If a week is a long time in politics, what happens if you waste a whole year? As the anniversary of Labour’s election win last July rolled around, the abiding sensation was one of emptiness. Was this it? Britain’s electoral system disproportionately empowers winning parties. But, as it turns out, it cannot compel them to do much with that power.
There is a feeling that though the electoral ground shook in July 2024, significant shifts are not easily visible. To the electorate it must feel like someone has switched the political system off. No matter how they vote, nothing changes.
And yet, politics has not stopped, even if it currently feels trapped in amber. Perhaps when we tell the story of this government, the first year will seem like an aberration. With an almost impregnable majority in parliament, it is hard to imagine Keir Starmer calling an election before 2029. We have perhaps four more years to run, after which this first might be forgotten.
Ironically, despite Labour’s “lost year”, the leadership has worn myriad masks. They began with a doomerist, look what the Tories left us, gosh-this-is-going-to-be-very-hard account of their predicament. This was followed, after Sue Gray was defenestrated, with a more pugilistic approach pioneered by Starmer’s adviser Morgan McSweeney. This led the government onto its third or fourth reset. From Doge-inspired disruption to bicep-flexing “Hard Labour”, to penny-pinching fiscal conservatism, somehow the prime minister has cycled through several grand visions without apparently having one of his own.
Recent interviews with the Labour leader have an oddly elegiac tone, given he has four years left in this parliament. Assuming Starmer is not content to write his own epitaph just yet, a dismal start does not destine him to a failed term in office. History is, after all, replete with successful governments whose first year was misleading.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party, elected in May 1979, was 10 points behind James Callaghan’s Labour by the summer of 1980. But her opposition soon split, with Michael Foot’s Labour leadership victory culminating in the breakaway Social Democrats. Initially that didn’t help Thatcher. Indeed, by early 1982, some polls had the Conservatives third behind Labour and the SDP-Liberal Alliance. But a year later the division among the opposition doomed Thatcher’s rivals, not her, as she won a landslide re-election. An unloved government surviving because a new party, dominated by a well-known, charismatic and now Eurosceptic politician (SDP MP David Owen, not Nigel Farage) creates a split in the opposition? Do tell…
I suspect that Starmer would feel pained by the comparison to Thatcher, so here’s an example he might prefer. Bill Clinton’s substantial Electoral College victory in the 1992 US presidential election was weaker than it looked, built on defeating an unloved incumbent with the aid of a third party (those parallels again). Starting with a Gallup approval rating of 58 per cent, his failure to craft a healthcare plan saw his approval plummet to 37 per cent within six months of taking office. By the end of 1994, he was so unpopular that the Democrats lost the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. And yet, the Clinton we recall—well, aside from the scandals—is the political titan who was re-elected with a landslide in 1996 and left office with two-thirds of Americans approving of him.
Over a five-year election cycle, nothing is written. We should know this from the chaos of the last decade in British politics. If the next election were to happen tomorrow it would be curtains for Starmer. But we have 80 per cent of the term left to go. And over that time, a lot could go right for Labour, if it can get policies into law and see them come to fruition.
If you aim directly at election victory you will never get there, because voters won’t reward you for having clever marketing strategies
There are two types of political campaign—“stay the course” or “time for change”. If Labour can make life feel, to quote YouGov’s Dylan Difford, “less shit”, then the former slogan might still work. And that means that even if the first year feels underwhelming, it’s possible that come the next election Labour will be get a second chance.
That, however, means focusing on policies that will make life better, not on trying to win an election in four years’ time. The philosopher Jon Elster talks about some goals that you cannot aim at directly; they only happen as byproducts of other behaviours. He includes falling asleep, falling in love or becoming famous.
Number 10 needs to remember that getting elected is a byproduct of doing a good job governing. If you aim directly at election victory you will never get there, because voters won’t reward you for having clever marketing strategies or for tacking your rhetoric to sail against political winds. At least not for that alone.
Campaign tactics only matter if you have a product to sell. Voters can be influenced, but they are not stupid. What saved Thatcher and Clinton was not “the politics of conviction” or “triangulation”, phrases still associated with them now, but economic growth. That “Hard Labour” tough talk about left liberals might be an electoral tactic, but it is no growth strategy. If Starmer wants that second term, he might do well to get on with the latter and forget about his lost first year. The rest of us would certainly prefer not to remember it.
