Tories are having a debate among themselves about whether they can somehow contrive to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat or are doomed to be chewed up and spat out by angry voters whenever the next election comes. Confronted with persistently terrible poll ratings, the gloomsters think they’re trapped in a repeat of an old horror movie about an age-raddled, scandal-riddled and bitterly divided Conservative government that has forfeited public respect for its competence with the economy or anything else. They know how that plotline went under John Major. The denouement in 1997 was a landslide defeat. On this reading, the public have made up their minds and are just drumming their fingers until they get the chance to chuck them out. Rishi Sunak will have the occasional positive episode, as he did with brokering improvements to the Northern Ireland protocol. He will exploit the opportunities of his position to perform on international stages, as he did at the Franco-British summit with Emmanuel Macron on Friday. The chancellor will attempt to claw back some confidence in the Tories’ financial management, which will be Jeremy Hunt’s central goal when he presents the budget this week. To Tory fatalists, despairing into the bottom of their wine glasses, none of this will really matter a damn. Mr Major had some good moments before the 1997 election, and the economy was doing quite well by the time it was called, but his government couldn’t be saved from oblivion. In the wake of his eviction from Number 10, he lugubriously lamented: “If I had stood unopposed, I would still have come second.”
Senior Labour people are not arguing about whether we are reliving the run-up to ’97. That’s because none of them think they have a chance of replicating the 179-seat majority won by Tony Blair. Sir Keir Starmer’s party had a 10-point advantage in the polls as the curtain crashed down on Boris Johnson’s shabby premiership, Labour moved 30 points ahead during the lunacies of Liz Truss and has settled into a 20-point lead since Mr Sunak moved into Number 10. That’s big and gives Labour people lots of hope that they can win, but the sensible ones are acutely conscious that opposition poll leads almost always shrink in the approach to an election. “The risk for us is that we get used to being 20 points ahead,” says one member of the shadow cabinet. “We have to be ready for things to narrow, as they inevitably will. We have to be prepared for that happening and not wobble when it does.” As Sir John Curtice, the psephological savant, says: “For all the government’s recent difficulties, Labour’s route back to power is markedly more rugged and steep than the one Tony Blair had to negotiate in 1997.” Then, Labour needed a swing of just 4% to get to a parliamentary majority. Thanks to the dismal legacy of the last election, its worst result since 1935, Labour has a vast mountain to scale. It probably requires a swing of 12% to get over the line – a bigger shift than the 10% achieved by Mr Blair.
The past election that most preoccupies Labour people is not the stunning victory in 1997, but the shock defeat at the hands of Mr Major five years earlier. Against most expectations, the Tories won in 1992 by claiming that, after a very rough period, they’d got Britain back on track, exactly the argument Mr Sunak is hoping to mimic if he can get inflation and NHS waiting lists down, and growth and living standards rising, before the country gives its verdict. The ’92 Tories also ran a brutally effective campaign to amplify voter anxieties about what a Labour government would mean for their livelihoods. Campaign broadcasts and posters headlined “Labour’s Double Whammy” featured a boxer wearing two gigantic red gloves. One biffed voters with the legend “More Taxes”, the other bashed them with “Higher Prices”. They still have psychological punch more than three decades later. Everyone of significance in today’s Labour hierarchy is haunted by the spectre of ’92. Understand that and you understand why Sir Keir and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are so cautious about making any large spending commitments beyond the green prosperity plan that they badge as investment. Understand that and you understand why they put so much stress on fiscal responsibility.
Sir Keir has also sought to reassure voters about the kind of government he’d lead by maximising the impact of milestones that demonstrate how he has reformed Labour. He put it in lights when the Equality and Human Rights Commission judged that the party is now fit to be removed from “special measures”. He led the celebrations when Luciana Berger, who quit as a Labour MP in protest over antisemitism in the party under its previous management, returned to the fold. He has barred Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate. Purging your predecessor as leader is ruthlessness without precedent in modern British politics, but people around Sir Keir still worry that they need to do even more to convince voters that the changes he has made to Labour are genuinely “permanent, fundamental and irrevocable”.
Sir Keir has also been ruthless in purging himself of what he once believed – or claimed to believe when it was convenient. When he ran for the leadership, he issued “10 pledges” committing himself to a lot of his predecessor’s prospectus. Most of those pledges have since been junked – he prefers to say “adapted” – into the dustbin of history. This has exposed him to charges of betrayal from the Corbynite left and flip-flopping from the Tories. Better to flip on a manifesto that was accompanied by a colossal defeat than to lead Labour to yet another election flop. And it is hard for the Tories to attack him on that basis when they’ve yo-yoed through three different prime ministers with three contrary programmes in less than a year. That said, the Labour leader can’t afford to provide his opponents with any more examples of reverse ferrets when they are already trying to paint a picture of him as a man who will say anything to get power.
As for what he would do with it, his most recent attempt to define his ambitions has come in the form of five “national missions”. These have not landed as well as team Starmer hoped. To their aggravation, the media have largely responded with unstifled yawns, weary shrugs and knowing sneers. “Break down the barriers to opportunity” is dismissed as platitudinous. “Build an NHS fit for the future” is scorned as predictable. “Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7” is mocked as wildly unrealistic.
Before its unveiling, the economic mission, which Sir Keir ranks top of the five, was the subject of intense debate within the Labour leader’s inner circle. They know it is a hostage to fortune. We can all imagine the fun a future Tory shadow chancellor will have with Sir Keir and Ms Reeves if they lack the means to deliver. Best in the G7 won inclusion as one of the missions in the belief that Labour needs to signal that it will address the country’s problems with big and bold ambitions. Veterans of Mr Blair’s time in Downing Street recall the scepticism that greeted the New Labour pledge to eliminate child poverty. That was often described as a mission impossible. The goal was not entirely fulfilled by the end of New Labour’s time in office, but setting it had a galvanising effect on the government’s priorities with the result that poverty among families with children did fall significantly.
There’s sense to having a direction-setting framework for a 10-year plan of renewal, but Labour MPs don’t pretend that “mission-driven government” cuts through with many voters. By the time of the election, they will need a fistful of crisp and credible offers that they can sell on doorsteps and in TV studios. It is not hard to find members of Labour’s high command who use the word “soft” to describe their party’s support. “The deal isn’t clinched,” says one of their number. “Not anywhere near clinched.”
The next election will not be an exact rerun of ’97 nor a rehash of ’92. History rarely repeats itself so neatly. But there are enduring lessons from both. Labour fails when its opponents have an opening to depict the party as unsafe with office. Labour succeeds when it has persuaded the country that it can be trusted with government and that it has compelling ideas to use power to make Britain a better country. Not one or the other, but both.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
