Leaders come and go, policies move with the times, but the challenge facing Labour is unchanged for generations: to win an election it must appeal to Conservative voters, which does not come easily to a party that struggles to imagine why anyone in their right mind would be a Tory.
Boris Johnson makes that empathic leap trickier still. Those who are unmoved by the magnetism of his character find it more alienating than any disagreement over policy or ideology.
The prime minister’s travails in recent weeks, tracked by a slide in poll ratings, help with that problem, but do not solve it. Polls can be volatile. The more encouraging sign for Labour is a collapse of Tory MPs’ faith in their leader. The rebellion over new Covid regulations – vaporising Johnson’s Commons majority – is significant as much for its ideological inflection as its scale.
For nearly two years, government has been synonymous with pandemic management. For so many Tory MPs to withdraw their endorsement from Johnson on this of all issues is fatal to his authority. But to do so under the banner of libertarian insurgency against public health precautions – a cause that exercises only a tiny minority of voters – suggests a party in danger of dislocation from reality. It is an affliction to which the Conservative right is historically prone, and to which Brexit has added a hubristic streak. Victory in the crusade against the mythic Brussels Empire has cultivated in some MPs a tendency to hallucinate liberation struggles where really there are just practical choices between imperfect options.
That is a good enough reason for Labour not to side with the rebels. It would be satisfying in the moment to force Johnson to the brink of defeat, but propping him up contains a different, more lingering humiliation. No prime minister wants to rely on the opposition to get business done, still less on a question of urgent public safety.
Keir Starmer’s constructive opposition on pandemic matters has often been invisible, to the frustration of Labour pugilists who yearn for the contact of political fist on Tory chin. But when Johnson was in his pomp, rallying the nation in self-defence, attacking him looked petty at best; at worst it was effectively siding with the virus.
The power dynamic is different with Johnson denuded of any benefit of the doubt. In the pandemic’s early stages, Labour sought credit for doing the right thing in Johnson’s slipstream; following, not leading. Tory dysfunction gives Starmer more control. It is harder for the prime minister to accuse the opposition of failure to get behind a national effort (his favourite line for deflecting criticism) when that national effort would grind to a halt without Labour votes in the Commons.
Hence the heavy emphasis in Starmer’s televised address earlier this week on Labour as “a patriotic party” fulfilling its “patriotic duty” to enact the latest regulations. The point was illustrated with a union flag at the Labour leader’s side, as if he always keeps one handy for such occasions. It was not subtle. But in political messaging, subtlety is often no better than silence.
Even when lit up in red, white and blue, Labour’s position on Covid regulations is low on most people’s list of things to care about as the Omicron variant threatens to rip up another Christmas. But it registered with Tory MPs, some of whom felt more comfortable rebelling in the knowledge that they could register a protest and salt the prime minister’s wounds without committing the more seditious act of enabling a government defeat.
There is a lesson here for Labour that goes beyond the pandemic. Johnson’s support among his MPs is a product of his fabled appeal in places that were traditionally inhospitable to Conservatives, combined with winning ways among more typical Tories. That in turn is a function of the rakish ebullience that transcends policy and ideology. If the spell is broken, it is not immediately obvious what else will bind a disparate coalition of voters.
There is a theory that Johnson hit upon a sustainable formula for political realignment; that he has colonised a new centre ground where leftish economics (raising taxes to spend on health and infrastructure) meets a rightward swerve on issues of culture and identity (flag-waving and immigration control). That looks plausible as a way to join dots on a map between economically diverse constituencies, but turning it into a plan for government has not been so easy.
That is what “levelling up” is supposed to be, and the Tories are divided as to what it means. The underlying impulse is egalitarian – sharing national wealth more evenly – but the most efficient way to do that is redistribution via taxation, and much of the Conservative party is viscerally and intellectually hostile to such methods. Neither of the frontrunners in a putative Tory leadership contest – Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss – is sold on the full-fat version of “levelling up” when it starts to smell like social democracy.
But Labour can be all for it. A debilitated prime minister will not have the strength to lead his party out of its comfort zone on social and economic policy, but that is where it will have to go to fulfil promises made to people who only gave their votes to the Tories on loan. Johnson’s charm, when it worked, was a bridge from his party to the electorate. If it fails, there is a gap into which Starmer can drive a wedge.
That might sometimes involve agreeing with the prime minister enough to aggravate division in his party. It is the method that David Cameron once used to good effect, voting for Tony Blair’s education reforms in the Commons. Tory endorsement spared Blair the pain of defeat in parliament, but at the price of confirming his status as a heretic to the left. The symmetrical manoeuvre against Johnson is available to Starmer. Labour voting with the government on Covid restrictions is right in principle, but it has the additional benefit of stoking suspicion on the Tory right that their leader is ideologically impure. Plus, lending stability to a teetering government is a way for the opposition to show readiness for the burdens of office.
It would suit Starmer for Johnson to drift in loveless cohabitation with MPs who have forgotten what they ever saw in him. Such prolonged dysfunction would do more to persuade voters that they need regime change than anything the opposition can say. The trap to avoid, as the prime minister’s charm curdles, is the smug, told-you-so piety of people who never succumbed in the first place. Labour’s disdain for the prime minister is not in doubt. The opposition’s job is complaining about the government, and complaining louder doesn’t make the message more compelling. That is why, just occasionally, the smarter move is not to bang on about the ways Johnson is wrong, but to be the lifeline he needs to get things right.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
