It was last Sunday night that word reached Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign chief, that he might have to cancel his holiday to prepare for a snap election. The low-profile Irishman had been through the adrenaline-depleting ritual of rumour, excitement and disappointment before.
This time it felt different. Intelligence was emerging from the shadow cabinet. David Lammy was at a private dinner with Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, when a senior Tory texted to say it was on. A sudden surge in activity on the betting markets sealed McSweeney’s conviction that a July poll would be called imminently.
Yet as late as Wednesday morning, when the pair met in the House of Commons, Starmer himself remained sceptical. The Labour leader repeated like a holy mantra to staff that there was a plan. He was comforted by the dress rehearsal offered by the recent local elections. But he was still unpersuaded that Rishi Sunak would go early. He knuckled down, writing his script for prime minister’s questions, focusing on the contaminated blood scandal.
It was a characteristic display of caution from a man determined not to get ahead of himself. After a first 48 hours in which Sunak’s launch was blighted by rain and the SNP leader’s plane was diverted by fog, one Tory peer ruefully joked that even God had defected to Starmer’s party. A Labour strategist’s response to such gallows humour: “I think he’s still undecided.”
That riposte cuts to the core of Starmer’s strategy, which is a blend of vaulting ambition — even the Almighty is a target voter — and risk averseness. He believes the electorate is far more volatile than ever. He is also haunted by Labour’s record of losing elections it seemed destined to win, often because of its weakness on the economy.
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In 2010 Ed Miliband was criticised for adopting a 35 per cent strategy squarely focused around mobilising the party’s core vote.
Starmer is seeking a far broader coalition: polls point to double-digit leads in every region, which, if converted into votes on July 4, could translate to a 1997-style deluge. Staff have been told the approach is akin to the tweet composed by the World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee and beamed around the Olympic opening ceremony in 2012: “This Is For Everyone.” Starmer — a hyper-competitive five-a-side player who this year met his hero Arsène Wenger for a private dinner — is keen to adopt a similar winning mentality.
For that reason the party has adopted a one-word slogan that means different things to different voters but has the widest possible resonance: Change. In England, that means change from the Conservatives; north of the border from the SNP.
New Deal is old news
To flesh out the message, the party wants to provide digestible examples of the difference Labour would make.
Rachel Reeves is the key “message-carrier” here. The shadow chancellor is the personification of the party’s desire not to offer a variety of change that is either too radical or undeliverable in the eyes of an electorate, which, according to its research, is more cynical about political promises than ever before. The proposed remedy for Tory “chaos” is a combination of economic stability and policy offers aimed squarely at the cost of living crisis. Hence the decision to rewrite and rebrand Labour’s package of workers’ rights reforms.
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This weekend The Sunday Times revealed the party had junked the “New Deal for Working People” — of which Angela Rayner had been the architect — and replaced it with the more consumer-oriented “Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay”. Hours later Reeves visited an Iceland supermarket to make her case.
Starmer chose to launch his campaign in Gillingham, one of Kent’s Brexit-backing Medway towns and the kind of Tory seat he wants to flip. Labour last won the constituency, where the Tories have a 15,000 majority, in 2005. For months the party was refreshing draft “grids” for the campaign, but the idea was always to launch in the southeast of England before travelling to Scotland, which Starmer sees as vital to any majority.
The desire to appeal across the board does not mean the party is not focused on specific kinds of voters and seats. Deborah Mattinson, Gordon Brown’s former pollster, has long championed the idea of the “hero voter” — potential Tory-Labour switchers who voted Brexit, are socially conservative and do not live in big cities.
McSweeney is similarly focused on winning voters without degrees. Yet he does not want Labour to repeat past mistakes by funnelling resources to cities where its victory is assured, or obsessing over one kind of imaginary voter. He wants the party to stay the course, remaining outside its comfort zone and striking a balance between targeting and retaining broad appeal to the last. In his eyes Labour has a tendency to lose focus as polling day approaches, comparing previous iterations to a friend at the pub who claims they are going to compete in the Olympics, only to down a pint of Guinness and lose interest.
That means funnelling campaign staff and volunteers from groups such as Labour Together, the Starmerite think tank, and Arden, a lobbying firm set up by the former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, as widely and deftly as possible.
