Keir Starmer had a very specific communications strategy during the election campaign: fight on your own turf and don’t get dragged down by someone else’s agenda. Don’t get distracted by the fight the Tories want to wage over culture or taxes – stick to the script and rise above it.
The problem with this tune is that, to paraphrase a footballer, you can sing it when you are winning. Even during the election campaign there were times when this tune failed.
Starmer’s weakest moment in the six-week campaign was the first debate against Rishi Sunak, where the Labour leader pressed on with his own blunt views and ignored Sunak’s wild claim about the £2,000 tax rise.
These were misleading figures and the Labour leader wanted to ignore them, but he did not refute them directly and that left a wide-open target. It gave newspapers and broadcasters the opportunity to put the claims on the front page and in bulletins. There was also a horrible week of bickering over the selections, which exposed the weakness of that strategy. But overall the Labour campaign was remarkably disciplined.
But last week we have seen the limits of that approach. Labour cabinet ministers and advisers are privately despairing at the flood of damaging stories about donations of clothes, hospitality and holidays.
There is a deep sense of injustice in Starmer’s inner circle – perhaps understandably – at comparisons being made with Boris Johnson’s government, which failed to follow the rules, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and where donors routinely paid for the former prime minister’s lavish holidays and even his wedding. Starmer, they say, is receiving such criticism for being diligent.
But that perceived injustice in Starmer’s treatment of Johnson does not seem to be an argument that will convince the general public, if polls and focus groups are to be believed. Starmer himself should know better: he persisted with his attacks on Johnson over Partygate and cronyism when many around him, including in the shadow cabinet, thought he should change the situation.
His closest advisers insist he was right to do so because he saw how deeply it struck a chord with the public, which makes it all the more bizarre now to understand why they could not have foreseen that this particular scandal was about to happen.
The controversy is more damaging because it is easier to understand. Every time a photo of Starmer appears on the evening news, he is wearing the glasses that people now associate with Waheed Alli’s donations. There is public disbelief that Alli would make donations to buy clothes for Starmer and his wife. Fair or unfair, that is the reality.
Senior officials appear to have a very explicit blind spot when it comes to Alli, who has been a close friend of many in the shadow cabinet and worked deep within the Labour operation during the election campaign.
They see him as an innocent party man who simply wanted to help and cared about getting a Labour government, a man on television who could tell Starmer directly that he needed to improve his behaviour. That blurred any risk they might otherwise have perceived of Alli being seen first and foremost as a donor by the general public – an assumption that now seems extremely naive.
The result seems to be something bordering on paralysis. Cabinet ministers have been on the airwaves without any coherent position, arguing that taxpayer-funded clothing is so-so overseas (it isn’t) or that the media has been unfair or that transparency has been, if anything, too strict. It took the prime minister four days to say he would never again accept donations for such personal items.
The Labour Party conference should be the moment to reframe that narrative, and the party can still use it to do so. But they are somewhat constrained by a determination to cling to a narrative of how painful things are ahead and avoid a populist insistence that everything can be rosy.
Some cabinet ministers are unsettled by that approach and have begun to argue more forcefully that voters simply do not view this moment in the same way they viewed George Osborne’s austerity response to the global financial crisis: they voted for political change and better public services.
They argue that the strategy must now change: that the rebuttal must be swift and aggressive, not aloof. And that the funeral attitude of Starmer and Reeves must also change and reflect the moment of hope that many of them felt about the return of a Labour government and what it can do.
