Janan Ganesh: Why Keir Starmer’s Labour might fall short of an overall victory

F Scott Fitzgerald said that a first-class mind can hold conflicting ideas without breaking down. Well, see how you get on with these two. Keir Starmer is a politician of grossly unsung excellence. And his chances of winning the next UK election are, almost to the same degree, overrated.

Let us take those in turn. Even if he achieves no more than a hung parliament, Starmer will have been the best leader of the opposition since the war. He took over a Labour Party in such electoral ruin that it might never have won again, and in such ethical disgrace that it might not have deserved to. The polling swing he has contrived since then is monstrous. And his doubters mustn’t weasel out of this with talk of “luck”. He lost his first year to a pandemic that made the very act of opposing the government seem distasteful, if not treasonous.

He is the most underrated politician I have covered, and I have covered Joe Biden. In each case, the analytic error was the same. Political animals, above all commentators, overvalued charisma, oratory and big ideas. For them, politics is a source of meaning in life. For the marginal voter, it is an exercise in sniffing out the lesser evil.

Is Britain going to give a left-of-centre party a clear win when the tax burden is as high as it is and government debt exceeds national output?

So how, despite all this, despite a spent-looking Conservative government, mightn’t Starmer win? Why does that 22-point poll lead seem to me a chimera?

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Some of it is just historical inference. Labour wins when the country is feeling robust. In 1945, Britain was demobilised from war and victorious. In the mid-1960s, it had cultural swagger and millions of new entrants to the consumer middle class. In 1997, what we now call the Great Moderation reigned. When has the public ever trusted Labour in a period of relative national angst? 1974, perhaps? And that was a squeak of a win, achieved at the second time of asking. (How neat if the 50th anniversary were to bring a similar result.)

Put it another way: is Britain going to give a left-of-centre party a clear win when the tax burden is as high as it is and government debt exceeds national output? “Ah, but those are Conservative failures.” Yes. And so? How does that affect the risk calculus of a voter in the solitude of the booth?

Now let us narrow the lens from the historic to the personal. Mid-term polls flatter the opposition. For a better clue to the next election, consider which leader voters prefer as prime minister. On that score, Starmer leads Rishi Sunak, but by a modest and, according to YouGov, shrinking amount. This is the untold story about Starmer’s luck: how bad it has been. He would have beaten either Liz Truss or Boris Johnson, whose status as a nationwide folk hero is upheld in newspaper editorial rooms and the lounge bars of 5 Hertford Street, but not the polls.

In Sunak, though, Starmer has something of a twin: a stiff performer, less moderate than he seems, but conscientious, smart and preferable to the rest of his party. Britain’s governing model is presidential in all but name, and so are its elections. This one seems too well-matched to throw up a result anything as decisive as the headline voting-intention polls now suggest.

Progressives no longer argue that ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘austerity’ are dead. No, they proceed from the premise that they are

There is another reason to doubt Labour, and it is harder to describe. Ingrained in the left is a belief, no doubt traceable to Marxism, that history is always about to turn its way. There was lots of this after the 2008 financial crash. (Since when Labour has lost four elections.) There is even more now. Progressives no longer argue that “neoliberalism” and “austerity” are dead. No, they proceed from the premise that they are. They have banked a profound intellectual victory, a historic turning point, a sort of left-wing version of 1979-80, that might be news to voters. And based on what? Some statist policies under Biden in the US: a different country, with different fiscal options and a different currency. Starmer himself does not think in these terms, but he is a speck on top of a movement that very much does. It is liable to over-reach.

To be clear, voters are sick of Tory nonsense. But they haven’t even begun to consider Labour nonsense. It has been out of sight these 13 years. Soon it will come to the foreground: the trade union special pleading, the idea that spending isn’t spending if it is “investment”, the identity neuroses, the moralising overkill of the NHS rhetoric and, above all, the memory that Labour had to be smashed to electoral dust to do something about the hard left. All parties have their pathologies. If the Tories’ ones are more exposed, it is because they govern for so long. Elections have a way of equalising the scrutiny.

— Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023