Absence of leadership forces Labour to play to electorate

Good morning. Westminster and the world are holding their breath to see what Donald Trump will do. Again. You can see why Downing Street prefers to talk about the next UK general election. Some thoughts on that below.

What year is this?

Why did Keir Starmer decide to describe Nigel Farage as his main opponent at the next election? If you haven’t yet read it, George Parker and Jim Pickard have written a terrific piece on the strategic rationale behind the decision:

The prime minister’s decision to dismiss Kemi Badenoch’s struggling party of 120 MPs and to train his fire on Reform UK, which currently has just five MPs, was driven by a combination of necessity and political calculation.

“Reform won the local elections,” said one ally of Starmer, referring to Farage’s sweeping victories in local elections in England last month. “They are ahead in the polls. The evidence is that they are the most likely opponents at the next general election.”

I am aware that I am a stuck record on this topic, but I would once again note that at this point in the 1979 parliament, James Callaghan’s Labour party had just won the 1980 local elections. Callaghan did not lead Labour into the 1983 election. And by 1983, Michael Foot’s Labour party was Margaret Thatcher’s “main opponent” in only a limited definition of the term.

The next election will probably take place in the summer of 2029, at which point Trump’s second term in office will be over. Given that we struggle to predict what the US president might do tomorrow, I do not think we can say how different the world, and therefore British politics, will be in four years’ time.

Another thing I would note is that voting intention outside election periods tends not to be particularly meaningful. People are largely making a judgment call on the record of the government; an absolute assessment, rather than a choice between alternative parties. That’s one reason why many elections have seen drastic swings in the final months, here and in peer countries. What generally is meaningful is how people feel about the potential options for prime minister.

There’s a political imperative for Labour, which has an advantage here, in seeking to maintain it. I’m not belittling that impulse at all. As it stands, provided that by the time of the next election the country is in a better state than it was in 2024, the party is well placed.

The problem is that word “provided”. One reason why Labour talks so much about the next election is the avowed lack of a big-picture political project on the part of the prime minister. As Sam Freedman notes over on his Substack in a terrific piece about how to make Downing Street run better:

His [Starmer’s] strengths are reactive. He is good at responding to immediate crises (like Trump’s row with Zelensky) and diplomacy, and he can change course when needed. But he is not a policy thinker and he is uncomfortable with strategies and sweeping narratives. Tom McTague’s recent lengthy profile of the PM for the New Statesman just confirmed what everyone in Whitehall knows — this is not a man with a big political vision, or any inclination to find one.

Almost all organisations are happier and run better when people in them can “work to the boss”. And in a big organisation, where the boss can’t just tell everyone what they want, part of being an effective leader is having some kind of philosophy or strategy people can follow.

In the absence of direction from the prime minister, the government defaults to working to its other boss, the electorate. But you can’t improve public services or the economy by asking “what will get us elected?” and “how can we see off Nigel Farage?” You need a wider theory, I think.

Now try this

I’ve been on a bit of a Michael Nyman kick lately, particularly his 1996 piece After Extra Time.

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