Adam Boulton Diary – Starmer’s success or failure will rest on getting his voice heard on economics

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.

Ed Miliband lives a few streets away from Starmer in Kentish Town – which, as Sir Keir insists, is part of Camden, not Islington, the mythical happy hunting ground of the leftie elite. Justine, Ed’s partner, is a fellow senior lawyer. Miliband is also the only politician of equivalent star power that Starmer has allowed into his Shadow Cabinet. Like Boris Johnson he has surrounded himself with mediocre colleagues unlikely to pose a real threat to his position.

If, and it remains a big if, Johnson manages to shuffle his team by replacing incompetents with heavyweight rivals such as Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid, or even his predecessor, Starmer will need to punch back with the elevation of some of the kept-down or overlooked such as Rachel Reeves, Emily Thornberry, Jess Philips, Pat McFadden Hilary Benn and Yvette Cooper.

Starmer’s exclusions were in part sops to avoid antagonizing the Corbynite left. Given the opportunity, by Jeremy Corbyn and Rebecca Long Bailey, he has paradoxically proven ruthless. He should note that the sky did not fall in. His hand will be strengthened further if, as seems more likely following last week’s legal action, the Labour Party confirms the exclusion of Corbyn. Outside Scotland, the far left has nowhere else to go. Labour is doing better in opinion polls because the left of centre vote has coalesced under his leadership. He has squeezed the Liberal Democrats, but he will need to go much further to win the extra 123 seats Labour needs for a majority, including the dozens of bricks dislodged from the red wall in December 2019.

By trade the former Director of Public Prosecutions is a prosecuting barrister. He is painstakingly assembling the charge sheet of government mistakes over Covid, with such zeal that he made the same speech twice, on screen from quarantine, in response to Johnson’s two outings in the Commons last Wednesday.

Sir Keir may be following Alastair Campbell’s law, that a message is only getting through to the public when politicians are bored of repeating it. He may be relying on the old saw that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. He is certainly narking the Prime Minister who wails, somewhat unreasonably, that the Leader of the Opposition should be supporting him. The trouble is that Johnson is on to something. Forensic criticism, hindsight and even foresight can only carry Starmer so far, because both he and the Prime Minister are on the same side in the battle against Covid-19.

To succeed Starmer needs to start talking – and being heard – on other issues as well. But not about a constitutional convention, because here again he and Johnson have a  common desire to head off Scottish independence.

His widely anticipated Fabian Society lecture was a missed opportunity. Tempting as it must have been to crow over Joe Biden’s ousting of Donald Trump, the norms of the special relationship suggest that Labour should not look to the new administration for overt political assistance.  For now, Johnson is adopting the traditional obsequiousness of Westminster to Washington and avoiding any provocations.

The ground where Blair and Brown feared to tread may be the most fertile.  It’s the economy, stupid. The pandemic has blown apart Thatcherite market capitalism. The state is back, and a Tory government is borrowing and spending hand over fist. The welfare safety net turns out to be inadequate and businesses of all kinds are crying out for government assistance.

Traditionally Labour does this sort of thing better than Conservatives, just like Democrats do it better than Republicans, as the US electorate noted. Already conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are unhappy, with some Tory MPs as anxious as the reborn American deficit hawks to turn off the taps.

Until now the Labour leader’s offer to the electorate has amounted to “we’d do the same only better”. No wonder the level of public engagement has remained insufficient. Instead of quibbling over detail while watching Boris Johnson steal their lunch, Sir Keir Starmer and his chosen Chancellor Anneliese Dodds need to start thinking deeply and speaking out boldly on the key economic questions. If they don’t, and Labour really wants to return to action in government, it will be in the party’s interest to find someone else.