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To do this, Starmer expects to draw upon an election war chest which, thanks to Tory reforms, can spend up to £35 million. One of his first acts after PMQs on Wednesday was to meet David Evans, the party’s general secretary, who assured him the finances were in rude health. For this, he is particularly indebted to Lord Alli, a millionaire peer and friend of Sir Tony Blair once described as one of the few openly gay Muslim politicians in the world. Alli has headed up fundraising and told the shadow cabinet last week that there would be enough cash to reach the ceiling. Those who have already contributed include Gary Lubner, the Autoglass founder, Stuart Roden, a hedge fund manager, and Dale Vince, a green energy industrialist who stopped funding Just Stop Oil in the face of Tory attack. The main unions will also contribute.
Such funds meant that, before the election was even announced, Labour had expanded its office space in Southwark, southeast London. They were ready on the ground too: back in March, Hollie Ridley, McSweeney’s deputy, armed candidates in every marginal with a “break in case of emergency” packs for a snap poll containing posters, leaflets, garden boards and digital adverts. She also told them to record what would appear spontaneous announcements welcoming news of an election — all of which went live instantly last week. Back at headquarters, the plan is that at 6.30am every day the core of the campaign team led by McSweeney will meet there, with Starmer able to dial in remotely when needed. Others in the room include the husband and wife duo Pat and Marianna McFadden — the former an MP who served as Blair’s political secretary and is now campaign co-ordinator, the latter an alumna of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and now deputy campaign director. Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief aide, is involved but will also continue to oversee preparations for government.
Mistakes are inevitable
Despite the vivid visual metaphor offered by Sunak’s rain-soaked launch, Starmer’s aides have sought to resist any schadenfreude. They are happy to go for the prime minister personally — Reeves herself reminded voters on Saturday that he was richer than the King, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List — but do not want to be seen to be delighting in his misfortune and know there will be a wobble of their own at some point. Their hope is not to avoid any mistakes at all — the leader knows that is all but impossible — but to ensure the message of the campaign is sufficiently strong it cannot be eclipsed by one gaffe.
The party has also adopted a risk-averse approach to events that could wrongfoot Starmer or undermine the strategy. The party is in talks with broadcasters about leader and deputy leader debates, but has already made clear Starmer will take part in only two live contests.
As for the manifesto, it is expected to be thin. The leader will announce a handful of punchy policies but otherwise hammer home the change message. His team is also not averse to repeating existing measures, believing as they do that many voters have long since switched off from politics and will have little detailed knowledge of its plans on energy and the cost of living.
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In response to the criticism that he has not yet offered a Big Idea, an aide to Starmer was nonplussed, pointing to proposals on housebuilding and Great British Energy. “We believe in big ideas but not ideas that can’t be delivered,” they said. Such thinking guided the belated decision to limit the party’s employment reforms, which no longer include a proposed ban on zero-hours contracts or an increase in statutory sick pay. Ditto removing the wider package from the party’s core messaging with the exception of Scotland, where they played especially well in last year’s Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election, which Labour seized from the SNP.
The Diane Abbott problem
Alongside change, the other c-word is Corbyn. Last week he announced he would stand against Labour in his Islington North constituency, prompting his immediate expulsion from the party. Starmer’s team are perfectly comfortable to draw a contrast between the two if necessary, having done so to great political advantage since suspending him from the party in 2020.
Another quasi-opponent on the left is Diane Abbott, who has been suspended from the parliamentary party for a year and remains under investigation for comments comparing antisemitism to discrimination experienced by “redheads”. Starmer’s instinctive approach has been to purge Corbynite opponents. But he is unsure about whether to let Abbott stand.
Starmer is conscious of her record as Britain’s first black female MP and knows a number of his MPs have qualms about her situation. At the same time many around him believe Abbott to be unpopular with voters they are seeking to convert, and she is known to have published an autobiography that attacks him in uncompromising terms. The situation must be resolved by June 4, in less than a fortnight’s time, when the party’s ruling national executive committee meets to rubber-stamp candidates interviewed and vetted under emergency procedures.
The party otherwise sees the left as a subplot to the campaign, rather than the existential concern that defined Starmer’s first two years as leader. The local elections especially vindicated his belief that the coalition of Muslim voters, Corbynite leftwingers and young progressives who have opposed his position on Gaza are not going to blow his strategy off course.
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For now, Starmer is said to be adopting the same approach he did towards the idea of a snap poll itself: extreme caution coupled with an ambition that, until polling day, will not speak its name.