last year was a bloodless affair; characterized by a “hostage video” style acceptance speech on 4 April and a lonely first speech to the annual conference delivered against a red-brick wall in Derby.
After returning from the US on Saturday, I find that Sir Keir is joining me in working-from-home quarantine. In his case, it’s the third such period of isolation, in slavish, if high-minded, respect for the NHS app warning him that he may have been in contact with contagious people.
On the assumption that the Tories can hold their large parliamentary majority together, Sir Keir has time on his side. There is unlikely to be a general election until 2024. But there will be important tests at the polls before then, beginning, Covid permitting, with this year’s Scottish, Welsh, big city and local government contests.
Labour sympathisers are already impatiently asking themselves if Sir Keir can do what Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn failed to do, and Tony Blair did in spades i.e., actually win. Their next question is if the trajectory looks too low right now, how can he raise Labour’s sights?
So far Labour has done well in opinion polls under Sir Keir’s leadership. Over the past year, the party has closed the Tories’ double figure lead, and has nudged ahead in some of the latest surveys. Sir Keir has enjoyed the highest personal approval ratings of any leader of the Opposition for forty years, except for Tony Blair. If he kept up this pace, Labour would be set for a landslide in 2024. But political recoveries do not go in straight lines. At a moment of crisis for the Conservative government, Labour may already have plateaued.
The Blair comparison grates because – as loyal Blairites such as Lord Adonis frequently remind social media – at the equivalent point to this, less than a year into the leadership, Blair’s Labour was twenty points ahead of John Major’s Conservatives.
Times have changed, and pure Blairism cannot be the answer for Labour, not least because the party’s divisions are still raw over Blair’s war in Iraq. Sir Keir is not a Blairite, even if he has had the courage to utter the name occasionally. He became an MP in 2015, seven years after Blair stood down. Rather than public school and Oxbridge, Starmer prefers to recall his blue collar, state school, background. One of his closest friends in politics is the Shadow Business Secretary Ed Miliband, whose fratricidal campaign for the leadership was predicated on the rejection of Blair’s heir, his brother David.
