As the two remaining Conservative leadership candidates continue to knock each other out, there is a natural temptation to think that Labor leader Keir Starmer should be sitting tight. With Rishi Sunak coming out particularly hard on near-certain winner Liz Truss, describing her economic strategy as “immoral… and not conservative” and claiming she was bound to lose the next election, Starmer is surely entitled to a quiet poolside smile at your family holiday.
After all, there is no dispute that generally the fall of one major party leader is a battle honor for another, implying the attainment of a certain level of power. Tony Blair rejected four opposing numbers – John Major, William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – while Theresa May rejected no one and almost made Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister.
But if Sir Keir is good at reading the political game – and the jury is still out on that – then he will know he is in for a very bumpy period. Sauron’s great political eye has almost finished his current project on the Tories, and his gaze is about to turn to the woes of Labour.
Past experience tells us that a new prime minister almost always gets a honeymoon period with the electorate. Even the uptight May and Gordon Brown were stratospherically popular at the start of their premierships. So it is unlikely to matter that Liz Truss is, as she puts it, “not the slickest of communicators”, nor even that she will take office in the midst of a painful economic crisis, as long as she lays out attractive plans to address And the emergency budget is bound to do just that.
Indeed, there is already polling evidence to suggest that Labour’s days of frothy double-digit poll results are coming to an end. Three weeks ago, the Politico website’s poll, which gives the best indication of general public opinion, showed Labor maintaining an average ten-point lead. This is now down to seven points and the trend line is clearly against Labour, while a YouGov poll this week found it had shrunk to one point, with Labor down on 35 per cent – five points below Corbyn’s 2017 share d. General Elections.
The party leader’s ratings are also turning against Starmer again, with research by Redfield & Wilton Strategies this week finding that Truss has already overtaken him on the question of who would make a better prime minister and that she is on a sharp rise. What’s more, with Truss’s premiership offering the prospect of bolder approaches to illegal immigration, the Northern Ireland Protocol and tax cuts, there is every chance she will quickly win disaffected centre-right voters back into the Tory voting fold.
If everything was insane in the Labor Camp, this might not be much of a problem. Starmer could just tell his band to keep calm, get out and wait for the winter electricity bills to land with a thud on the doormats. But the problem for him is that sentiment towards him in his own party is already very shaken. Senior leaders continue to criticize him over his personal performance, while the party’s left is seething with anger after largely electing him as leader on a set of radical socialist promises he has now abandoned.
Trot will present Starmer with a completely different challenge from the ailing Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions when. He is only one weak performance away from a full-blown crisis. Yet, strangely, the thing most likely to keep him going is Truss’ early power.
Now that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act no longer exists, the timing of a general election is once again the prerogative of the Prime Minister. It is unlikely that Ms Truss will be betting on an autumn election to win her own mandate from voters – if she goes wrong, her premiership may not even make it past 100 days – but it is far from impossible. The Labor MPs must have noticed that there was a certain wildness in her eyes that suggested unpredictability.
Still, if Labor ditches Starmer and embarks on a protracted leadership contest, it risks the prospect of Truss calling a general election while this has been a meaningless mess with literally no one to sell voters as a future prime minister. So Starmer will almost certainly be able to slip through, winning over large swathes of the electorate and with few hints that he is someone who can turn 200 Labor seats into more than 300 in one go.
Tory grandee Willie Whitelaw once quipped that Labor was “going around the country causing apathy”. For most of his tenure as party leader, that description also fit Keir Starmer. He did quite well in his role in the defenestration of Boris Johnson, but he’s about to do so again.
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